Malahini in Greece and Turkey

I haven’t been able to put up blogs postings since Tuesday, but I keep writing. The Internet connection at the Corinth Dig went down on Tuesday sometime. Each day the repairmen were supposed to come, but they have not been here yet. It is Friday morning and so I am really hoping that they will come before the weekend. [Friday afternoon I was finally able to post this]
Yesterday I went into New Corinth to an Internet Café in order to upload two days worth. The Internet Café was pretty nice. In October I went to one that was more like a bar. It was dark, smokey and loud. This one was more like a café with computers around the room. Unfortunately the site where I put my blog (Edublogs.org) was down yesterday! So, I was able to read my email, but not to post the blog.

I wanted to write about the end of the year celebration at the elementary school here, which was on Wednesday night. The kids had been preparing it all week and I learned why they were so excited to talk about games when I came to visit their classroom. One of the things that the kids did was to demonstrate games that their grandparents had played when in school. They did some of the same games that they told me about!

There were also two plays done by the older kids. Both of them emphasized peace. The first one started with a group of boys dressed in white shirts and ties meeting in a setting that looked sort of like the United Nations. While they were meeting and arguing some aliens landed and brought peace, prosperity and disarmament. I didn’t understand all of the Greek, but I could understand that the aliens were trying to convince the earthlings to choose peace. Peace, prosperity and disarmament were three girls with white dresses and flowers in their hair. There were some funny scenes with the girls trying to get the earthlings to marry them. In the end the earthlings decided to be influenced most by the arms dealers. The sad ending was that the arms dealer came in and shot all of the aliens.

The other play was from Aristophanes, who is a very famous Greek writer of plays.

It was about a farmer who went up to the Gods to try and find a solution to the war between the Athenians and the Spartans. He ends up being successful and in the end he meets an arms dealer and buys all of the arms and uses them for other things. It was funny.

The students memorized LOTS of lines and spoke very clearly and loudly. This was all performed outside in the playground where they have PE. Raisers were put up for people to sit on and lots of parents and community members came to watch. At the end the 6th grade that would be moving on to Gimnasium (like Jr. High) were all given a graduation plaque and the rest were all given some treats. It was a really nice evening.

In Corinth I was able to read my email and saw that there were comments from Shannon, Sean and Luke with good questions! I will get to those questions in the next week sometime. Hopefully the Internet will be up soon, so there won’t be so much for you to read all at once!

Your Greek word for the day is irini. It means peace! That is what I hope for you and the world today!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 7:45 am and is filed under modern Greece, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.