Mandred the Unmagnificent

Once there was a planet named after it’s leader Mandred and he liked fighting and so every day he tried to conquer another planet, until he owned the whole galaxy. And then one day he was wandering around in his spaceship when he saw the end of the galaxy so he said to himself “what if there was more beyond the end of this galaxy?” so he went over and then found himself in a new galaxy and the one planet he liked the most was blue and green. So the next day he sent 1000 platoons of 100 aliens to take over the planet called earth.

Now I will tell you off a few things that happened when they landed in earth, first a few of his spaceships landed on a train track and a train came and destroyed them, next some landed in the ocean and the water got in but they were aliens and they didn’t know about water but when they landed they were swallowed up and never seen again, then there were the ones who landed in streets and were safe but then the sun rose and they turned in to statues of gummy bears. When everyone was awake they looked out of their windows and saw all those piles of gummy bears and all the children ran out of the houses and ate them all up.

When he heard that Mandred was furious, and he sent out a bigger army and told the space pilots to not to land in the blue stuff (water) and when any light came to get into the spaceships immediately, and not to land on  the lines going over the green stuff (land). And when the aliens completed the task of landing without being destroyed, they all landed together in a war zone and the night patrol saw them and opened fire and the aliens returned fire but their bullets did totally nothing to the soldiers. The aliens had blood and if they lost one drop they would disintegrate into a pile of gummy bears and none of the human soldiers were killed.

Only one of the pilots survived and flew back to Mandred and reported the bad news, and Mandred said "If I can't have it, nobody will," so the next day he made a lot of meteorites and sent them showering on earth until everyone was crushed and earth was destroyed. and then he conquered the rest of the milky way except for the sun which was too hot for his aliens to live on.

The Stories of the Greeks and Romans

Since we have been living out of 4 suitcases this past year, we obviously haven't brought with us our stacks and stacks of books that surround us at home. We have worked very hard at our schooling but in different ways than normal. Perhaps I will go into more detail about that in a later post, but here I just want to illustrate 1 example.

We have discovered a wonderful site called Baldwin Project at www.mainlesson.com. This is a site that is attempting to collect and make available online books for children in all sorts of genres. For example, in the ancient Greek section there are approximately 40 books which cover biographies, histories, mythology, fiction.

We only managed to read 3 of these - The Story of the Greeks by Helene A. Guerber, The Wonder book for Children by Nathaniel Hawthorne and an autobiography of Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbott. We also read a story of the Greek War of Independence by G.A. Henty. With the Story of the Greeks, we would read 2 (short) chapters and then Jacob and Zachary would each narrate one. At first they were dictating and I was typing for them and then about half was through they switched to typing for themselves. This practice of written narration was promoted by a teacher named Charlotte Mason, who is well known to many of my homeschooling friends. This promotes good reading comprehension and summarizing skills as well as the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, sentence structure. If you read their narrations, you can see that we still have to work on that!

The Story of the Greeks has approximately 125 short chapters, so to read and narrate/summarize it took a considerable amount of work.  Here is a link to the manuscript if you are interested.

We spent 3 months in Greece and it took all that time to work on the Story of the Greeks; when we went to Italy, we also wanted to read the Story of the Romans, but in the interest of time (since we only spent 2 weeks there) we read Story of the Romans but did not narrate it.

You can find the BALDWIN PROJECT at www. mainlesson.com

Story of the Greeks

Story of the Romans

Greece Top Ten

Top 10 Things I'll Miss about Greece (not in order)

Seeing shepherds along the road with their sheep and goats

Being able to bike everywhere

Seeing the mountains from our apartment windows

Loukoumades and Loukoumies

Souvlaki

Walking to the Bakery in the morning for bread

Greek lessons with Nick

Flopodopolous - our stray dog at the cafeteria

Having school at the university computer lab with more computers than we can use

Our friends from the university and church

Greek Dining

A few different dining experiences over the past couple of weeks. First up on the left is our regular cafeteria lunches with the Erasmus Masters students (Shane from Ireland in green, Hussein from Iran, Joseph & Luke from Ethiopia). When it's nice we'll sit out in the gazebos with our adopted stray dog, whom Shane named "Flopodopolous" sprawled nearby.

Being the amazing hostess that she is, Debbie threw a dinner party for Petros and his parents from downstairs, along with Nick/Litsa and their parents Giorgos/Paraskevi. Not bad fitting 11 into the small apartment, with lots of good food, company, and leftovers. The boys were awesome at helping throughout the prep and also as waiters. Paraskevi especially adores the boys, which comes across loud and clear whether you know Greek or not!

Then we were also invited to Giorgos and Christina's (Danna and Molly's parents) house in the old city part of Trikala for dinner. Lots and lots of interesting old stone and otherwise unique houses in the area. I really like that yellow house.

And of course, it's almost impossible to go wrong with pita gyros! These are the Volos version, with ketchup, mustard, and tzatziki - all complete no-no's for Cretans like Andreas!

My Life in Greek!

Blog Post #200!!!

Last Thursday (Pro-ee-oo-mi-no Pemptee), Nick and Litsa asked me to give a talk about my career as a scientist to Litsa's high school class at the 3rd Gymnasium (High School #3) here in Trikala. I was a bit nervous at first when preparing and thinking about what to say, as Litsa didn't really give me any input into what to talk about. So Wednesday night, I figured I'd forestall any uncertainty by using it as an opportunity to talk about the fun life I have through science, and also at the same time really go Greek immersion.

Here's an article in the local papers about my talk. Big points for whoever can translate it without help from Google!

For better or worse, here's the result! I'm trying to say that I'm a scientist and professor at a university in Canada. I hope that's what came out!

It turned out to be a lot of fun. I showed photos from many of the cool places I've biked, studied, and travelled through science, while at the same time telling them about the hard work involved. The students (about 20 15 year olds) were very keen and enthusiastic, helping me finish some Greek words/phrases, asking lots of questions about what a scientist does. Think it was a good sign that they were helping me finish words but basically knew what I was saying!

Looking at arranging a field trip for the students to the lab here, especially now that we finally have all the equipment to start our experiment.

It's All Greek to Me!

We were a bit lax at the start, but the past couple of weeks we've really tried to immerse ourselves into learning Greek. Since our arrival, we've been playing the 30x30 min Pimsleur audio course during breakfast, mumbling Greek while trying to chew muesli at the same time! The past two weeks, our friend Nick Denos from church has started giving us lessons both Tuesday and Thursday mornings. In other words, we're trying to bombard ourselves with the language in as many modes as possible.
This week, we've also taken to watching the local History Channel, where they have shows in English (and also French/German, etc.) but subtitles in Greek. It's a good way to recognize words and put them into context! This past week, the boys greatly enjoyed going through the food flyer from Lidl and figuring out the names for different foods: manitaria (mushrooms), fraooles (strawberries), myla kokkina (red apples), portokala (oranges), etc.
Further, Debbie and I have been trying to deconstruct the Greek language's basic grammar and vocabulary, including trying to learn the typical 100 most common/frequent words used in many spoken languages. Surprisingly, I've already managed to learn the large majority of those 100 words over the past couple of weeks. It's neat - with those 100 common words and basic conjugations, you can actually start making decent conversation, adding vocabulary as you go.
At the same time, we're taking our language training wheels off and trying to communicate in Greek whenever we can, whether myself with Andreas and Petros, or around town. It worked well yesterday in Vasilitsa, where I was able to rent snowboards (saying "I want to rent", sizes, etc.) all in Greek. It's fun to communicate like Tarzan! I did that during my Kori ride with a villager on a moped partway up the climb, and think I did OK - "to thromos eeneh poli aPOtomo alla poli omorpho!" (the road is very steep but very beautiful!).

Don't Worry Worrying Beads

On our adventure to Ioannia, when we were almost done for the day we stopped to get some Pita Gyros. Then we bought some Worry Beads, (in greek Komboloi) my beads protect me from the evil eye, and Zachs are a football club (AEK).
Worry Beads are sometimes used to try to stop smoking and to keep their hands busy.
But the bad thing is we don't quite know how to use them, but we might see if one of the people from the church could teach us.

So here is Nick giving us both Greek language and worry bead lessons!