A Brief Respite

The next week or so of our vacation was nice, but pretty uneventful. We saw a temple of Poseidon and a temple of Artemis near Athens. Then we headed out to the villages Ritsa’s family is fun and spent some time with her uncle and aunt Constantine and Helen. The second day, Ritsa’s friend R showed up to join us.

We spent time in the villages with various and assorted members of Ritsa’s family, and we managed to squeeze in another trip to Monemvassia. There was also a fair amount of time spent swimming at the beach.

The highlight of the time in Livadi was watching Aunt Helen climb up on to the kitchen counter with a broom to kill a wasp. As you can see, we had a nice, relaxing time there.

On to bigger and brighter things: Lesvos. Lesvos (or as the Greeks call it, Mitilini) is a Greek Island near Turkey. It is the home of Sappho and where the term “lesbians” is derived from. These days, it as well known for ouzo as it is lesbians.

We shared a beach house with R, and we could actually see Turkey from our house. Swimming and day trips ensued. I will get into the day trips in the next post, but one interesting thing we did at the beach house is buy produce from the vans that drive by. We bought of kilogram of dried chickpeas (which we did not finish and will bring home with us) and a kilogram of sword fish, of which we ate about 2/3 and some cats ate the other 1/3.

And Don’t Call Me Shirley

I am finally getting  a chance to blog about my vacation.  Everyone give thanks to Galata Life Hotel.  I will be starting with the beginning of the trip, which was August 26th, 2010.

We flew from Dulles International Airport (IAD) to Frankfurt, Germany (FRA.)  The only interesting thing about the flight is that I got to drink two cans of complementary Warsteiner.  Lufthansa is nice.

We spent the morning in the executive lounge thanks to my wife’s elite status and our international tickets.  From there we flew to Athens (ATH.)  The flight to ATH was very different from the flight to FRA.

First, there was a LOT more talking.  The flight to FRA was a graveyard compared to the ATH flight.  Greeks are a chatty bunch, and this flight was no exception.

The second, and much funnier part of the FRA-ATH flight was the bathroom five rows ahead of us.  I watched a little old man leave the bathroom, and, a few minutes later, a woman entered the bathroom.  She turned around and came right back out.

I chuckled a little to myself, figuring the man had left a pungent odor in the stall.  I thought I had further proof for my hypothesis when another woman went in and came out a few minutes later, none the worse for wear.

However, I was wrong, because the next person who was supposed to enter the bathroom was a little girl, guided by her mother.  I almost laughed out loud when the little girl poked her head in, pulled it out quickly, and just shook her head “NO!” to her mother.  The mother then, looked in, looked down, made a face, and escorted her child back towards the back of the plane.

Another person also refused to enter the forbidden zone, but she summoned a flight attendant.  The attendant, looked in, looked down, scrunched up her face, and summoned another attendant.  The second attendant looked in, looked down, closed the door and locked it from the outside.  He then went and found a sticker and placed it on the door.

On the way out, I read the sticker.  It said, “Out of Order.  Do not use.”  I never did find out what that little old man did to that poor bathroom.

Taking The T.A.R.D.I.S. To India

Finally, I have internet access.  The Space Apart Hotel was the last place we had access.  It was the place we stayed in London, and I was very pleased with it.  We had a little studio that came with a kitchenette and a washer/dryer.  And when I say “washer/dryer,” I mean a washer that is also a dryer.  I never have figured out why we have to have two machines to do one job…

However, we found out the hard way you should not use the timed dry function.  After 60 minutes, the clothes were still very damp.  So, I set it on automatic dry.  This would not have been such a problem if it had not been 11 o’clock at night.  The dryer was a bit loud, and it kept making this swishing water sound that really worried us.  Thankfully, the clothes were dry the next morning.

After leaving London, we went to Glasgow.  We stayed at the Kelvingrove Hotel for the one night we were there.  It was a nice place with really friendly people.  The receptionist was excited for us going to the Doctor Who exhibition, and one of the other employees had been there.

The exhibition was fantastic.  It had the classic monsters that have been in the new series, a lot of the good new monsters as well.  There is even a dalek you can stick your head in, move the plunger and gun, and it changes your voice to sound like a dalek.  It was great fun, and Ritsa took a video of it.  I will see if I can get it posted to either my blog or YouTube later.

The receptionist at the hotel gave us a recommendation for dinner at Mother India.  We had a leg of lamb there that was to die for.  It was tender and covered in spices.  I could have eaten an entire lamb done like that.  It is a must eat in Glasgow.

The next day we went to Edinburgh to pick up my sister-in-law. More about that tomorrow!

Heaven and Hell

Our first day in London, we hit a couple of major tourist spots.  Of course, our day started in normal fashion for this trip: the quickest underground line to Westminster Abbey was closed for repairs.  The second most convenient route was also blocked due to repairs.  That left us the third best route.

Westminster Abbey was beautiful.  To get there we had to get off at the Embankment stop, which let us see the London Eye from across the Thames and took us right by the Houses of Parliament.  The movies do not do the Houses justice.  They are HUGE.

As I said, the abbey itself was gorgeous.  I am a sucker for gothic architecture, and the abbey has it in spades.  It is hard for me to decide on what part was my favorite, but I think I liked Poet’s Corner best.  If you are in London and have not seen it, see Westminster Abbey.

From there we went to the War Cabinet Rooms and Winston Churchill museum.  The cabinet rooms were pretty interesting, but the WC museum left me a little bored.  They had some neat interactive displays, but I was still left a little cold.

Then we ended up walking through the exercise grounds for the calvary.  We got some pictures of mounted guards and walked pass the entrance to Downing Street, since they do not let you get near #10 any more.

We walked by Trafalger square.  Neither one of us really wanted to spend time there, although Nelson has an impressive column.

We then mosied on through St. James Park and avoided both wildfowl and canoodling couples.  The park is beautiful.  I would not have minded wasting an entire afternoon there, but we had to soldier on to see Buckingham Palace.

We missed the changing of the guard by quite a bit, so the palace itself was kind of boring.  We did not stay there long.

Finally we ran an errand for one of my wife’s co-workers and hiked to Harrod’s to pick up a bag.  Harrod’s is my own special kind of hell.  It was full of people and over-priced, over-designed… stuff.  We got out of there as fast as we could.  We even asked the girl that rang up our purchase what the fastest way out was!

That left us with a tube ride home, a quick dinner of salad, bread and cheese, and an early bed time.

Starting Another Trip

This time we are off to Jolly Olde England.  Well, we will be in London for three days, and then the bulk of the trip will be in Scotland.  So, hopefully I will have lots of great pictures for you all and some witty commentary.  The only problem so far is leaving my contacts at home.  Thankfully, my sister-in-law will be meeting us in Scotland, and she can bring my contacts wit her.

So long for now.

How Nerdy Am I?

With my wife in Ethiopia, we needed a cheap way to talk to each other, voice to voice.  Enter Skype.  It is a handy little program that looks a lot like any other instant messenger program, except it also lets you make voice calls.  Voice calls from one computer running Skype to another are free, so we decided to try it while my wife is in Ethiopia.

There were some complications, though.  Nothing technical, other than my wife getting an echo of her voice, like you would on a bad cell connection.  The complications came in time differences and sleep schedules.  My wife was not certain when she would wake up, since she had just arrived in Ethiopia.  Add in a seven hour time difference, and… well… Things get complicated.

So, what was my uber-nerdy solution?  Easy:  hook the computer up to the stereo so I can hear the computer “ring” when my wife calls on Skype.  Then, I slept on the couch with the headset next to the computer.  So, when my wife called, the stereo woke me, I groped my way over to the computer, plugged in the headset, put it on, and talked to my wife at 5 in the morning.

All of that so we did not have to pay international calling rates.  Worth it?  I think so.

Someone Out There Thinks I’m German

On Santorini we went to a very popular black sand beach.  We were going to spend more time there, but my wife’s shoulders were blistering from a sunburn soon after we arrived.   As I was staggering out of the ocean, an older lady comes up to me and starts saying something to me in German.

Now, I’m 3/4ths German as near as I can figure, but apparently I look so German that random German people come up to me and assume their crazy moon language I speak.  My wife DOES speak a smattering of German and figured out the lady was asking if we wanted to use the umbrella and sun chair she had rented, since the nice German lady was getting ready to leave.  My intrepid wife did her best to convey to the woman that we were leaving soon as well, and everyone parted amicably.

So, remember, looking German can score you free sun chairs.

I’m Back

Okay, I’m going to try to keep this up to date again.  I think I have a lot to post on this one.  🙂

First, Greece was awesome.  I have to go back.  However, I will share with you the travel tips I learned:

1.  Before going to Greece, bone up on your Greek.

2.  Even more importantly before going to Greece, get on a StairMaster.

3.  Don’t fly Air France.  Every flight of theirs we took left late, and they managed to lose one of our bags for a few days.

4.  There is less internet access in Greece than you would expect.

5.  There are more historical sites there than you can see in three weeks.

As for more current news, school starts August 25th.  I’m excited to be going back, because now I get to take all the finance courses I want to take, instead of all the other courses I had to take.  I have a very strong affinity for things I want and a very strong repulsion for things I have to do.

Oh, and the economy still sucks.  Again, Steven Pearlstein has a great column on the economy.  I think it’s funny how I’ve been reading how people don’t understand why consumer confidence is as low as it was in the 70s when the economy is better.  What people aren’t grasping is the difference between the micro and macro view.  In the macro world of economics, the broad measures aren’t as bad.  The GDP is still growing, for instance.  However, in the micro world, people are getting laid off, they aren’t paying their bills, and everything is getting more expensive.  So, we have a disconnect between the two sides of economics.  I have a feeling the micro is going to pull down the macro, though.  If peoples’ personal finances are not doing well on a growing scale, then the economy as a whole is going to have trouble recovering.

So, there you have it, my prediction of doom and gloom.  Things will get better once the economy isn’t so levereged.  When people and companies are borrowing so much money, it’s hard to gauge how something like the Fed increasing interest rates to combat inflation will change things.  Let’s hope for the best.

Playing Catch-Up

Finally.  Finally we have internet access again.  For being a country that has cell phones everywhere, I expected Greece to have more wireless internet available.  However, that would not be the case.  So, let me catch you up on where we have been and what we have been doing.

Leaving Athens
We picked up our rental car at the airport, and had a very pleasant drive through the city on a new highway, the E-95.  We wanted to stop and see ancient Corinthos, but we missed the turn off and decided to see ancient Nemea instead.  Nemea is where Herakles (Hercules) killed the Nemean lion for one of his labors.  It also was the site of some miniature Olympic-style games, though it was mainly just foot races.  Nemea is also wine country, so we stopped at a local winery and had some wine.  We left with two bottles.

The Horio
We finally made it to our uncle Costa’s house, and he was a fantastic host.  He fed us, plied us with wine and ouzo, and treated us to too many dinners at a local taverna (Manoleas).  He also was a fantastic tour guide.  He drove us to many different places including Ritsa’s parents’ villages:  Pragmatefti for Kathy and Melana for George.

Pragmatefti was on the side of a mountain, and it is a steep mountain.  Everytime Uncle Costa took us there, we parked a little further up the mountain so we didn’t have to walk so far.  Ritsa’s Thia (Aunt) Marigoula and Thio (Uncle) Nick and Thia Dimitra live there.  Thia Marigoula is a spirited, tough, kind and generous woman.  She reminded me a lot of my Nanny.  Thio Nick and Thia Dimitra are cute and Thio Nick got up and danced a little bit at one of the dinners.  I think Thia Marigoula was trying to fatten us up for the slaughter, though.  She kept feeding us so much food.  We got to see the house Ritsa’s grandfather was building and the house that Kathy was born in.  Oh, and we got to see the church Thia Marigoula had built.

Melana was not nearly as steep as Pragmatefti.  The only family Ritsa really had there was her Thia Marianna.  Marianna is Ritsa’s Uncle Pete’s sister.  Thia Marianna is a tiny woman with a tiny voice.  She has a good sense of humor, though.  Uncle Costa was joking around with her a lot.  We got to see the house George lived in as a child, and they even had a mulberry tree there, something that reminded me of my childhood.

The Peloponnese
When we could escape the villages, we got to see some neat things.  Uncle Costa took us to Leonidio and the surrounding countryside, showing us places from George’s past, like the apartment he shared with his brothers while they were going to high school.  (They had to walk from Melana to Leonidio to spend the week there and then walk back to spend the weekend in Melana.)  He also took us up into the mountains to show us one of the farms they used to have to spend time at.

Uncle Costa also guided us down to Monemvassia.  Monemvassia was awesome.  It’s an old fort town built on what is basically a mesa that has been occupied since the 13th or 14th century.  The lower town is almost completely restored and is now mostly houses and shops.  There are a couple of hotels there too, so you can actually spend the night in the fort.  The upper town is not as restored, and we pretty much skipped it so we could climb up to the top, the Castro.  The church up there, Hagia Sophia is supposed to be a pretty good replica of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  However, it was closed for some unknown reason and instead we got harassed by bees.  It was not an even exchange.

After Monemvassia, we spent the night in Gythion, the former main port for Sparti.  We had a fantastic dinner at Isalos, which was practically next door to our hotel.  From there we headed out the next morning to go explore Mani.

Mani is a really neat section of Greece known for its tower-shaped houses and fierce independence.  It was never really conquered by the Romans or the Turks.  It is also known for its honey, and we picked up a few jars of that from a local beekeeper.  She let us try it and it was really good.  One of the jars had a nice, delicate flavor and the other one had a robust honey flavor, so we got one of each.  From there we drove around, looking at the tower houses and getting lots of pictures.  The landscape was a little more desolate than the other parts of Greece we had seen, but it has its own majestic quality.

Our stay in Mani was shorter than we wanted it to be, because we had to go to Mystra before it closed for the day.  To get to Mystra, we had to drive through Sparti (A.K.A Sparta) which apparently does not believe in traffic controls.  I figure it is just part of the Spartan spirit, and instead of doing combat with swords and shields, they now practice car combat.  We managed to escape unscathed from Sparti and had two hours to check out Mystra.

Mystra is a town a lot like Monemvassia, although it was abandoned for around 400 years.  The big draw for Mystra is the Metropolitan, an old cathedral with well preserved icons on the wall.  There were also two or three monasteries there along with a few more churches.  We did not get to go to the top and see the palace, but the parts that we did see were beautiful.  After Mystra we returned, via the winding mountain roads, to Uncle Costa’s house.

Nafplio
We left for Nafplio on the 4th of June.  We stopped by the Acropolis of Tyrintha, and old Mycenaen fort.  It had some great examples of Cyclopean architecture.  When we got to Nafplio, we settled into our very cute pension, Amfitriti.  They were fantastic and very accommodating when we wanted to check out early the next day.

From there we went to Epidauros.  It has two parts.  The first part is the amphitheater which has perfect acoustics, so you can hear everything perfectly from every seat in the house.  Not bad for something built around the 4th century AD.  The second part is the temple of Aesculpis.  They are doing a lot of reconstruction work there, rebuilding parts of the destroyed temple and outbuildings.

When we got back from Epidauros, Ritsa called her dad’s cousin that lives in Nafplio, and they took us out to eat after showing us some of the towns hear Nafplio.  We ate at a street-side taverna with a great view of the Palamidi, the big keep above Nafplio.  Ritsa’s cousin also invited us to lunch the next day.  However, before we ate lunch there, we had to check out Ancient Mycenae.

Mycenae was founded by Perseus (the guy Harry Hamlin played in Clash of the Titans) and supposedly had some cyclops build the big, huge walls.  We wandered around there for a few hours, checking out the burial pits, palace floors, cisterns and vaulted chambers.  It is a really neat site with a very nice museum.

We came back to Nafplio and had lunch with George’s cousin and his wife.  It was a great meal of grilled meats, Greek salad, horta, and macaronia.  After that, we went back to the hotel and drove up to the Palamidi.  Then we ran into more typical Greekness.  The Palamidi is supposed to be open until 6 or 6:30 every night.  However, this time they decided to close at 2:45.  Why it was 2:45 instead of 3 or 2:30, I have no idea, but there were several groups of unhappy tourists there at 4 in the afternoon.

Defeated we went shopping to make ourselves feel better.  I bought a set of worry beads, so now I have a new and entertaining way to annoy Ritsa.  It was a successful shopping trip.

The next day we got up early and drove back to the Athens airport.  From there we flew to Naxos, one of the Cyclades.  We had to hike up a lot of stairs to get to our hotel, which would not have been bad if we had not hiked up a lot of stairs almost every day we have been in Greece and if I was not carrying 40 lbs. of our belongings on my back.  The hotel is cute, and they have a nice breakfast.  We also have a millipede crawling along one of the walls here as I type this.

The only historical thing we saw in Naxos was the Archaic Temple of Apollo which features Ariadne’s Doorway.  It is basically a huge stone doorframe that is still standing.  We wandered around town a bit, managed to find where to pick up or tickets for the ferry, and generally amused ourselves looking at the cubic architecture of the buildings here.  Later today we will be catching the ferry to Folegandros.

The only link I’ll leave you with for now will be the linking to my Picasa gallery where you can see all of the pictures we have taken so far and the captions on the ones we have captioned.

I’ll post more when we can find an internet connection again.  Who knows when that will be!

Athens, In Five Minutes Or Less

Sorry this is going to be a quick post, but we are packing to leave as I type this.  Normally, we would have had a lot more time to pack, but we got ambushed by the need to see some family in town here last night.  I’ll add links and pictures in later.

The day was another scorcher.  We realized the other day that the reason my father-in-law loves Arizona so much is that it must remind him of Greece: dry, hot, desert plants, houses with tile rooves, etc.  Despite the heat we had a good walking tour through the city.

We started at the Temple of Olympian Zeus.  It is amazing how tall those columns are.  We have a nice picture of me standing next to one to give a good idea of how big they actually are.  (Keep in mind I am six feet tall.)  We also saw Hadrian’s arch while we were there.

Then we started wandering through the city to look at churches.  There are a lot of hills in Athens.  We must have climbed them all.  In fact, I think we went uphill much more than downhill.  I would believe anyone that went to school in Athens if they told me it was uphill both ways.

Back to churches.  We saw a good five or six of them, but my favorite was Agios Nicolaos.  It was not just because it was a pretty church, but because of the caretaker that was there.  When she found out Ritsa spoke Greek, we became her best friends.  She gave us little cards with pictures of icons on them to watch over us, gave us each a loukoumia, and showed us where to get some cold, cold water.  I think the water was my favorite part.  I sweat a lot normally, but put a backpack on me and put me in 80 degree weather, and I am my own special little fountain.

We also did some shopping and found gifts for a few people.  We also picked up some embroidery patterns for ourselves.  They are really pretty and a lot less expensive than we thought they would be.  We managed to stumble across them almost by accident.  Actually, that is how we found all the stuff we wanted to buy.  When we were actively looking, we could not find anything, but when we stopped trying, we found exactly what we wanted.

Shopping was not an entirely enjoyable experience, however.  Ritsa slipped and fell in the fish market.  She bruised a knee a bit, but also got her hands and pants covered with water from a fish market.  It was not a pleasant perfume.

We made it back to the hotel around 5pm, and that was when we got the phone call telling us that the aunt and uncle we thought were in the village were actually in Athens.  A flurry of phone calls ensued, and our uncle Nico took a cab to come pick us up and bring us back to his place.  It was really nice to meet them, but everyone involved felt rushed.  I think aunt Dimitra really wanted to put out a big spread for me, but with the short notice, she only managed a really nice meal instead.

We were too tired to pack when we got home, so now we are up at 6am cramming stuff into bags so we can get to the airport to rent a car to drive to the village.  I have no idea when we will have internet access again, so until then, goodbye.