Feast!

Trip Start Sep 07, 2008
1
32
148
Trip End Dec 09, 2008


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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Operation Clean Clothes/Hungry Professor has commenced. Twenty of the students in the program do not have washing machines in their apartments. They can take their laundry to the neighborhood laundromat/dry cleaners, but they've discovered that's a very expensive option. On the other hand, I have a washing machine in my apartment, but refuse to cook.

So all the students have an open invitation: give me a grocery list and I'll buy the food. You come over to my apartment and while you're cooking us dinner, I'll put your laundry in my washing machine. Everybody happy!

Tonight Mary Lou and Wedding Belle were the first to take me up on this offer. Mary Lou went to culinary school and seems to genuinely enjoy cooking. While the washing machine happily rumbled in the background, she made pasta bake, garlic bread, and broccoli in pots and pans I didn't even know I had here in the apartment Mary Lou and Wedding Belle sorting laundry
Mary Lou and Wedding Belle sorting laundry
 . The food was fabulous. She made the pasta sauce herself with ground beef and oregano, roasted a whole head of garlic and mixed it with olive-oil infused butter for the garlic bread, and steamed the broccoli until it was lushly green.

The dinner conversation was also a delight. They told me hilarious stories they had heard of students in previous years of the program, like the one about the student who lived on nothing but bread and jam for the whole semester. Or the one about the young man who arrived in Greece with a suitcase full of sandwiches made by his mother. Halfway through the program when he ran out of sandwiches, he left the program and flew back home.

They told me about their adventures clubbing. Mary Lou was baffled by her experiences of amorous Greek men who like to pinch the skin on her back and shove their faces into her armpits.

Wedding Belle talked about finally finding balance between her course load here in Greece and going out to enjoy the culture. And she told me about the thrilling moment when she realized that her little brother, whom she had helped to raise, had grown from an infant into a little boy who could articulate his own personality.

The students departed with nice clean clothes and I went to bed with a nice full belly.
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stilldianes
stilldianes on Sep 25, 2008 at 03:34PM

Clean clothes, comfortable professor
Yummy! I like Mary Lou more every time I read about her. Women who like to cook ROCK! (So do women who have washing machines.)

So did your Greek studies provide an answer to the pinching and armpit thing Greek men do? Curious minds want to know!

-Diane

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