Todays Notes

Sorry that I couldn't get an email to you last night. After my photography class and my painting class and my art history class and then my Greek class, I got down to the computer lab, and things just kept going wrong. First, I turned on the lights, and that was enough to throw a circuit. I then had to go searching the school looking for the box, which I did end up handling. Then, I got onto the computers and the Internet was down. I tried to reset the dynamic IP address, but I think I did it wrong, and the computer got really mad at me. Then, I decided that I was just going to work madly and get things done on writing, and I tried to connect to the hard drive that has ALL my work on it, and it was totally down. I took it as a sign, and I just walked away. I ended up cleaning my house and getting a little bit of some extra sleep. It was actually kind of nice.

I had an incredible day yesterday and a super-incredible day today. I'll tell you about them, but first I have to tell you about the less incredible thing that happened today. I really have to communicate with someone about it, because even talking it over with the people here hasn't helped, and maybe, I thought, talking to you about it may help me, so bear with me if this isn't exactly pleasant. I am doing a painting for impressionism, so I was going to go an collect flowers. John told us that there were some really good flowers around the cemetery. We wanted to look at the cemetery, so I went there with four other friends and we went in and looked around and took some photos. We weren't going to go in because they were doing a service, but we decided to work around the service. We were walking around, and we noticed that people were buried with personal items (photos, olive oil, cleaning supplies, etc.) in a box next to their heads. We noticed that all of the graves were fairly recent. At the service, there was a woman in total and absolute grief over what was going on. THEN we realized what was going on. It is tradition in Greece (a thing of the Greek Orthodox church) that three years after a person dies, that they dig up the grave and give the remains to the family. They do it to save the space in the cemetery (it was really small). They were digging up the bones of a husband to give to his wife. They pulled the body out of the ground and put it in the basket and carried it off. This man walked right by us with the body. I was so upset by it, so we were going to leave the cemetery as we started to walk out, they did another one of them and I ended up seeing that body too. Needless to say, I was totally shocked at the idea and it was really odd. It totally put the shock of death and what they do with people and the fact that a body doesn't always have life in it. This wasn't a bad thing, and it was an experience that I probably needed to run into, but I just really needed to talk it out with someone!

Other than that, things are going really, really well. Yesterday, I went through the whole day having fun. I took some photos and did some experiments in the darkroom. I also decided where my work is going here in photography and I am ready to get moving on it and really make it what I want it to be. Because I do a lot of travel and things, I am going to have different portfolios of the places that I have been, and I am going to make a portfolio that communicates what Greece is to me.

In addition to that, I am going to do some prints of Night Photography, Still Lifes and other things, but that's where my photography is going. I was really trilled with that. Then, I went to painting. I have been working on a painting for weeks, and I was making some big breakthroughs with it, but it just was taking forever, and I didn't know where it was going, so I really just got a grasp of it and then I worked like MAD to get it going. I made a beautiful painting, and it just now needs all of it's finishing touches and it will be done. I painting for hours and in all of my spare time yesterday. It was so exciting. I got so into my painting that today I skipped my classes until 3:30 to just sit there and paint. I made so much progress and I am finally starting to get pretty caught up on the paintings I am working on. I adore painting, and I can do it pretty proficiently. I'm so excited about it! I'm working on an impressionistic painting next. I'm so excited about it. I am painting a bouquet of flowers on a chair. It should be nice!

I learned a lot of Greek last night, and I realized as I was walking down the street today listening to people talk that I really know quite a bit of Greek. I'm at the point now that I can pick out certain words that I don't know in a conversation, and I am really good at following along what is going on. I took a nice long walk today to the hardware store to buy some paint supplies.

On the way back, I went to the store and bought as much fruit and vegetables I could stand. I'm so excited to eat them all up now. And one of the coolest parts of the day was the fact that the poppies here are blooming. I'm actually very excited about this. They bloom in the fields, and sometimes a whole field can be totally crimson with them. It's not a great poppy year, but with a lot of work, I found a field, and I was out in this barley field laying down trying to get some great photos of poppies. It was actually really nice.

Can't you imagine me photographing the poppies and then picking them for my painting tomorrow? It's so exciting! I did a drama workshop tonight, and it was fun. We're going to do a performance. I also decided to go to Crete in the next week or two. I'm so excited about it, but basically, my friends and I are going to go camp on Crete. I'm so excited about that. I also got a taste of what light is made up of. We played with lights and made the colors red, yellow, green, blue, cyan and magenta. It was crazy! Life is so nice here…!