Meet my Family

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Hi everyone. My name is Alexandra and I'm a sophomore at Rutgers. Eventually, I’d like to talk about some of my personal experiences on this blog, but for the purpose of continuously coming up with new, interesting material, I’ll just start with the basics. 

Meet my family.

This is my mom. 

Her name is Fotini which translates to "light" in Greek. She moved here from Greece when she was three years old with her parents and two sisters. I call her Mama.

This is my dad.

 His name is Zisimos which translates to "life" in Greek, though people tend to call him Mike as a nickname. He was born in New Jersey, moved to Greece when he was seven years old, moved back when he was eighteen to go to county college, and pretty much stayed put after he met my mom a few years later. I call him Baba.

This is my brother and I.

His name is Andreas which translates to "man" in Greek. My name is Alexandra which translates to "protector of man" in Greek. You may think that was a cute little name pairing my parents came up with but we were actually named directly after our grandparents on my dad's side. Andreas is four years older than me and we sometimes like to jokingly refer to ourselves as the "children of life and light", referring to our parents' names.

This is Baba's village.

My dad's parents grew up in a tiny mountainside village in Greece called Eleftheriani. Its name means "freedom" which alludes to the fact that no enemy has ever found or invaded it. Daily life for my grandparents included spending the day taking care of the crops, hiking home (the women carrying the firewood on their backs), then the women would clean and cook in the house while the men walked down to the town square by the church to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They moved to Athens a little after they got married to find a better life. My dad spent all of his summers in the village as a kid and my brother and I spent about a week per summer there as kids. The serenity and simple life there makes it my absolute favorite place on earth.

This is my brother and I with our dad.

When my brother and I were little, our dad was drafted to serve in the Greek army. My family and I left New Jersey to live in Athens for about ten months while my dad worked in the army. Funny story: Since my brother attended a year of preschool while we were in Greece, he got a letter in the mail when he was seventeen drafting him into the Greek army as well. He's been able to put it off because of the fact that he's in college right now, but it's probably something he'll have to do eventually. Sorry bro.

This is me with my dad's parents and one of his sisters.

While most of my mom's side eventually moved to the United States, my dad's entire family still lives in Athens. This includes my grandparents, my two aunts, their husbands, and my three cousins. We don't get to see each other very often, but the summers we got to spend together when I was growing up has kept us very close. 

These are three of my best friends in college enjoying one of my favorite Greek dishes to make.

The other day, I used our family recipe to make myself some spaghetti bolognese for dinner, but completely forgot that my family likes to cook enough for the village. Luckily, my friends love spaghetti bolognese and were eager to come over to make sure it didn't all go to waste. In moments like that, I feel like I'm able to share a little bit of where I'm from and the things that make me who I am. Cooking for my friends helped me feel a bit more in touch with my culture while being away from home.