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...

Another Trip to the Vet

I could seriously imagine developing some twisted form of Munchausen by Proxy here. Today I went to pick up Elf, or Bachelorette #3, from her spay procedure. Since I was going to be there anyway, I also brought Cleo in to check on a scabby skin condition that she has developed around her head, face and ears. Rikki has it too, but not as bad. While waiting for the doctor to finish up with a woman and her poor little doggy who is going to lose an eye from a fight with a cat, Yannis (the vet's assistant) and I had time to chat and as usual, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. We covered a number of subjects to include the best way to learn a foreign language (watching old movies), culture shock, and the flawed monetary system. It's nice to have someone to talk to who is intelligent and has a good sense of humor! This kitty here has adopted the vet clinic as his new home. Yannis tells me that he was fearless from the moment he showed up, cruising in through the open window and making himself right at home. Once there were two large dogs in the waiting area, one of them a doberman, and this little guy walked right past them without twitching a whisker.

Anyway, Cleo has an ulcer on the back of her neck, probably a reaction to the Frontline treatment I gave to both her and Rikki back in July. So the doctor sent me home with some anti-biotic drops that also contain steroids, and gave me a steeper than usual discount for kitty #3.

Joke of the Day

A Pontiac goes to a coffee machine, puts in his coin and takes his coffee. He immediately puts in another coin and takes another coffee. He continues and gets a third and fourth coffee. At some point a man who was passing and wanted to get some coffee as well asked him, "When will you stop taking coffees?" to which the Pontiac replied, "When I stop winning!"


Note: Pontiacs are Greeks who usually come from Asia Minor and southern Russia. They are known for how hard they work, and how helpful they are to each other, but they got a reputation when they began to return to Greece as being "soft in the head". So the Greeks apparently tell Pontiac jokes like we (used to) tell Polish Jokes. Fortunately Greece hasn't jumped on the PC bandwagon yet. Many of the jokes involve two characters named Kostikas and Giorikas, which I assume are typical names for ethnic Greeks who come from the above mentioned areas.

What I Learned Today

1) Placing additional slabs of dough on the thin spots in your pie crust does not work. It just makes the thin spots not cook thoroughly.

2) Before going out to the car first thing in the morning to get the cat carrier to take kitty#3 to the vet for spaying, ALWAYS double check to make sure you've put the key back on the outside. It very much sucks to be stuck outside your house while the freshly brewed coffee is inside, waiting for signs that your neighbor has woken so you can borrow her phone to call the maintenance "hotline".

3) Keep spare key hidden somewhere outside, because #2 is just bound to happen again at some point.

Filler

I picked up a little book of supposedly "Greek" jokes at the gas station today. My guess is that they aren't strictly Greek, but I figure I'll post a few here from time to time anyway:

Why are married people fat and single people thin?
Because single people see what's in the fridge, then they go to bed.
Married people see what's in the bed, then they go to the fridge.

****************************************************************

When God created the nations, he gave two virtues to each one. So, he made the Americans organized and law-abiding, the Germans determined and studious, and the Japanese hardworking and patient.

For the Greeks he said, "They will be intelligent, honest and they will be working for the government."

When he finished the creation of the world, the Archangel Gabriel approached him and told him, "My Lord, you gave all the nations two virtues except for the Greeks. You have them three virtues. This will make them very powerful and disrupt the balance on Earth."

"You're right, Gabriel", the Lord said. "I was not careful and now the Greeks will rule the world. I must do something about it but now I can't take back the virtues I gave them. I know! I will let them keep the three virtues, but each Greek will be able to use only two of them."

And so it happened. Greeks who are honest and work for the government are not intelligent. Greeks who are intelligent and work for the government are not honest. Greeks who are intelligent and honest do not work for the government.

Just a Sunday

Breakfast was yoghurt with nectarines, crushed pistachios and honey (and of course, plenty of coffee). I usually try to do some greek homework while having breakfast, but since I've already completed the assignments that my tutor gave me for the week, I decided to try something different. I made a list of random nouns, verbs, adjectives, personal pronouns and possesives, cut the list up into individual pieces, and drew one blindly from each category, with the intention of making 5 sentences out of each batch. Didn't really work so well. For starters, I have not yet learned the proper past or future tenses, so the sentences were bound to be very awkward in only the present tense. And you can't really combine the personal pronoun for "we" with the possesive for "yours" without making a very complex, run-on sentence, which is far beyond my grasp. So I gave up after two sentences, neither of which I'm sure is correct anyway:

Η ομορφια νοικοκυρα ανεβαινει τη σκαλα. (The pretty housewife went up the staircase.)
Eςεισ θελετε να βρω ενα καταλογο; (Do you want to see a menu?)

I haven't figured out yet how to put the accent marks above the emphasized letters, so it is technically incorrect anyway. This is more than just a technicality, though - Greek contains several words that are spelled exactly the same but have completely different meanings, and where the accent is placed is the only way of differentiating them.

After the painful attempt at scholastic creativity, I did a load of laundry which had to be hung inside because the sky was rather moody today and I thought that it might rain. The fan blowing on them helped somewhat, but it's now 1o hours later and they're still not all dry.




I had planned to do one of my indoor workouts with the bag o' cat litter, etc. but decided that I needed to get out of the house, so instead I went for a walk along the western edge of the Rodhopuo peninsula, which isn't too far from my village. As I passed by the Porto Allegre restaurant in Nopigia, I picked up a walking companion. This is Αγγελικοσ, which means "angelic", and who I mentioned in a previous post when Yannis and I came to Porto Allegre for a few beers. She belongs to the restaurant owners, and is just as sweet as her name would imply.

We ran into very few people along the way. A few fishermen, and a group of about 10 men sitting up on some rocks, drinking and bull-shitting, apparently. Who knows, maybe they were talking about some very serious matters, but it sure looked like they were just bull-shitting to me. I did come across this lovely mattress cemetery, and decided that had I been born a mattress, this is where I would have wanted to be put out to pasture once I had passed my prime.

On my way back I passed Porto Allegre again, and fully expected the dog to leave me at that point, but she seemed to be enjoying the walk very much and she continued to follow me. In an apparent attempt to buck the stigma attached to her name, she harassed every goat that we came across. Many of them fled, but this one here was ready for a fight and alternated between lowering it's head as if about to charge, and stamping the ground angrily with his right front hoof. Αγγελικοσ eventually realized that she was out-sized and left him alone. After that she just went after any cats she came across, and delighted in tormenting the neighborhood dogs as we passed them, who were all chained and could only bark impotently at her.

Is this a pomegranate? It looks like one to me, but it's been so long since I've had one I'm not sure.







So, the damn dog followed me all the way home, which is about 4 miles from her home. I had no idea if this was normal for her, and worried that she might not be able to find her way back to the restaurant, so I intended to put her in the car and drive her back. Except that she wanted nothing to do with the car. I tried luring her in with sausage, I tried picking her up, all to no avail. After about 15 minutes I finally gave up, wished her good luck, went inside and left her to further torment my local neighborhood dogs. I will probably drive by the restaurant sometime in the next few days, just to reassure myself that she made it home.

It is spooky-quiet around here tonight. My Greek neighbors who are always home and always very vocal seem to have gone out for the evening; their house is completely dark. My landlord, who has been occupying the house behind me, is away on a business trip to Italy. No sound from my neighbor Helen's house, either - although she is usually very quiet anyway. Only the distant barking of dogs, the faint sound of wind-chimes and the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees.