First Attempt at Horta

Horta is the catch-all name for the wild greens that grow on the hills and mountains here. They're somewhat bitter, and usually boiled and served with lemon juice and olive oil. I had no lemons, so I just added some sauteed garlic along with the olive oil. I also added some vegetable bouillon to the water while they were boiling, no idea if this made any difference. It was not bad at all...as good as any I've had in restaurants here. Had with chicken in tomato sauce with oregano and garlic, potatoes, and a glass of Cretan mourvedre from the Monastery of Agarathos.

Dinner

Stew? Yeah, I guess that's what you'd call it. Village sausage, onions, zucchini, and giant beans in a light tomato sauce with some vegetable stock. Garlic, salt and pepper seasoning. Side of nice, thick bread and a glass of the cab that Helene gave me. Very simple and quick. Perfect for the cool evening, will be a good one to keep in mind for winter, too. Enjoyed while reading a few articles from the Economist, listening to some classical piano on the Ipod, and shooing the fly away that has been in the house all day. My cats seem only mildly interested in trying to catch him.

What a Beautiful Day

Started with some breakfast and Greek homework on the back patio.

Ran several errands in Kastelli, and got a call from Yannis. He is back in Albania, apparently to stay. I'm happy to know that he is OK, and will always have very nice memories of our "beach days" together.

After some lunch and Skype chat with Mike in Athens, I went for a walk down to the beach. It's a bit cold and windy for swimming/sunbathing, but absolutely gorgeous for walking. I picked some jasmine along the way, and met a local named Yannis who stopped me to chat. More opportunity to try conversing in Greek.
























I stopped by my neighbor Helen's house to double check that she'll be available to take care of my cats while I'm in Santorini and Athens with Lisa. It was a productive visit; I not only left with a glass of Cretan cabernet sauvignon that she poured and wanted me to try with my dinner, but also with a tip on how to keep the pebbles that I find on the beach shiny. She showed me her collection, and when I remarked that they looked so much prettier than mine, she pulled out a jar of marble wax that she uses to make them look that way. A project for those long winter nights coming up...

Crazy People

They make me uncomfortable. So today at the beach I did my best to avoid eye contact with a very nice looking young man who was walking up and down the beach talking to himself, splashing around in the water yelling and singing unintelligibly, and making kissing noises at each woman he saw as he walked by them. It was all the more disturbing that there weren't that many people on the beach today at all, thereby increasing the chance that he would zero in on me at some point.

Which indeed he did, walking up to me and asking me the time. His accent let me know that he wasn't a native English speaker, but his English was very good. I took my cell phone out of my purse and showed him the display with the time. He thanked me and began to walk off and then turned around and asked me where I was from, and I just shook my head and told him I didn't want to talk. With that he went away, and I felt grateful and just a little sad for him.

An Experiment

Since the crust on the boureki I made last week didn't turn out half bad, I decided to try the whole "pie" theme again, this time with ground beef, onions, carrots, peas, potatoes and a curry cream sauce. Something went horribly wrong with the dough - I think I put in too much ouzo - and it just wouldn't hold together once rolled out so that I could transfer it to the pan. And being the lazy, short cut person that I can be at times, I didn't feel like trying to remake it so I just squished it around once it was in the pan, then squished the top around over the filling until I had it basically covered. It came out something like a dutch apple pie crust consistency, and wouldn't have been bad except that the underside was still slightly undercooked. Overall I give this meal a C, especially given the effort to result ratio. My kitchen looked like a war zone by the time this went in the oven.

I Love Surprises!!

I came home from the beach this afternoon to find this bottle of home-brewed tsikoudia hanging from my front door. No IDEA who left it for me, although the bag that it was in is from a shop in Cyprus, so that's a clue I guess, although I don't know how to use it to figure out who the mystery giver is.

I checked with my neighbor Helene, and she knows nothing about it. What a fun little mystery:-)

Slow Connection

No, not my internet - my brain. It is amazing and disturbing to me sometimes the speed (or lack thereof actually) at which my brain processes information sometimes.

This morning shortly after I woke up, my cell phone rang. The display read "Dimi", and my thus far caffeine deprived brain began rifling clumsily through it's database. "Dimi? I don't know anyone named Dimi. Why is this name showing up on my display?". I answered it, and it was a woman speaking greek who switched to halting english once she realized I was a foreigner. She was calling about the plane ticket.

Plane ticket? What plane ticket? Wait...synapses trying to fire...Lisa contacted me yesterday to tell me that her original flight had been canceled and that she had to come in a day earlier, and I was supposed to go to the travel agency in Kastelli to see about getting her domestic portion changed. Is Olympic Airways THAT on the ball that they somehow knew this, even though the two flights were not booked in conjunction with each other? Has the airline industry somehow pulled its sh*t together and managed to start communicating across carriers to anticipate stuff like this? Really, that's what was going through my mind at the time. So I asked, "Are you calling from Olympic Air?" and she said yes. She then explained that the flight time had been changed and was leaving several hours later than the originally scheduled time. Oh, now I got it. They were calling about a schedule change completely unrelated to Lisa's other, international issue. So she and I spoke for a few more minutes, me trying to explain that I was going to have to change her ticket to the previous day anyway because of the change in her international flight, and that I was going to visit the travel agency from which I had purchased it later that day to get it exchanged. And as she was saying OK, it hit me...Dimi is the name I had entered a long time ago, when I first bought the tickets, for the travel agency (the name on one of the business cards I took was Dimitrios - this was before I knew Mike's name, and I had taken the company's card which has his cousin's name on it). So this was in fact the travel agency calling me, not Olympic Air, and while it may have been a simple issue of faulty communication on both of our parts, that I didn't remember entering "Dimi" was bothersome.

It was all very confusing, but maybe I can chalk it up to pre-caffeine stupor.

Not so my realization today that the "Agora" that I see on the sign for many little markets around here is derived from the word "agorazo", which means to buy. Agorazo was one of the first greek words I learned, and that it has taken me this long to take note of this pisses me off.

Really wishing I hadn't smoked so much pot in highschool...