Patras day two

 After a long night out I slept in. After an eternity I managed to rouse myself from bed in search of a shower. The water ran forever within warming up. I remembered that in Greece you need to switch on your water heater beforehand. Back to bed.

I was finally ready to go about my day at noon. Since I needed food and laundry, a trip to the local supermarket is in order. Buying laundry detergent in a language you don’t understand is a special kind of hell. Add to that, Google Translate’s camera translation doesn’t really seem to work on detergent labels. An odd bug.

As the spin cycle went on, I rested and snacked on bread and cheese. Line dry, my favorite. For a few years I was living in my grandparent’s house and we had a massive clothesline there. It was so much fun to wake up in the morning, have breakfast while the top-loader worked its magic and listen to music while putting the clothes on the line. Go about your business all day and take your crunchy sheets down. Many of my older shirts from thy era are still sun bleached.

I stayed in more or less until dinner. The Erasmus students from last night were going out again to celebrate a birthday. We met up at a massive restaurant that looked like an Irish pub but served Greek and American barbecue. Super weird. The service was glacial but the people were extraordinarily friendly. In groups like that people will cluster around their countrymen to drink up their native languages together. It’s exhausting to speak English all day, I understand. The Spaniards keep apologizing for doing it and I keep telling them, “No esta una problema para mi.” Nobody expects a native English speaker to be able to do anything else. I blame the British for that one.

After dinner we went back to the same kiosk as last night for street beers. For a buck and a half, I can’t blame them.