And then it was the last week.

I'm writing now, partly because I need a study break, also because I feel obligated to now that it's the last week.

I'm getting down to the wire. Finals week looms, and our flights home. Everyone is studying like they have nothing to lose. It would have been nice to do something fun for my final full weekend, but alas, no one is making time for it. Plus the weather in Greece is trying to pull a Flagstaff and change every once in a while. That's something I don't look forward to upon my return.

There is a psychological side to studying abroad: there is a proposed cycle of emotion that I was warned about at the orientation (along with all the other freakish things I was warned about that never happened). It starts with excitement, drops down to culture shock, levels out at surface adjustment, and then overshadows re-entry shock. Did I go through these phases? Sure did.

I was so excited to get here that I was irritated by the other students for not being as excited. It took some people for EVER to go downtown and see the Acropolis, and even longer to check out Monastiraki. I disadvise against this completely. Yes, it is true that we got here knowing that we had four full months to do what we wanted, and we were exposed to "Greek time" almost right away, so the slow start was expected. And it's true that I say myself, I'm not in any hurry to see places...now that the excitement phase is over! I was itching to go out, not through a sense of obligation, but because I was freaking excited. So when you first get to a place, I advise you to do stuff! You can settle down later. Of course, there has been excitement throughout my entire stay, too, and it's going to feel strange getting back to America and experiencing less excitement due to less being new.

Culture shock was a fun one. Not. I will not discuss this on the blog, I'm happy to answer questions through email or conversation, but I'll only mention it here: there was a dark side to this study abroad experience. There was one particular experience I had one weekend within the first month of being here that really brought on the culture shock, and after that I constantly thought about it for a week or so. Culture shock is defined as discomfort while living in an unfamiliar culture, which consists of physical symptoms like over-eating or sleeplessness or headaches, but which mostly consists of negative attitudes toward the unfamiliar cultural practices plus ethnocentrism towards your home culture. For me personally, I will say outright without worrying about whether it's ethnocentric or not, that some aspects of Greek culture are displeasing to human society. As in, humans who live amongst other humans in society shouldn't act the way the Greeks do. By getting over the culture shock, I didn't exactly accept their activities so much as went out of my way to ignore them. But you know what? I survived them, and now they will make good stories to tell people. Plus, it should never be expected that travel plans will go perfectly...they won't. They absolutely won't. I'm not disappointed in my experience with culture shock, I just include it in my stories.

Moving on to surface adjustment, which is, in fact, adjustment to the culture and your comfort zones to the point where the strange things don't impede your daily life. This is where Spain came in and saved my sanity, giving me two weeks to be by myself in a country I was already slightly familiar with and could therefore relate to a little better. Once I returned from Spain knowing I did all that alone and survived it, I was ready to be back in Greece and appreciate more that it has to offer. It did feel slightly strange to be leaving the country I'd wanted to come to for so long, so I decided it would be the only time I left Greece (unlike other study abroad students, who were on a mission to knock as many countries off their list as they could in four months. One girls knocked off at least nine). No use wondering what would have happened if I'd stayed in Greece over spring break. What happened was that I got a short leave from it so that my sanity could be retained and I would be more ready to tackle my time here. And May turned out to be excellent!

Now. Re-entry shock. This is supposed to be like reverse culture shock, missing your host country's customs, trying to combine the new with the old, and feeling regret for not having done enough. I'll let you know how the first two go when I return, but as for the last point, I can say something now. I'd started feeling some regret, after turning down Santorini, and thinking about how I missed out on a trip near the beginning. The regret morphed into something like, "It's been four months, and I didn't do enough." The regret lasted about an hour. After an hour, I said to myself, "STOP FEELING REGRET." I wrote down in one long sentence all the cities I went to, sites I visited, places I explored, cultural habits I'd partaken in, and experiences I couldn't have had anywhere else in the world. Anyone who has spent enough time with me knows I have small handwriting. It took eight lines of notebook paper. Okay, so there were some things I regretted not doing, but overall? Ha! I did plenty! I'm not going to let myself feel bad about the overall experience ever again, and if you catch me doing it, put me in my place! Even the freakier experiences were worth it to me, and the less than perfect ones.

I think the biggest lesson I learned from being here was that things aren't always as they seem. For example, last week I learned that there was a protest downtown. Usually the study abroad program sends us emails when those happen saying to stay away from downtown that day. But last week I decided to go anyway. I had to see at least one protest, right? I was expecting something more like a public speaker, signs, maybe a riot, maybe something burning...I got there...and there were people dancing to drums, gyro stands, tents on the grass, banners saying "We Want Revolution," basically. Really? Study abroad has been sending us emails this whole time telling us to stay away from a festival of hippies?

Things are not always as they seem. Greece does not look entirely like the ancient agora, nor does it look like Santorini, nor do people run around restaurants breaking dishes and shouting "Opa!" Expecting the unexpected was an important lesson for me, and also to take things as they come. I'm happy that I came and that I took the bad with the good, and now I have a great story to tell. I'll write more when my flight home draws nearer.