A few weeks have passed since we all returned from Athens, but after bumping into one of the Berklee students in Athens back here on campus, I felt compelled to do one final blog post about last semester’s trip.
Much as they might have wished they could resist the well-worn quip, some of Berklee’s students in Athens last semester walked out of their twice-weekly language class at some point muttering to each other, “It’s all Greek to me.” It was funny the first few times, but eventually, they were faced with the cold, hard realization that Greek was the toughest class they had at Nakas and it wasn’t getting much easier as the semester wore on. Despite the challenges of a new alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar, each of the students knew enough to get by. They could certainly order food and ask for directions.
But to the group, one student stood out as their go-to Greek language expert, the one who could always get them out of a jam when they the deltas and gammas looked like stick figures. That person was music education major Jen O’Shea.
Jen O'Shea, on bouzouki.