Round I Go
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7" by 5" - Smalti, mosaic gold, ammonite fossil
I'm still getting my 10,000 daily steps, and I now have a morning routine that goes something like this: get up, put a load of laundry on or collect the trash to be taken out, receive my morning coffee from my cute Greek guy, lace up my shoes, and hit the road, said coffee in hand. Until recently, I've had basically the same route every day: up the main road, turn at the cafe, walk down to the beach road, walk along the beach road, then once that turns up to the mountain, decide at which turn off I'll head back home, depending on what amount of time I have, how many steps I anticipate getting later, and how I'm feeling. So ultimately I've spent much of the summer going around and around in a big loop of 5-7km.
Except, I'm pretty sure I look like a crazy person doing it. I've talked about my attempts to learn Greek before, and there have been many stops and starts. Duolingo, for anyone who has used it, is an alright way to get some vocab, but lousy for actual language learning (if i hear about one more pink elephant drinking milk, I might scream). My Greek tutor ghosted me after four lessons that weren't getting me anywhere. But I'm now getting harassed more and more for not knowing Greek, and certainly, I feel like an absolute malaka (asshole in Greek) for not having more ability in the language when I'm helping Kosta out at his restaurant. People ought to be able to go out for a meal and speak in their native language in their own country. So this year I decided to try something new, an audio application called Pimsleur. I decided the perfect time to do it was on my morning walk, as it's pretty boring to just sit there and do it. So imagine me, wandering around every morning, speaking random Greek phrases to myself. I'm sure people think I'm crazy. What will she be going on about today? Will it be random numbers? Will she need a doctor for her wife? Does she play tennis better than Eleni?
But...it's working. It's working well enough that I don't care if people think I'm slightly nuts. I can now speak very basic Greek, beyond ordering a coffee or a wine. Can I have a conversation? Not really, but I can understand a bit more of what is happening around me, and even add a word or phrase in here and there. I guess the thing is, to learn a language, you have to want it badly enough to look like an idiot, to fail and fail again, and to not beat yourself up for it. It's hard on the ol' ego. I figure by learning while walking, I'm just jumping the gun and getting used to it.
So round and round I go, one Greek word at a time.
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