(A few more things, including yogurt):
Saturday night we went to a deli down the street to see if we could gather some charcuterie for meals the next day. The owner was super friendly and insisted on us having samples of anything we so much as glanced at behind the counter, as well as several things we didn't. And everything was GOOD. Lots of salamis and prosciutto…many kinds of cheeses (feta being the very best of them)…the most delicious sheep's milk yogurt in little terra cotta pots. He even talked us into some olives, which are usually not my favorite, but these were big and meaty and didn't really taste like anything else I'd ever had. The guy said to us, "If you don't like something as much as you expect, come back and I'll give you your money back. If you like it more than you expect…come back and pay me double!" Ha ha. We almost would have considered it! The final meal was amazing.
We added Fanta, of course, and a super good olive oil from our apartment, pistachios from Aegina, honey, and some good chocolate. This is my favorite kind of lunch in the world!
We ate out on the balcony and were as happy as kings!
I was particularly taken with the Greek yogurt. We ate it at several meals. It was thick and not at all sweet, but perfect with the honey and pistachios on top. We wished we could bring some home! I usually make my own yogurt and strain it, so I feel like it should be just as good, but this stuff was better. Maybe it's the sheep's milk. Or maybe mine just needs to be eaten on a balcony in Athens with the Parthenon in the distance!
These were the little pots the yogurt came in
We dumped them out like this
And poured honey on top, with pistachios sprinkled over. YUMYUMYUM
I liked the other buildings on our street. Many had balconies covered with potted plants or vines growing along the railings. It made the whole building look pretty.
We walked past the National Gardens several times because it was near our apartment, but one evening around sunset we actually walked through it. It had some fun playgrounds (sadly, Malachi didn't want to play on any of them) and various little ponds and gazebos. In one area we heard SUCH loud screeching and squawking from the trees, we were looking everywhere to see what kind of birds would make such a racket! It almost sounded like parrots…and then we looked up and saw that it was parrots! A whole flock of them, green with red beaks. We wished we could show Gus.
The website had said the garden closed at eight, but around 5:45 some very aggressive workers (volunteers? They had that officious air that people without any real authority often exhibit) started walking through the paths waving their arms and tweeting their whistles at people for all they were worth. It was clear they were trying to get people to leave, which is all very well, but we didn't much like being whistled at as if we were dogs, or the Von Trapp children pre-Maria.
We had been wending our way toward a point on the map labeled "the Turtle Parthenon," so naturally, having the unconquerable spirits that we do, we doubled back on a path which wasn't infested with whistle-tweeting garden workers to try and get there. I am sorry to report that it was just a bunch of turtles in a pond, no "Parthenon" involved, but having seen it, we were content to leave before anyone else could tweet at us any more.
I don't know what these column fragments are. Themed benches? Ruins? One can never tell.
It would have been easy to forget it was December while we were in Greece, because the weather was so nice (although it was nice back in Utah too! It's been such a mild winter!), but there were lots of Christmas decorations all over the place, and Christmas music playing with various degrees of annoying-ness (it was never good Christmas music), so it did actually feel pretty Christmas-y. After the gardens we walked over to Syntagma Square where there was a big outdoor Christmas tree and a bunch of stuff going on—musicians playing, people selling stuff from carts, and tons of people walking around.
There was a booth with a spinning pull-up bar and signs saying you could pay to try the challenge. You'd get €100 if you did a pull-up (or hung there for 30 seconds or something…can't quite remember). Malachi was very interested in this and kept weighing the pros and cons. "It's a trick because almost no one can hang on that way. But because I'm small but also have lots of upper body strength, I'm probably one of the few people who could beat it. But I'm sure they've figured it out so they almost never have to pay anyone. But they have to let a few people get close so others will be talked into trying it. Maybe if I gripped it the other direction…" He was so tempted to try it and honestly I think the only thing that stopped him was that it was Sunday and he didn't want to spend money on the Sabbath. Good boy. (And I think he would have lost his €10, anyway!)
It looked like someone had just thrown an entire string of Christmas lights at each tree and let it land however it would.
The streets were so packed, and we didn't know what everyone was doing! There weren't that many booths selling things. Maybe people were just doing regular Christmas shopping at the regular stores?
Some of the department stores were beautifully hung with colored lights.
We went into this beautiful Greek Orthodox church and looked around. Sam never could resist a Byzantine Icon.
Next door to the big church was this tiny stone chapel. Some monks (priests?) were inside singing evensong, or maybe some other chant—I guess I'm not that familiar with Greek Orthodox worship. But it sounded beautiful echoing around that tiny stone space.
We walked up onto and around the Acropolis and got into some pretty neighborhoods with weird and winding streets. I won't say we got lost, because we knew the direction we wanted to go the entire time, but we did not get there in a direct a way as we might have. It was fun exploring off the beaten path a bit.
In Greece, like in Rome, there are people on motorcycles and scooters everywhere! This was a whole street lined with them.
Whenever a light turns green, there is a swarm of motorcycles leading the traffic into the intersection. At first I thought they were bike gangs or funeral processions or something! But no, it's just that all the motorcycles weave past the cars and go right up to the intersection while the light's red. And then they're the first ones to go when it turns green. Motorcycles are allowed to do that here too, but there aren't nearly so many of them!
On the hilly streets by the Acropolis, there are often stairways like this one with restaurants lining both sides of the street. Each restaurant sets tables out on the sides of the stairs and people eat outside under the lights! There were even some spots where the restaurant had put pillows and cushions out for people to sit on the steps themselves. It made a fun, festive atmosphere there (but also felt a bit weird for people that were just trying to get through and had to squeeze through ranks of eaters and tables to do so).
This is a wedding dress I took a picture of for my girls, in case any of them would like to look like a stack of powdered donuts on their wedding day.
And in the same shop, I found this mother-daughter combo for Clementine and me.
Temple of Zeus—what's left of it. It must have been a massive temple when it had all its columns.
Here's Hadrian's Arch again. Just sitting there by the road. It appears when you least expect it.
This was a big high-rise in a busy area, and under one corner it sheltered a tiny stone chapel. They just built around the chapel when they built the building. I love that.
Here's the little stone church in the daytime. Because it's next to the Metropolitan Cathedral it's called the "Little Metropolis" but the real name is Church of St. Eleutherius. It was built in the 1400s (so rather recently, for Greece).
More random churches we saw while walking around
We took this picture of a pretty turquoise building for Goldie, who loves that color. Sam and my camera bag match it too!
I loved the iron filigree on the railing of this building, and really just the look of the whole street
In the shopping district we found a shop with carved olive wood souvenirs. Sam loves to talk to other artists and he really liked this guy's work, so they talked for quite a long time. We got this tiny chess set to bring back to Teddy! Malachi had been keeping his eye out for a chess set too, and after several days not finding one and despairing of ever finding one he liked for a good price, I had a feeling to go into a shop that didn't seem to have any, and we found just the kind Ky wanted in the very back! The owner even let him switch out some of the pieces with another set, so he could get the green-and-gold case he liked AND the little metal owl figures. Malachi likes owls (his email is "owlachi") and the symbol of Athens is an owl (because it's a symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom, I think)—so it seemed quite fortuitous.
Ky also got some nice pins (the Greek flag, another owl, an "evil eye," etc) for his collection. He wears a pin on the lapel of his suit every Sunday so he likes having a large variety of them.
At the wood shop, Sam bought this cool hillside village all carved from one piece of wood. It reminded us of the houses we saw around the harbor on Hydra, those beautiful hillside towns, The wood pieces are staggered when you push them out, giving this stacked effect. The artist carves out the little windows with a tiny saw and you can put a light behind the block of wood to light them up. The work is so intricate and skillful, just the kind of thing Sam loves.
(I think the artist is from this beautiful village of Oia and takes his inspiration from the houses there)
These are some wonderful loukoumades we tried, a kind of Greek donut. Some were drizzled with honey, and those were delicious, but the ones with pistachio cream were even better. We loved them SO much. The donut shop is called LUKUMAΔΕΣ, which adds to its charm, I think. (It's another of those Greek words I feel like I can actually read.) We stopped here more than once.
The second time we had the sense to get pistachio cream on both boxes. (That's Milky the Bunny again. I said she'd get her own post, and she will, but for now she's horning in on this one.)
Perhaps our favorite gyros came from this shop, where you can see at a glance they are going to be good by:
a.) the enormous cylinders of meat. No unserious person entertains meat of this size. And
b.) the fact that all the workers are bald. Like monks, they must remain undistracted by worldly concerns and put their singleminded focus into MEAT
The face of a happy gyro-eater. A gyter.
These are the kind of gyros with fries in them. Some had them, some didn't. I liked them all.
I took a picture of this intersection because it was place that five streets came together, and none of them had any stop signs or yield signs or anything to direct the flow of traffic! I don't know how cars didn't just bash into each other all the time there! We felt like we were taking our lives in our hands trying to cross there at all. But no one else seemed fazed by it! You can't really see all five roads in the picture, but this is intersection on the map:
Another olive-tree-lined street
I was actually amazed how many interesting things and beautiful places we were able to see in Greece in such a short time. (About 3 ½ days.) In some ways it felt much longer, and we were SO glad we got to go at all, but we also would have liked to have a few more days, of course. I would have liked to drive into the countryside. See some of the temples and monasteries in other places. Get to some of the beaches to look for tide pools or seashells even if it wasn't swimming weather. But, all that can wait for "someday." We loved everything we were able to do while we were there, and it was SO fun to be with Malachi and make these memories with him before he moved down to Provo to go to BYU! (We miss him so much!)
On our last evening in Greece I sat on Malachi's bed by him while he worked on his class schedule, and we watched the light get more and more gold around us as the sun got lower in the sky.
We went outside and watched the sun set over the Aegean.
And the next morning, we sadly said goodbye to this view and went back to real life.
We will just note, but not dwell on, the harrowing tale of our trip home, involving a delayed flight, a horrendous security line, an missed connection, countless unsympathetic bureaucracies, and, saddest of all, the forced abandonment of these two Greek Fantas. Woe, woe, woe! Let us turn our faces from this heart-rending scene.
An empty wing of JFK airport. At 3 a.m.
Malachi. Sleeping. At least we hope so.
Finally on our way.
I've never been IN a pink cloud before!
And the best part of everything: getting home to these darling people. We brought some of them scarves.
Teddy liked his chess set
Gus liked matching Malachi (the two bird-lovers!)
And all the girls look beautiful in this pretty Greek-blue dress! (Not that they all wear it at the same time. It is, in fact, only Junie wearing it in this picture. But they do all, one at a time, look pretty in it!)
