I'm off to Greece on 12 October

On 12 October, I will be leaving Australia for around 4 months. I'm going to Athens to collaborate with Professor Antonis Botinis at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (say that three times fast). I have received ethics approval from UWS, and have my airplane ticket. It's just a matter of time.

During my stay I need to recruit and record the speech of 8 Greeks, and test the perception of 40 Greeks. I'm hoping that Greek students will be willing to help the new Afstralo in town. We'll see what happens.

Mark and Hellas are engaged

On Saturday 19 May 2007, Hellas and I held our Engagement party at Fontana Amorosa in Liverpool. Greek engagements are pretty big and fancy. We had just over 100 guests - mostly relatives and friends from school, and Hellas had some people from MTC.

It has been kind of weird for us since I proposed in December. To Aussies we were engaged, while to Greeks we were getting engaged (you are engaged only after your engagement party). It was funny when I told my dad that we were engaged last Christmas. His reaction was, "What do you mean? What sort of engagement was that? Oh, alright, show me your ring." - He thought we had the engagement party without him.

Anyways, it's good to be engaged in both cultures. Now people can start hassling us about when we're going to get married. Yay!