Santorini Experiences

So now that we've come to Santorini our vacation has slowed down. This is the part where we planned to sleep late every day and just play it by ear on what to do....so far that's exactly how everything is working. Although the first day we did discover that although things on Santorini start late (think 10AM or later) like the rest of Greece, it closes down MUCH earlier than the rest of Greece (10PM vs 2AM).

On Tuesday we really just hung around our hotel room and then explored the town we're staying in (Fira the capital of Santorini). Here's some shots of the gorgeous view from our private balcony:





Unfortunately the majority of the shops were closed either because of the national holiday or because it was so late in the season. However we did have an good lunch of authentic gyros and then we found some handmade ice cream/gelato that was AMAZING! Unfortunately dinner was a comedy of errors, bad food, bad service, and general frustrations.

Wednesday we were in our hotel room until the maid actually kicked us out so she could clean. We then made our way down to the bus station to catch a bus to Oia. Now a couple of things, these buses aren't like the T buses back home, they're super comfy mini-greyhound type buses. However, the roads here are even smaller then they were on Kefalonia, so while the ride is comfy it's scary as hell too.

Now we had gone to Oia specifically because they were supposed to have a "Kastro" (yeah I know if we really wanted to see castles we should have gone to Ireland or Scotland!) and because it's supposed to have the best view of the sunsets in the entire island. Well, once again the Kastro disappointed, it was paved over and really just a place people use to take pictures because once again it has an amazing view (just like the last kastro). Adrienne is convinced that they keep calling stuff castles to suck in all of the western european tourists. Here's the view from the kastro:





Oia was very quiet...much like Sami was on Kefalonia. You can tell it must be hopping during the summer though. I actually enjoyed being able to walk through the uncrowded streets. But the locals were definitely in chill winter mode....even the dogs:



Also Spike you might want to look away because Adrienne totally cheated on you with one of the shop owners dogs who was adorable (she said her plan was to run to the bus with him and pack him her carry-on for the flight home):



After that we did some shopping for people back home, and then the sun was already starting to set (I told you we got a late start!). We were able to get some really neat and beautiful pictures. Here's the best one of us though taken by some nice ladies from NYC who we ended up talking to about the election later (cue Adrienne eye-roll here because I'm obsessed with the election and the polls):



I got this picture afterwards:



Once again dinner was a bit disappointing (not as bad as last night), at this point we really feel like our cousins spoiled us in Thessaloniki, or that the dinner food there is seriously 100x better than here.

Thursday Adrienne wants to visit the beaches.

Kefalonia Part 3 - On the Road

We left Farsa and followed the map to get to Lake Melassani. During the drive we realized just how mountainous Kefalonia is and the lake is on the other side of the island, so we had to cross all of those mountains.



Most of you know how *ahem* "good" of a driver Dave is. But what many of you don't know is that Greek drivers are worse. Because of this, Dave feels like he needs to fit in. Or that it's ok for him to drive like a maniac. Either way, lets just say that I spent most of the ride with my eye's closed. ;) Have you ever been on the seacoast highway in California? The roads in Kefalonia are more narrow and windy than that road.

About halfway across the island as we rounded a corner I yelled "GOATS!" and Dave slammed on the breaks as there was an entire heard of about 50 goats meandering up the road and eating on the side of the road. I got out to take some closer pictures and one of the goats (the white one pictured below) was super interested in us and the car. At one point I was standing in front of the car and he walked towards me and I reached out to him and then at the last second both of us jumped away from each other. Dave said that it was like both of us freaked out and at the same time had similar thoughts running through our heads, namely "AHH GOAT!" "AHH HUMAN!".







We continued on into Sami to Melessani Lake and when we got there we were two of maybe 10 people there to see the Lake. This is usually a place that is swarming with tourists during the high season (so much so that they have a dedicated line for people who arrive on buses). I think the fact that it was low season and thus not busy actually made this a much more enjoyable experience for both of us versus if we would have had to wait in a 30 or 60 minute line.





Lake Mellasani is an underground lake that is a mixture of salt and fresh water. The water from the lake travels all the way across the island and flows out of the ground near Argostoli (where we are staying). It was absolutely beautiful, even on a cloudy day. On sunny days you can see the light streaming in through the ceiling. We took a gondola ride through the lake, the water was so clear you could see straight down to the bottom. Surprisingly, we saw no fish at all, and just as we were leaving a swarm of bats dive bombed behind us.

I then saw signs for the Arcropolis of Sami and a "Kastro" (i.e. Castle) so Dave and I decided to check it out since we were on "adventure day" in Kefalonia anyways. We made our way into the mountains above Sami. Dave warned me beforehand that everything he had read online said this was a disappointing "historical" site. Once we parked the car and walked up, what we saw totally confirmed it. There's basically nothing left of either of them, and even worse the site is under construction (Dave think's they're trying to rebuild it so it's not so pathetic). However we did get a great view of Sami below us....and Dave conquered the most pathetic castle ever. "King of the castle, king of the castle." ;)





By this time we were starving so we drove down to Sami to eat on the waterfront. There we had some awesome seafood while watching a little old greek fisherman get his boat ready to go out to catch some fish.



At this point it was getting late in the day and we still wanted to see St. Gerrassimo's Church (or St. Geranimo's as Dave called it all day....he's such a dork), who is the patron saint of the island and who much uncle is named after, and St. George's Castle. Unfortunately we were racing the sunset as we forgot that with daylight savings time comes much earlier sunsets. When we got to the castle though we found it closed (it apparently closes at 3PM every day), which was disappointing because this (unlike the one from earlier today) was a true castle. According to Dave it was the original capital of Keflonia for hundreds of years. I told him we'll just have to leave more time to see it next time we're in Keflonia.





On the drive back Dave drove by the hotel and I asked him what he was doing. He said our day of adventure wasn't quite done yet. We kept driving through random streets till suddenly he said "AH HA" and pulled over. Turns out he had wanted to find the "lighthouse" of Argostoli, which was built in the 50's and has a gorgeous view. Unfortunately none of the pictures of us in front of it turned out, but Dave got this pretty cool shot of it.



And that finished up our day of adventure in Keflonia as we then had to go to the hotel and get ready for our 7AM flight!

Kefalonia adventure - part 2 - Old Farsa

We drove up the road of death to find Old Farsa. In 1953 there was a massive earthquake all over Kefalonia and many people were left homeless or killed. There are abandoned villages all over the island, many people left the island for "safer" homes and communities rebuilt on lower ground. Yannis showed us all over Old Farsa. From what I understood of Greek he showed me the old school, library, bath house and town well, and a taverna that was run by members of my family! :)

Here I am standing in what used to be the Voutsinas family taverna!



Old Farsa was really fascinating. We found the old church and graveyard with a Voutsinas family member buried there.

It was really moving to be in a place where so much life once was. Yannis showed us where his family house once was and we saw some amazing views of the newer Farsa from above :)

This is a view of the new cemetary, where my great grandparents are, from Old Farsa. :)

We left the old village and brought Yannis to his store. The girl at the bar told us he had some of the best hot meals, so we thought we'd get lunch. We sat down and he gave us a drink and then started talking about Souvlaki. He said Souvlaki to us and we smiled, nodded yes and said "Souvlaki" back. My thought was that the next thing would be souvlaki sitting in front of us at the table. However, I was wrong. Somehow we couldn't really communicate and we wound up leaving with a croissant stuffed with peach jelly. Yannis wouldn't let us pay so we on our way out of Farsa we stopped at the bar again, gave the young girl(who spoke very good English) some money so that Yannis could have a coffee anytime he wanted, and left him a note that she would translate for him.

We left Farsa discovering that we still had plenty of time (due to our earlier clock/daylight savings time mixup) and headed for Melassani Lake. :)

Best Kefalonia adveture EVER!

So far this has been my favorite day of this trip. Get comfy folks - because this is going to be a long post! :)

We scheduled one day to rent a car (unfortunately it wasn't a SMART car which are just SO cute) and drive up to the village my grandfather was born in. We stayed in the capitol city, Argostoli because it was basically one of the only hotels open. It was eerie, kind of like being on Nantucket in December. You could tell that it's really only a vibrant summer place, but at the same time there is something to be said for visiting a place like this in the off season.

Kefalonia is a fairly big island and there are a lot of things we wanted to do. We didn't get to do all of them, although we certainly got up early enough. Apparently, in our vacation mode, we forgot about daylight savings :p so we thought we were waking up at 7 but it was another clock mix up and we were up at 6AM! Classic.

We got a map and headed up to Farsa. The drive was beautiful - and because Dave is going nuts with the camera we borrowed from Katie, we were stopping to take pictures every couple hundred feet it seemed. Dave is certainly in vacation tourist mode.

We found Farsa pretty easily, luckily my new hubby is a wiz at directions.
If you look at the bottom of this sign you can see Farsa.



My cousins had given us a little map of how to find the cemetery. Funny story, cemetery in Greek is "Necrophitia" NOT "NecrophiLia" ;) Luckily I made that mistake while talking to my cousin, not to a stranger.

I went into this little taverna and in my broken Greek asked the 12 year old girl who was tending bar (only in Greece!) how to find the cemetery. We walked down the road and thankfully the cemetery was open. Before my PaPou died, during one of his last trips to Greece, he took pictures of himself standing next to his parent's graves. I wanted to visit that same site, so my cousins wrote down my great grandparent's names in Greek and we used that to help us find the graves. We found something that looked like "Voutsinas" but it didn't have the "S" on the end and was spelled slightly differently - so we kept looking. As we were looking an older gentleman came in, who didn't speak any English. Dave asked him if he could help us, using gestures and a few Greek words. :) He helped us find the grave (it WAS the one that was spelled a little differently) and we got the pictures I wanted. :)







My great grandparents were Spiros and Theadora Voutsinas (Theadora is my mother's namesake). There was also another grave next to it, it was smaller and seemed to possibly contain a child - it was the Voutsinas name but we couldn't figure out who it was. I'm hoping Mom will read this and tell us who it was. :) The other picture is Dave getting all creative with the Digital SLR....boys and their toys!



Here's a picture of the old man who helped us around, we discovered his name was Yannis(Greek for John) and that either he or maybe his parents knew my great grandparents well. He was really nice and also offered to show us around Old Farsa, the old village that was abandoned many years ago.



Seeing as it was our one week anniversary, I decided to test Dave's love for me by making him drive up the "road of death". Thankfully, we all survived and so did our marriage. ;) You know a man really loves you when he he drives up a mountain on an old dirt/gravel road filled with narrow switchbacks, in a Hyundai on a "road" just barely big enough for a small car, with an old man who doesn't speak any English just so that his wife can see where her grandfather grew up. :) This is the road we drove up.



We also thought it was kind of funny how "inventive" the Greeks in the little towns are. For the "fences" they basically combine anything that can be used to wall off a section. The one we passed on the "road of death" contained among other things: an ironing board, bed headboard & footboards, a ladder, mattress framing & springs, old wire racks from a store, etc.



To be continued.....

(edited for humor by Dave)

Traveling and Random Thoughts

So we owe you guys a fuller post on our time in Kefalonia (with pictures!) yesterday but we're in the midst of travelling to Santorini (a 12 hour layover after catching a 6:55AM flight to Athens).

So what do we do during the layover in Athens....of course Adrienne wants to go to the mall! (actually we needed some stuff we lost/left behind). Seriously though I'm so "proud" to be an American....what are the great cultural exports of our country....malls and fast food! What a bland culture we have.... Seriously though, luckily they have internet cafe's in their malls, so we're able to bring you this scintillating post. And I must admit this is an impressive mall, it's 5 stories and has amongst other things a full bowling alley, cinemas, and a HOOTERS! ( Adrienne won't let me to go lunch there :-( )

The other thing that I've noticed here...based on all of the stares I get from everyone...is that next to NO ONE shaves their head here. I'm like a circus freak to these people!

Anyways, we've got to go now...Adrienne found a dress for my sister's wedding and we want to go take one of the tour buses around the city so we have an idea of what to visit when we come back here in 8 days.

Leaving Thessaloniki

So on Friday Eleni took us around to a couple of spots in Thessaloniki with her daughter Niki (who was skipping school) before the family left for vacation.

The first place that we visited was one of the Byzantine churches that she, Andromihki (Andi) and Fanni had worked on for 7 years painting all of the "icons" (saints) and that Alexi (Eleni's husband) had provided some of the gold and silver metalwork (think chandaliers, prayer lights, etc) for. It was a gorgeous church and it was amazing to think of how much work they had put into it. And the craziest part of all....everything was painted on 23K gold sheets! The walls in that church were probably worth millions of dollars in just gold let alone anything else. Here's some pictures to let you see:







After that we went up to the "Castle" of Thessaloniki which is really just a corner of the old city walls which enclosed a space that was 2-3 miles across. Little of the walls are still standing as they had to knock them down to expand the city, but it the area where we were does provide a beautiful view of the city below:







We then visited Alexi at his shop and saw more of the amazing metalwork he does with gold and silver. There they thoroughly embarassed us by giving us a bunch of silver as a wedding present. Since the whole hotel thing hadn't worked out apparently they had been trying to figure out what to get us, so they had Alexi pull together a bunch of stuff. This is PURE silver and is amazing craftsmanship. They really are way too kind, and we'll definitely have to send them better gifts once we get back to America (We had brought salt water taffy, maple sugar candy and boston harbor tea for the 3 of them because it could easily fit in our suitcases).

Our last stop with Elani was to visit Andi and Fanni where all of them work (Eleni had taken the week off to be our guide). Adrienne was able to see a painting Andi had done years ago of her Papu (Grandfather), and I know that meant alot to her. Fanni and the rest of the family were telling her stories too of when her Papu and YaiYai (Grandmother) visited Greece years ago. Later that night in the car Adrienne made me promise that as soon as we get home we start saving up for another trip to Greece (in addition to saving for a lake house).





We then went to lunch with Fanni and Andi to a place on the outskirts of the Thessaloniki hills that overlooked the city. There I found that the Greeks CAN do spicy! They have this awesome spicey 4 cheese spread that basically is their version of jalepeno cheese. It was so good I basically ate the whole plate. Fanni then took us to the top of the hills to get another great view of the city down below:



The glow you see is the sun reflected in the sea.

After pictures Fanni dropped us off at the hotel and we took a quick nap before heading out to explore the shopping district that we were staying in before meeting up with the Andi's family & Fanni for dinner. Adrienne wasn't able to find anything for my sister's wedding, and we discovered that purple is the new IT color and that at least Thessaloniki is stuck back in 1989.

For dinner we went to a place far up in the mountains to get some good lamb. It was a pleasant family dinner, and I was super glad that Yannis (Andi's husband) was there because since he went to grad school in London he speaks English exceptionally well....which has the added benefit of him getting my jokes!

Then on Saturday Fanni picked us up with all of our luggage and we went and visited their summer home down the coast from Thessaloniki. Unfortunately it was too foggy to get a good picture of Thessaloniki from their balcony, but you could see that on a clear summer day they must have an AMAZING view! While there we discovered that Greeks DO like magnets as they have a fireplace shield with magnets from everywhere they have visited on it (BACKSTORY: we were agonizing whether to get any of them Boston magnets as a present from the US). We then went out for fish (meeting up with Andi, Yannis and Konstaninos again) near their house right on the water where we went back into the kitchen and the owner let us pick which fish we wanted to eat. Needless to say having fish that fresh was delicious.

We were then taken to the airport by everyone where we had some mishaps with overweight luggage and missing boarding passes that eventually worked itself out and we said goodbye to the family. (ASIDE: you'll be happy to know that in Europe they're actually sane and don't make you take off your shoes to go through security).

We then boarded our turbo-prop plane that was going to make two stops before getting to Kefalonia. There was a bit of confusion that when we landed at the second stop we didn't realize we had to leave the plane so they could refuel it (a passenger saw us just sitting there and had to tell us), but we got here safely and checked into the Ionian Plaza.

Since it was only 7PM or so we walked around the city, discovered the most DELECTABLE pastry shop and had dinner in the main Argostolia square.

Tomorrow will be a big day as we're going to explore most of Kefalonia and specifically try to visit her great grandparent's graves (with just rough instructions from her family). Then on Monday morning (at 7AM!) we fly to Athens to catch another flight later for Santorini.

Exploring Thessaloniki

So today we actually got to explore a bit of Thessaloniki, and more importantly we learned why it's called Solonika as well. If you drop the first part of Thessaloniki it becomes saloniki, which over time got boiled down to Solonika. Similar to how New York City becomes NYC.

So Adrienne already told you about our misadventures with timezones and alarm clocks...but once we got out and about our first stop was down on the waterfront. We walked to Alexander the Great's "grave" which is really more of a memorial as no one knows where he was really buried. Apparently the Thessaloniki area was his base of operations for his father's palace is about 2 hours outside the city, and the city is very proud to be associated with him.







From there we went onto the "white tower", which actually has had a number of names throughout history here. The most ominous being the "blood tower" because it used to be the place they executed all of the criminals and their blood literally stained the walls red. In 1890, one of the prisoners knowing how ugly it looked convinced the guards that he should be let go if he whitewashed the entire tower, hence the new name. They've now converted the tower into a mini-museum just about Thessaloniki. Unfortunately all of the exhibits are just in greek, apparently this is a trip that every school child in Thessaloniki makes to learn about the history of their city. However Elena translated what she could, and we were able to get the gist of many of the exhibits.





The real reason for visiting though is being able to be at the top of the tower. From the top of the tower you get a 360 degree view of the city and its gorgeous. I took pictures that I hope to be able to stitch together into a panoramic shot later, but here's one of us that Elena took.

After the white tower we walked down to the "world's fair tower" that the city had built in the 1970's to attract business and show that they were part of the modern economy. Now the tower hosts much of the communication equipment for cell phones, but it has a nice rotating cafe at the top where we got something quick to eat.



Then it was onto the Archeological Museum of Macedonia. They had some very interesting exhibits about Alexander the Great (or Alessandro Magnus as they call him), prehistoric Macedonian and one on the plants of Europe/Greece. By this time though we were starving for lunch and so we left with the goal to visit that and the Byzantine Museum next door today.

Unfortunately when we returned to the car, it turned out the police had taken Elena's plates and given her a ticket. Apparently we had parked illegally and that's what they do. Needless to say she was bummed and distracted as we drove to lunch....where she parked like this:



So I guess it's not that surprising that she got a ticket. We offered to pay but she wouldn't have any of it. The place she took us was the most brilliant idea ever for a restaurant....it was MEAT SUSHI! They give you a checklist of all the types of meat and you write down how much you want of each. We also got their version of "french fries" and you should see the size of these things:



Needless to say I was a happy man. I'm also loving the fact that everyone here eats on my schedule (versus Adrienne's). We've been having lunch at 2-3PM everyday and then dinner is at 8-9PM. Anyways, after lunch Elena dropped us back at the hotel so she could go to the police station to get her plates back and because Adrienne was tired anyways. We ended up napping again until Elena called us to see if we wanted to take a taxi to her house to meet up for dinner.

At dinner we met Elena's older sister Andromiki (probably slaughtered that) and her husband Yannis who will be taking us to dinner on Friday and dropping us off at the airport on Saturday (Elena and her family are leaving for vacation on Friday).

Once we came back neither of us were really all that tired, even though it was midnight, so we ended up watching Fever Pitch and not going to sleep until almost 3AM!

Anyways I've gotta run her cousin is taking us up to a castle today!