My Moment in Greece

Johnathan Buell

Even though it's cliche it's the truth that there was so much jam-packed into this trip that it is hard to widdle down all of the experiences to just one best one. I do have a cheesy moment that I felt really highlighted the nature of cultures being intertwined now-a-days. It only takes a total of thirteen hours to get a person halfway around the world, and a second delay in a skype chat that invloves a distance of close to 6000 miles without hardly any delay. This being said culture mixes and spreads like wild fire, and this involves everything from food to transortation to industry to entertainment.

When we were in Athens we happened to frequent a karaoke bar in Athens: Mike's Irish Pub. It seemed to be a local hangout but they were very nice to us in there. Everyone was having a good time, and to my surprise the first thing I heard when I walked in was REM Loosing my Religion. We heard American music, British music, Latin music, and Greek music (surprisingly no Irish music). I might no have been able to understand most of the Greek that they were speaking but I could understand what the song held. You could tell a love song from a sad song from a pump up song and they as Greeks have had an MTV influence so they knew some of the American songs better than I did. I felt at that moment that these people that I was sharing the room with were not just Greeks; they were all the same as I. I never thought before that they weren't at their core the same as I was but I didn't realize the commonalities until something that mattered to me mattered to them: music. It was at that moment that I really felt that I could connect with these people, the Greeks, on a better basis (adding to the list now of motorcycles and music and flea markets). We couldn't just be idle bystanders, so we proceeded to sign up for our song. Ben, Kyle, Robert, and I belted out the song Hotel California by The Eagles; we weren't the best, might have been out of tune, singing from an iphone with the lyrics, playing air guitar at the long breaks from the chorus, came in too early on the intro, but everyone loved it just the same because we showed the courage to get up there in a foreign country and lay it all down on the line in front of a unfamiliar atmosphere. I think that we might have gotten some respect that night from the Greeks; not just our Hotel California singing group but all of us in the group who sang.