Imagine a summer of swimming along the shores of Greece, speaking the country’s language, and touring historic sites with a group of Greek and American high schools students. Junior Cecilia Tarlas plans to do just this while a attending three week summer camp in late July.
“The camp is called Ionian Village and it’s a camp for both high schoolers from the United States and teenagers who live in Greece,” Tarlas said.
Tarlas will attend the camp with her twin cousins, as well as several other teenagers from her Greek Orthodox Church. During the three week session, Tarlas hopes to create new relationships with her fellow campers.
”I’m most excited to meet new people and learn more about my culture from a different point of view with people that are my age,” Tarlas said. “I’m not very good at [speaking] Greek, but once I am there for a while I begin to pick it up again.”
Although Tarlas is not fluent in Greek, the language barrier is not a major source of concern for her.
“Its much easier for me to understand parts of what people are saying rather than communicating myself,” Tarlas said. “Since my dad and yiayia are both fully fluent, using them to translate makes it easier. While I am at the camp I think it will be pretty difficult at first to communicate with others who don’t know English, although I believe most of the teenagers who are going to the camp if not all know English.”
While the camp will be a new experience for Tarlas, she has traveled to Greece twice before: once in 2007 and again in 2010. Her family tries to travel there every three years to tour and visit family, which she plans to do again once the camp is over.
“My family will be vacationing in Europe while I’m there and will be there to pick me up once the camp is over so we can go to the village of Xylokastro, where my family lives, for another week after that,” Tarlas said. “You are allowed to have visitors, so my family who lives there will try to visit us a few times while we’re at the camp.”
According to Tarlas, family is one of the most important aspects of her trips to Greece in the past, and will continue to be this summer.
”The best part of my trips in the past is getting to spend time with the family who live there that I never get to see, and realizing how many people I never knew were a part of my life,” Tarlas said. “It was hard to communicate with some of them and I didn’t know how I was related to a lot of them but seeing how excited they were to be with us meant a lot.”
