Sunday, May 29, 2011
I'm in love with blue and a snail's tale
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| Papermache snail made out of newspaper in 7 languages |
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| Can you tell which one is on the outside of the net? |
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| Typical Santorini church |
Surrounded by blue in the Aegean, I realize that I love every shade of blue. The sky, the sea, the swimming pools, the domes of Greek Orthodox churches, the trim on every white house kind of wakes you up and then makes you relax - so much beauty!
Getting here by ferry from Crete was easy - just one little hitch worth writing about. After a week of traveling the island, we returned to the same hotel in Hiraklion, the Mirabello. It was like coming home. People remembered us, we knew how to get around town, where the supermarket was,etc. When the Mirabello owner, Kostas, found out we were going to Santorini, he told us he knew someone with a place there and he could make arrangements for us. When he told us the reasonable price and that the hotel picks up from the ferry, we said sure! (The Santorini port is at the base of a cliff, and you either walk 580 steps, get a donkey ride, take a cable car or a taxi.) He made the arrangements and told us not to worry - the driver would be waiting for us, holding a name card.
The next time I saw him he asked if I could carry a package for him. I raised my eyebrows and asked," What is it, a bomb?" Here was a man I barely knew asking me to carry a package to a total stranger. One of those no-no's drummed into us at airports: do not agree to carry packages for strangers.
"Oh, no, no, no!!" he replied. "Just a kilo of snails.They are asleep. They won't bother you."
"Sleeping snails?" I responded incredulously.
"Yes, I want to send my friend, Popi, in Santorini some snails," he confirmed. I immediately pictured Popi as an older man, a buddy from Kostas' navy days.
There ensued a lengthy conversation about all the ways to cook snails, various methods to keep them off your plants, new medicinal uses of the slime, how they "sleep" and even how to prepare my garden snails back home for consumption.
That evening he greeted me with a large plastic bag. I peered inside to find an orange plastic net bag full of "sleeping" snails (they spent the night in our bathroom - a little fishy smelling).
On the boat the next day, I looked into the bag to find that one snail had not only woken up but had figured its way out of the net and was making its way up the side of the bag. I felt great respect for its heroic attempt at freedom.
We disembarked from the ferry and began looking for our driver. There were 20 men waving cards trying to get my attention. I walked through them and could find no one with a sign that said JARDIM. Then I realized - the Mirabello owner had meant the sign would have the name of the HOTEL on it - but he never told us the name of the place! So I started asking the other card waving guys for Popi's hotel (I knew the snails were for Popi). They asked what town - I had no idea. Word spread (they all knew each other) and finally a lanky man came forward and said, "Mirabello?"
We followed him to a van full of six recently graduated girls from Indiana who were on a whirlwind tour of Europe. Ten hairpin turns later the van had climbed to the top of the cliff and we had a birds' eye view of the "caldera" - what is now a bay was once a volcano that blew its top in 1650 AD. The hotel was so lovely (great pool) we assumed the girls were getting dropped off and then we'd be taken to our hovel. But the Vila Manos is where we all got out. I explained I had a package for Popi and a lovely young woman came forward and said, "I'm Popi." When I handed her the snails, she exclaimed, "Oh! From my brother!"
Thursday, May 26, 2011
YASAS, YAMAS and Droussolites
Today I uploaded pics below the blog so keep scrolling down after you read. I made a mistake - obviously, King Minos' throne is against the wall on the right (not the left) of the picture below!
YASAS! This is the greeting word in Greece every where we go (but I don't know how to spell it). I am studying the Greek alphabet (never too late) and I have the capitals down, but many lower case letters don't even look like the upper case letters!
The sun has risen on Agia Galini on the southern coast of Crete. It is an old town, perched on a hill that descends rapidly to the Libyan Sea. The town is quiet at this hour of the morning, except for the birds and the goats. Our tiny balcony faces a steep hillside rather than the sea, and so we have a good view of the activities of a small herd of goats.First, they were on the vertical hillside then they jumped onto the flat roof of the neighbors across the street.
Greece really is WHITE AND BLUE!! All the houses are white with blue doors and windows. Words fail me when I try to describe the blues of the waters around these islands. They are crystal clear! Which leads me to comment on how CLEAN Greece is. No old plastic bags in the water or on the streets!
YAMAS! After our first meal in a Cretan restaurant, we asked for the bill and they brought us shots of ouzo and plates of sweets. The guide book warned that Greek waiters bring food you did not ask for, so we were wary (but we drank the ouzo and ate the cake). Now that we have been in Greece for two weeks we have discovered it is standard for restaurants to give you after-dinner treats on the house. Usually when the waiter brings the ouzo, he says something like "medicine!" or "vitamin!" And we raise our tiny glasses and say YAMAS!
The most extreme example of this hospitality was last week in Frangokastelo (see fortress below). We stayed and often ate at the Artemis Taverna. When we first arrived, the host brought ouzo for a toast between us and himself. After our first breakfast, he also brought us ouzo! Another time, when he brought ouzo before we even ordered our food, I asked him WHEN one drinks ouzo, before or after the meal? He replied, "Before and after!" and duly brought us another set of ouzo glasses (and his to toast with us) when we were done.
Frangokastelo isn't even a town - it is a series of houses and tavernas surrounding the remnants of the 13th century Venetian fortress you see in the pics below. You can find reference to it in wikipedia and on youtube because of the Drossoulites, the ghosts of Greek rebels massacred on May 18, 1829. Every May, they march at dawn across the coastal plain and disappear into the sea near the fort. We arrived on May 17th and enjoyed the rise of a dramatic full moon over the castle next door. They say the occupying Germans in WWII actually fired at the Droussoulites, but none of the residents we spoke with had ever seen them. I got up at 5 am every day to see the Drousolites - to no avail.
Our other main activity in Frangokastelo was vitamin D synthesis - lying on the lovely deserted beach for 2-3 hrs. We are very toasty looking now. The water was very shallow, few waves. Tourist buses would stop around lunch time to visit the fort and walk on the beach and eat lunch but by 3 pm it was virtually ours again.
One night, (Saturday May 21st) shots were fired around midnight. It was the feast day for everyone named Kostantinos. We knew about the feast day because earlier that day we had gone next door to the Kali Kardia restaurant for some typical Greek food: spinach pie, gigantic white beans in a tomato sauce, and a Cretan salad (cuke, tomato, hard boiled egg, potato, croutons made from rusks of whole wheat Cretan bread, small green olives,green pepper, LOTS of feta cheese,dressed with olive oil). Before we left, the owner insisted we share our obligatory ouzo with his uncle, Kostantinos, who was celebrating his feast day. Kostantinos had spent 40 years in NYC making pizza. We drank to his health, the health of his children, Greece, America, etc. We learned his adult children and wife were still in NYC and he would be attending his daughter's wedding there soon.
The next day there were quite a few cars in front of the Kali Kardia. We thought - yeah, everyone knows they have the best cook in town! We went inside for breakfast. It was apparent that Kostantino's feast day party went long and late as a long banquet table still had dirty cups and napkins on it. People stared at us with glazed eyes - the owner was a bit tongue tied - I figured it was all that ouzo from the night before. When we asked if we could have breakfast, he looked at us intently and blurted out - "Last night we had a terrible accident." In broken English laden with grief he explained - his uncle, Kostantinos, whose health we toasted the day before, had fallen down the marble steps and hit his head. I asked if he was OK now, and he said, "No, he died." The worse part of it was that no one realized it! They had just found him a little while before we arrived at the bottom of the stairs, lying on the Taverna patio covered with grapevines that looks out on the sea. They were waiting for the police, the coroner, the priest, etc.
We barely knew him, but we were strongly affected. How unpredictable life is! I always think of John Lennon's line, "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." So, CARPE DIEM, folks!!
YASAS! This is the greeting word in Greece every where we go (but I don't know how to spell it). I am studying the Greek alphabet (never too late) and I have the capitals down, but many lower case letters don't even look like the upper case letters!
The sun has risen on Agia Galini on the southern coast of Crete. It is an old town, perched on a hill that descends rapidly to the Libyan Sea. The town is quiet at this hour of the morning, except for the birds and the goats. Our tiny balcony faces a steep hillside rather than the sea, and so we have a good view of the activities of a small herd of goats.First, they were on the vertical hillside then they jumped onto the flat roof of the neighbors across the street.
Greece really is WHITE AND BLUE!! All the houses are white with blue doors and windows. Words fail me when I try to describe the blues of the waters around these islands. They are crystal clear! Which leads me to comment on how CLEAN Greece is. No old plastic bags in the water or on the streets!
YAMAS! After our first meal in a Cretan restaurant, we asked for the bill and they brought us shots of ouzo and plates of sweets. The guide book warned that Greek waiters bring food you did not ask for, so we were wary (but we drank the ouzo and ate the cake). Now that we have been in Greece for two weeks we have discovered it is standard for restaurants to give you after-dinner treats on the house. Usually when the waiter brings the ouzo, he says something like "medicine!" or "vitamin!" And we raise our tiny glasses and say YAMAS!
The most extreme example of this hospitality was last week in Frangokastelo (see fortress below). We stayed and often ate at the Artemis Taverna. When we first arrived, the host brought ouzo for a toast between us and himself. After our first breakfast, he also brought us ouzo! Another time, when he brought ouzo before we even ordered our food, I asked him WHEN one drinks ouzo, before or after the meal? He replied, "Before and after!" and duly brought us another set of ouzo glasses (and his to toast with us) when we were done.
Frangokastelo isn't even a town - it is a series of houses and tavernas surrounding the remnants of the 13th century Venetian fortress you see in the pics below. You can find reference to it in wikipedia and on youtube because of the Drossoulites, the ghosts of Greek rebels massacred on May 18, 1829. Every May, they march at dawn across the coastal plain and disappear into the sea near the fort. We arrived on May 17th and enjoyed the rise of a dramatic full moon over the castle next door. They say the occupying Germans in WWII actually fired at the Droussoulites, but none of the residents we spoke with had ever seen them. I got up at 5 am every day to see the Drousolites - to no avail.
Our other main activity in Frangokastelo was vitamin D synthesis - lying on the lovely deserted beach for 2-3 hrs. We are very toasty looking now. The water was very shallow, few waves. Tourist buses would stop around lunch time to visit the fort and walk on the beach and eat lunch but by 3 pm it was virtually ours again.
One night, (Saturday May 21st) shots were fired around midnight. It was the feast day for everyone named Kostantinos. We knew about the feast day because earlier that day we had gone next door to the Kali Kardia restaurant for some typical Greek food: spinach pie, gigantic white beans in a tomato sauce, and a Cretan salad (cuke, tomato, hard boiled egg, potato, croutons made from rusks of whole wheat Cretan bread, small green olives,green pepper, LOTS of feta cheese,dressed with olive oil). Before we left, the owner insisted we share our obligatory ouzo with his uncle, Kostantinos, who was celebrating his feast day. Kostantinos had spent 40 years in NYC making pizza. We drank to his health, the health of his children, Greece, America, etc. We learned his adult children and wife were still in NYC and he would be attending his daughter's wedding there soon.
The next day there were quite a few cars in front of the Kali Kardia. We thought - yeah, everyone knows they have the best cook in town! We went inside for breakfast. It was apparent that Kostantino's feast day party went long and late as a long banquet table still had dirty cups and napkins on it. People stared at us with glazed eyes - the owner was a bit tongue tied - I figured it was all that ouzo from the night before. When we asked if we could have breakfast, he looked at us intently and blurted out - "Last night we had a terrible accident." In broken English laden with grief he explained - his uncle, Kostantinos, whose health we toasted the day before, had fallen down the marble steps and hit his head. I asked if he was OK now, and he said, "No, he died." The worse part of it was that no one realized it! They had just found him a little while before we arrived at the bottom of the stairs, lying on the Taverna patio covered with grapevines that looks out on the sea. They were waiting for the police, the coroner, the priest, etc.
We barely knew him, but we were strongly affected. How unpredictable life is! I always think of John Lennon's line, "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." So, CARPE DIEM, folks!!
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| Rhodes: Did you know the Nazi's came this far? |
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| Left against the wall - King Minos' throne |
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| Mural of cavorting bull, Knossos, Crete |
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| Greek graffiti - can anyone tell me what it says? |
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| Frangokastelo Venetian fort - from our hotel balcony |
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| Venetian fort and odd apparition (Droussolite?) in water |
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| Note telescope: "ONLY FOR MOON TO LOOK." So, only the moon can look, not you or me! |
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Aegean Odyssey
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| Hygeia, feeding snake |
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| Mosaic of Triton, half-man, half-sea creature, made with pebbles |
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| Sea sponges from the Aegean |
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| On the deck of the Prevelis, between Rhodes and Crete (14 hr ferry ride) |
In the photo of the statue of Hygeia, note that she has a snake wrapped around her right arm. It is drinking from a little plate she holds with her left. Hygeia is the daughter of Asklepios the healer (remember an Asklepion was the original hospital/spa/therapy institution in ancient Greece). This statue is from 2nd Century AD.
The photo of the mosaic shows a Triton, half-man, half-sea creature. The mosaic is made with black, gray and white pebbles (not colored glass or clay tiles). It was found underneath a high school playground and is stylistically very dynamic.
****
At the end of the day, we allowed ourselves plenty of time to walk from our hotel to the port to catch our ferry to Crete. We left at 5:30 pm; the boat was due to depart at 7 pm. We figured we would arrive 45 minutes early. The travel agent said there was no way of knowing which of the two ports the boat would leave from until the day of, but not to worry because the two ports were "right next to each other."
So, We dragged our suitcases over cobble stoned streets, marble sidewalks and gravel driveways and at 6 pm discovered our ferry was NOT in the port that was closer to town. The security guard pointed to the left and said "It's right over there." Twenty minutes into this new leg of walking to the next port, one of the wheels on one of our wheelie bags broke off!! It is a major blow to us old foggies who don't want to have to carry our bags the way we used to.
At 6:30 pm we made it to the only large ship in the "Commercial Harbor." But since my Greek is in its infancy, I had read the name wrong, and it wasn't our ship. In fact, the sailors told us, "Oh, Prevelis, that ship, no go. Maybe tomorrow...." I pulled out our tickets which they read with amazement and waved us on to another dock. We dragged/carried our injured luggage another half mile to a completely empty water front with a very chilly breeze coming off the water. In the distance I could see a figure sitting in a little wooden kiosk with the name of the shipping company on it: ANEK (I could read that). Philip stayed w/the luggage and I ran over as fast as I could imagining we were about to miss our boat (it was 6:50pm). An overweight, bleached blond, terrifically bored looking ANEK employee glanced at the tickets and said casually, "Ship late. Coming 9:30." We looked around us - no waiting room, no benches, no cafe, just a windy and dusty parking lot . I asked if she would keep our luggage while we found a place out of the wind. She reluctantly agreed, so we walked back out of the harbor area to a commercial part of Rhodes with car parts, car garages, and no restaurants or cafes. Luckily, we found an automated video arcade with vending machines, and metal seats. We could sit there without the obligation to buy a coffee to have an excuse to sit there.
A few other ANEK ferry boat customers were already there. We got to know a lovely young Chinese-Brazilian couple on their honeymoon and two girls from UVA who just finished a semester studying art in Florence. Our motley crew made its way back to the port 3 hrs later, but the 6 of us had to huddle behind the ticket kiosk in the dark to get out of the wind for another hour and a half.
When we finally got onto the ship around10:45 pm, we were taken to our cozy cabin with bunk beds and private bathroom. So the rest of the trip felt luxurious, much more pleasant than the sleeper car on an Indian train!! Here in Crete, the Greek response to our comments about the boat being so late has been, "Only 4 hrs?" Now we know to call before our next ferry ride!
My goal in Crete is to see all the amazing sites I learned about in Art History - I am so excited to see Knossos - the palace of King Minos!! It was Schliemann (German-American business man at turn of 19 C) who identified the location of the palace here. He was the first person in thousands of years to take the stories LITERALLY and piece together where they would have taken place!! He found Troy, but in Crete he did not receive permission to dig. Many years later a British archeologist with training bought property on Crete in the location Schliemann had identified and thereby had the right to dig. Today we looked at artefacts from 5000 years ago!! The cult images of priestess holding snakes predate the Greek.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Kapadokya
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| Fairy chimneys or castles made from volcanic ash (some still inhabited by locals) |
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| Underground city meeting room, 9 storeys below ground. |
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| The monastery from below |
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| Patient camel, waiting for a rider |
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| The church inside the monastery |
The main draw here in Kapadokya, central Turkey, are the peribacalar or fairy chimneys formed when erosion wiped out the lava covering the consolidated ash shaped like pinnacles . They can reach 40 meters and are often capped by a cap of harder rock. Adapted from the Lonely Planet :
A great number of Christian cave churches and underground cities were built in the 4th to 11th centuries (AD) when Christianity flourished in the area. The first church we visited was off a dirt road by itself (the others are in clusters). We were dismayed to see a ticket taker approaching us even for this little chapel. I hesitated to go in and I said something about all the entrance fees and how expensive they were. He nodded his head and said, "OK, two for one. Then you come have tea." So we paid one ticket and got to see Nazar Church, a 10th century sacred space cut out of the inside of one of the odd conical rock formations that "populate" this area (see pics). Adem (Adam), our ticket taker/guide, had to identify the biblical stories in the frescos for us. Some damage on the frescos was due to the moisture of the cave, but the scratching out of the eyes of the figures was intentional, done by muslims who conquered the area. Protecting oneself against the evil eye was and still is paramount in Turkey, so one theory is that they scratched out the eyes to protect themselves from the evil eye. The other is that Islam does not permit any art with human figures. If they did it for that reason, then we just have to be grateful that they only removed the eyes from the frescos. Adem insisted we sit outside his office (which was dug out of another cave, of course) and drink tea. We enjoyed his company and his generosity.
Yesterday we visited an underground city that had 9 levels!! These tunnels, stairs, stables, living rooms, bedrooms, and churches were dug out of the rock in the same way as the cave churches above ground - by hand. Whole towns would descend into the earth when marauders would come through. They had ventilation vents and wells because sometimes they would have to live down there for months. Nowadays the hordes are tourists and it was WAY too crowded at 65 meters below!! Security guards directed the "traffic" in the low, narrow tunnels. I'm very proud that my claustrophobia did not kick in!
you will also see two pics here of the monastery we hiked up to. There were kitchens, refectories, chapels. It must have been amazing in its heyday and impregnable.
Almost every hotel is built into a pinnacle or cliff. Just a few examples of hotel names: Flintstones Cave, Elif Star Caves, Village Cave House,Legend Cave Hotel, etc. Our room is 2/3rds cave, 1/3 stone wall (manmade but from the same stone). I now feel a lot closer to my prehistoric relatives!
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