dinner at dafni's

On Wednesday night my art professor, Dafni, invited my modern art class over to her house for dinner. She lives in Kalamaria, which is the pretty town that is close to us that I had coffee with Ilias in awhile ago and Efi also lives over there too. My Modern art class only has 6 people in it, 5 american girls and 1 greek guy, Michael. Michael had a big marketing test on Thursday so he was unable to come to the dinner with all of us.

Anyways, Kelsey, Karen, Josefina, Megan, and I all grabbed a bus and headed on over to Dafni's around 7:30 pm. We stopped by a flower store and bought her a bouquet of lilies, daisies, and roses to show our appreciation for Dafni hosting us and for her just being awesome in general. Dafni is a firecracker. She's super openminded and openhearted and is full of life, love, and energy. She has no problem telling us exactly, and I mean exactly what is on her minds. Sometimes when she looks at a piece of artwork she'll say: how do you think this would look if you were drunk? how about if you were high? She's just open and doesn't tip-toe around her students. She's just like a friend who happens to know a hell of a lot about art. All of her students love her and love that she just tells it like it is.

meet dafni!

Dafni has a beautiful home, an apartment in Kalamaria that is decorated like you would expect an art teacher's home to be decorated: filled with art and artistic things. She also has a love for souvenirs and little nick-nacks so she has a whole candy-cart filled with snow globes and she has a collection of old cookie tins in her kitchen. Despite it being slightly eclectic, it doesn't feel cluttered or overwhelming. It's very Dafni.

She has a wonderful balcony filled with plants and pretty lights and we sat out there for quite a while eating appetizers: spanakopita (a greek philo dough and spinach appetizer) and drinking sweet red wine and mastika, which is a greek liquor which is made from the resin of the mastic tree, which only grows on part of one island in greece. It grows absolutely no where else in the world. It's very sweet and tastes like trees. I don't particularly like it, but I like that it's a greek tradition and it's a special kind of drink.

For dinner, Dafni prepared a feast of pastitsio, which is similar to lasagna, it's a creamy, cheesy, baked pasta dish with ground meat. The seasoning is what makes it different and usually they don't use flat pieces of noodles, they use macaroni noodles. Dafni also made greek salad and a BUCKET of tzatziki. She knows how much us Americans love tzatziki, so she had promised us a bucket of it. And she delivered.

Dinner was delicious, of course! Luckily she hadn't prepared mounds upon mounds upon mounds of food so I didn't feel pressured to over-consume. I had a good sized meal, very very filling, but I didn't over-stuff myself. Phew.

Dafni had also made homemade baklava! It was d-elicious! She swears it's a super easy recipe and she promised to email it to all of us. I can't wait to give it a try at home.

After dinner, we all sat around the kitchen table laughing and swapping stories. Did I mention how funny Dafni is? Well she told us a lot of jokes and brought out old photos and let us all look through them. She's a diva and has taken some pretty awesome photos in her day. We left her place, exhausted and full at 11:30 pm. None of us wanted to leave but we all needed to get home because Kelsey had a quiz in the morning and we were genuinely tired.

How awesome is that? Going over for dinner with a professor? Looking through her old photos and swapping stories? Isn't that more like how the world is supposed to be?