Giving thanks

For Thanksgiving, keeping with tradition, my parents and I went on a hike...up to the top of the highest hill in Athens

 (All the way up there!)

 It was a beautiful day...

 And had a beautiful view...

(figure I might as well throw in this picture of the view from my parents' hotel room...there it is again! Can't go anywhere without that darn Acropolis poppin up)

For Thanksgiving dinner we resisted the 48-euro "traditional American Thanksgiving dinner" being served at one of the hotels in Syntagma and instead had a splurge meal at my parents' hotel in the rooftop restaurant with a view of the Acropolis--and a real view, not like the ones advertised by every single restaurant in Plaka.

The food was nouveau Greek. It was interesting to see Greek "fine dining"--Greek dishes re-imagined and plated with fancy sauce decorations on rectangular slate plates

 Amuse-bouche and Acropolis

 Delicious, fresh mixed salad--and Acropolis again

 Moussaka (the smokiest and richest moussaka I've ever had)

(breaded and fried chicken--stuffed with bechamel perhaps?--and mashed potatoes with caper berries)

Great food, the best company, and a killer view--I don't think I could have dreamed up a better Thanksgiving here

and I am very thankful.

ReCrete-ing, Part II

For our second day, we drove to the capital city of Heraklion--a beautiful drive along the coast/ through the pine forests/the mountains. 

We saw Knossos (with perhaps one-tenth the number of tourists as the first time I went), and then stopped along the way back at the quaint town of Bali. Which was a ghost town. All the shops and restaurants were closed up tight. We saw all of five people total driving through the entire town. But it was still beautiful.

Then we stopped at the third-largest city of Crete, Rethymnon. After some very stressful and confusing driving on much too narrow streets, we found a parking spot and walked around the Venetian fort and down the old cobblestone streets.

On our way back to the car, we paused for gelato (delicious Nutella gelato!), and within a minute of us refusing a seat in the warm, sheltered gelato shop, instead taking it in a to-go cup, it began to rain buckets. It poured, and poured, and poured...finally we had to just bite the bullet and sprint through the flooded streets back to our car. It made for another very stressful drive back to Chania.

For dinner we went to the highly-recommended Italian restaurant in Chania. It was a beautiful restaurant, with little fairy lights pressed into the ceiling and twinkling like stars. The food was a refreshing break from Greek food: beef carpaccio, delicious pizza with arugula, asparagus, and prosciutto, and a "pork parmesan" dish that was the best pork I'd ever tasted in my life (and reminded me of a childhood-favorite that I used to order every time we went out to eat at one restaurant in Bloomington). 

At the end of the meal, in traditional Cretan manner, they brought us alcohol and dessert--with an Italian twist. The liquor was a dessert wine rather than raki, and the dessert was handmade truffles 

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We spent our last day in Crete wandering the streets of Chania--a really beautiful city

We ate a fantastic last lunch of Cretan salad, stewed beef with zucchini, "BBQ" chicken (nothing like barbecue but deliciously flavored and tender), and cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and served with Greek yogurt. Then we headed off to the port to take the ferry back to Piraeus. (Also, small world: on the ferry back, a middle-aged Greek man walked by and I kind of stared at him, he kind of stared at me, and he looked really familiar...but what Greek people did I know in Crete? Then he smiled and said "Rethymnon?" and I remembered he had been sitting in the same cafe as us at Rethymnon! He told us he was on the Athens police force, was on a break in Crete, had visited his brother in New York...and that was where his English comprehension ended. Quite funny to recognize someone, though).

ReCrete-ing, Part I

Since I was so enamored of Crete after my trip with CYA, and since when my parents had visited the island years ago they had spent the entirety of it on the beach, we flew over for a few days. We stayed in the picturesque Old Town of Chania. In the height of tourist season, one can imagine that it is insufferably crowded, but that wasn't much of a problem in November. Many places were, in fact, quite deserted.

We could also stay at a beautiful hotel for much less:

Our beautiful suite...converted from an old Turkish building

We arrived late Sunday afternoon, and after successfully renting a car and navigating from the airport to the hotel, we enjoyed a tasty dinner (the best fried zucchini I've had yet and various meats including my first experience with goat, and great wine). My parents were introduced to the wonderful after-dinner Cretan tradition: complimentary raki (a Cretan liquor) and dessert (in this case loukamades, Greek deep-fried donut-holes covered in honey). I tried a sip of raki (I had avoided it all of my first visit to Crete, but figured I should at least taste it before leaving), found it disgusting, and hurriedly started scraping my fork on the empty loukamades plate, scraping up the remnants of honey to get the alcoholic flavor out of my mouth. The waiter took this to mean I wanted more loukamades, and came back smiling with a heaping plate of them. I was at this point already completely stuffed, but was forced to eat a few more so as not to insult the waiter...I waddled back to the hotel afterwards.


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On our first full day in Crete, we loaded up the rental car and headed of for the Southwestern coast and Elefonisi beach. All I can say is: thank goodness there weren't many cars, and thank goodness my mom is such a talented driver. The "National Road" was nothing more than a one-lane road (well, one-and-a-half if you count the shoulder, which you really should in Greece because that's the way you drive here: driving partially in the shoulder, thereby creating a makeshift passing lane). Since this was the National road and the only red-labeled road on the Michelin map, you can only imagine what the other, orange- and yellow-labeled roads were like...

 We called this "the orphan-maker" (my brother had expressed distress at my parents driving around the mountain roads of Crete because he "wasn't ready to be an orphan")...this is a two-way, one-lane road, hairpin turn around a cliff, and you can see that there's a pole, where a mirror used to be...

A two-way, one-lane tunnel--but there's a stoplight! So easypeasy right? Well...not if a truck going the other way decides to run the red light and you have to go in reverse back through the tunnel...


We did make it to Elefonisi, and it was well worth the drive. We were, for the first fifteen minutes, completely alone on the beautiful, pink-sanded beach, before it became a bustling crowd of five on the entire stretch of beach.

Kite surfing in gusty winds around protruding rocks...quite dangerous and impressive

On our way back, the concierge at our hotel had urged us to take a detour to the eco-village of Milia. She warned us that the road was a little iffy (the roads we'd already driven on weren't?!), but that 70% of her guests had felt it was worth it upon return. So we buckled up and braved it. We were firmly in the 30% (I had to suppress hysterical laughter for most of the 6 km along the unpaved dirt one-lane road running along the mountain edge)...

...until we finally got there. It was a truly special place: tucked up in the mountains, completely isolated, silent, and peaceful. We walked into the beautiful little hotel/restaurant, where we were once again alone save for the one man cooking in the kitchen. We had a lovely lunch (which I will not be describing because unfortunately it did not sit well with me after the long winding drive back)

 (the salad was fresh and delicious, maybe the best salad I've eaten in Greece)

On the way back we saw the most spectacular rainbow I've ever seen

All in all, the day took the phrase "off the beaten track" to a whole new level.

A day with Mike

For my parents' second day here, we decided to take a one-day tour of the Peloponnese with Mike, who was part of a private taxi company and who had picked my parents up from the airport.

Though I had spent a week in the Peloponnese, I hadn't truly experienced it until I saw it Mike's way. We saw the Isthmian canal (this time I could get a picture since it wasn't pouring)

Ancient Corinth and the Temple of Apollo (which was deserted--we were the only people wandering through the site)

Myceneae

and Nafplion...

...but more importantly, we saw Greek life. On our way out of Corinth, Mike turned into a gravel lot where there was a barn-like structure and told us that it was the first pressing of olives of the season and that we must come and see. So we went into the small factory and learned how olive oil was made. And took pictures, at Mike's insistance. I call all of these photos "Mike Made Me..."






A little farther on, Mike pulled over to the side of the road, got out, had us cross the road, the railroad tracks, and scramble up a ditch to watch olives being harvested by some workers. He explained how they spread out netting beneath the trees, and then took large combs and dragged them along the branches, scraping off the olives.

...and then had us get some hands-on experience

At another point he pulled into a bakery at the side of the road, where he bought us spanakopita and "the best bougatsa [cream pie] in Greece". Indeed, it was like heaven in a pastry...creamy sweet custard with a light sprinkling of cinnamon, wrapped in delightful layers of pastry dough. Then he took us into the bakery kitchen, where a young woman was pulling bread out of the oven...

And had me get some hands-on experience...

For lunch, he marched us to "the best restaurant in Nafplion" and ordered for us--fantastic fresh fried calamari with "skordalia" (a garlic dipping sauce), shrimp "saganaki" in a rich tomato sauce with chunks of a mild cheese, and fresh boiled dandelion greens and broccoli with lemon.

On the drive between sites, he alternated between telling us various tidbits of Athenian and Greek life, and playing for us History Channel shorts about the places we were seeing.

It was also quite an adventure getting back to Athens; one of the reasons we chose to leave Athens for the day was on account of the protests (commemorating the November 17th, 1973 protests against the military "Junta" regime in Athens, during which many student protestors were killed) that not only CYA but also the US Embassy had warned me of. The center of Athens was for the most part closed, but thanks to Mike's incredible navigational skills and intimate knowledge of Athens side streets, he got us within walking distance of the hotel...but Mike never settles for second-best, so he told the guard that my dad had asthma and was able to drive along the pedestrian street, onto some other side roads, and pulled up right to the front of the hotel.

All in all, a most memorable day with Mike.