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Greece Chapter 3 |
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The diary tends to get more verbose when J is home. Chapter 3 actually only covers about 5 days, but we have filled it with pithy anecdotes and obscure details. 06-July-2000, Thursday J arrives home. He came out of camp on Monday the 3rd by bus. The plane has not been very reliable lately and, since his new back-to-back was already on site, he could leave a day earlier to make sure that he caught his flight out of Tripoli. Good thing too, because there was indeed no plane on Tuesday. The bus ride is 14 hours long. J's boss says he will try and transfer him to the coast soon. That would save J the hassle of planes and buses through the desert. He left Tripoli on Wednesday afternoon for Milan, Italy and then Athens. He arrived in Athens at 11:55 PM Wednesday and left to Ioannina at 6:00AM Thursday. J got to Ioannina to find L waiting for him. All by herself. She had taken a taxi to the airport. The driver didn't speak English, so she showed him a picture of an airplane that she had sketched in her notepad (angled downwards, with its' wheels out and everything!) the night before and said, "take me to the airport". He understood, no problem. By the way, L (and now J) are still at Dimitris' parents' place, "for a few days". We were suppose to be moving into Grandmother's place but apparently there have been a few delays in that area. 07-July-2000, Friday We paid off the balance owing on the cruise today so it looks like we are definitely going. We still have to arrange plane fare to Athens and a hotel for a couple nights there. No big deal. Looking forward to the trip. It looks like we will need our passports for the day in Istanbul. Hopefully they will stamp them so that L doesn't have to worry about being in Greece for too long at a stretch. We're only allowed 3 months at a time without special permission. L and Norma were going to take a drive to Albania (about 1 1/2 hours away) if necessary so that L was out of the country just long enough to renew her stay. Norma has never seen Thelma and Louise, but L promised to find it for her. Enough said. 10-July-2000, Monday Three days later and we finally moved into Grandmother's place last night at 11 PM. Got our first good night's sleep since J got home (longer for L). L had been here briefly once and says that they did a LOT of work cleaning and fixing up the place. It's small but cozy. Downstairs is the kitchen and upstairs is the living room and bedroom. The place has a downstairs bathroom....no upstairs bathroom, just a downstairs bathroom. The upstairs rooms are rather small. So are the beds. Our house (with the marble steps)We got onto the internet and finally sent Part 1 of our diary. J also managed to update his Scotia banking. We did some shopping this morning and tried to figure out just were we are. We are still not sure yet, but we have a general idea, we just haven't been in this part of town before. We went for supper downtown around 8:30 PM. We both had the pork souvlaki and a beer. There are a few semi-feral cats running around and, when J dropped his fork, it was a good thing that he retrieved it quickly because three cats appeared out of nowhere and were arguing over the spot where the fork fell. It was as if someone had yelled "clean-up at Table 6" and the clean-up crew rushed over with un-Greek-like promptness. They even stuck around for 10 or 15 minutes just in case J dropped something else. Most considerate. Eventually, they found a table with a little girl who succumbed easily to their sad and hungry stares. A local Folk Festival is currently under way. a pair of guitar players were in the restaurant entertaining us. They were playing acoustic guitars and they played mostly instrumentals. They were very good. We even recognized an old song (Never on a Sunday) that J's dad used to play on accordion. We eventually got home around 11:30 PM and were soon off to bed. 11-July-2000 Tuesday We made some measurements around the house. The floor space is roughly 10 ft wide by about 24 ft long. The kitchen is only about 8.5 ft wide due to the staircase. Counter, stove and frig are under the staircase and the bathroom takes up the last 3 ft or so at the far end. Downstairs looking towards the front door, and the bathroomUpstairs is a sitting room with a couch/day bed. the room is 10 ft by 13 ft and has big windows looking out the front of the house. Through an open doorway to the back is the bedroom. It is 10 ft by 10 ft and has a twin bed. L is using the bedroom and J is using the front room (the twin bed isn't quite wide enough for both of us to sleep in and the daybed isn't wide enough for the both of us to do anything in). Standing at the top of the stairs looking towards the back room, and out the windowVikki and her mom dropped by this morning and we got them to show us how to use the clothes washer, and where the circuit breaker was for the hot water. Most people here don't use a lot of hot water so they tend to turn the breaker off to save electricity. Now we don't have to heat kettles of water to bath. Yeah! We were in Perama today to have lunch at "mama's". They are tearing up the streets all through that area and mama didn't have gas for cooking. We had some salad and some lamb soup that she heated up somehow. As always, very good food and lots of it. She brought us extra olives for the salad and, when J told her that the soup was very good, she brought him a little more. We tried to tell her what we had found on the internet regarding Gold Detectors but we couldn't really tell what her reaction to the price of one ($2,500 US) that looked perfect for her needs. J will download the webpage onto Hermes and we will visit her again on Thursday with the laptop and Norma to translate for us. L and Mama, two pictures of Norma and Ted's new houseWe stopped off at Norma's house and she drove us over to their new house to see inside and to meet her husband Ted. He is in town for a week or so and he is spending all his time on the new house. They want to move in during his vacation time in September so he's pushing to make sure everything will be ready. The house is very impressive. It's spacious with beautiful views no matter which window you look out (ignoring the chicken farm in back is easy because it's close to the ground and the hills aren't). Norma dropped us off at home this afternoon and took a look around. She says that we are in a wonderfully old part of town and that the house is really great. We admit that it is bright and clean. Bobby did a great job of fixing it up. Norma and her youngest, Ellie, met us at Goody's at 8 PM to go to the final night of the International Folk Festival. First of all, Goody's is Greece's answer to MacDonald's. We're not sure they were asking the right question, but the place does seem to have that "plastic look" of Western Capitalism and the fast food IS reasonably fast. It's the first hamburger J has had in some time. L deferred to a sub-type sandwich instead. The fries were pretty close to McD's though, which J liked (Greek fries tend to be soggy not crisp). We then went to the Folk Festival show at the "Anichto Theatro", a small open-air amphitheater built recently (in the last 100 years) in the style of the ancient Greek and Roman amphitheaters (there is a real ancient amphitheater at Dodona, an ancient city site about 12 kilometers away but we haven't been there yet). The show was excellent. It started at about 10 PM (it was scheduled for 9:30 so that wasn't too bad) and it ran until about 1 AM. There were seven young dance troupes from six neighbouring countries and Greece. In order of appearance there was Ukraine, Albania, Belarus, Italy, Turkey, Romaina and Greece. If our pictures don't turn out we'll scan in the pictures from the program that they gave us. They were all very good and very colourful. The Belarus group had the most costume changes including a Russian Gypsies number and a traditional Cossak number. All in all, it gave us a wonderful feel for where we are, geographically and culturally. We enjoyed it thoroughly and the 100 drachmas (40 cents) that we each spent on styrofoam seat pads was money well spent. I couldn't tell you which was which any more but the
last picture does have them
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