Returning to My First Greek Love, Athens

Hi -

We have now just about completed our Greek tour. The islands were fantastic as expected. I'm not sure if Santorini or Mykonos was my isle d' chois... Anyway, we have returned by boat to Athens. We are staying in the same hotel (Hotel St. George) in the "Beverly Hills" district. The cool thing about staying in the same spot is that they actually remember us from a month ago and booked us in an even larger, cooler pad with a fantastic view of the Parthenon from our veranda. I can hear crowds of people outside right now. I presume they are making their way to local Eastern Orthodox Churches for their Easter midnight mass. I need to go wake up Paul so we can go check one out.
In two days we're flying to London. But for now we'll just check out some perviously unseen sites here in the city.
Yazous.

Halkidiki, Etc. Pics

Well, I tried the hotel's internet one more time and was able to download a few more pictures before it crapped out again. Here you go:

Mount Olympus. Mountain of the gods.

Aristotle's park. This is Greece's main statue tribute to him. The park was really strange. There were several "artistic" and "scientific" pieces on display. All really kind of tacky. I think Aristotle would laugh.

See what I mean?

Paul's birthday night of celebration. (He's actually holding up 9 fingers.)

Another addition to the Druidic Paul portfolio. This is the Temple of Zues.

Me at the Zues Temple. (I guess I have shorter hair.)

We're now leaving Crete

We've been here for a couple of days and tomorrow we'll take a very fast boat to Santorini. Hopefully I'll be able to post many more pictures once we get there. It took me about 2 hours to post that last set. Pray for Europe and their internet.

Crete is beautiful. We're staying at the Knossos Royal Villas. Everyone is very kind here. The villa is filled with mainly families. In this resort villa alone there are about 5 pools, a miniature golf course, game rooms, shops, restaurants, and the beach... Very cool. The busy season is just about to start around here so the town is finishing up it's remodeling. This means we still don't have access to everything that summer tourist will get, but we still had a great time.

I hope everyone had a nice Easter. Our's was fine. We still have one more in another week. This is going to be the big one for us since the Eastern Orthodox Easter is the Greek's equivalent to Christmas.

Talk to you soon.

Athens and Delphi, Greece

Finally!!! Here's some random pics with purpose. Without further adieu...

We visited the ancient city of Delphi (near athens). This is the colosseum/chariot track.

Below the colosseum was the Apollos amphitheater. This is where Mo'Nique hosts a variety show each Sunday night.

So we're trying to collect a series of "Paul the Druid" photos. Here he is praying to Apollos at the remains of his Delphi temple.

Our cool hotel balcony, perfect for scanning the internet... And greek honnies.

It would have taken approx. 8 photos to create a full panoramic shot of the city of Athens. That's the Parthenon on the hill.

This was the military Independence Day parade in Athens. I just like the image for the cool baby on his dad's shoulders taking a moment from munchin' on a cookie in order to support his troops.

Yasou

That's a rough phonetic translation of "Hello" in Greek. (If you want to see how it's really spelled check out that little "Translator" hyperlink just to the right of the screen there. See it? Click it and learn something.)

Speaking of learning something, this may interest you:

We've decided to once again restructure our tavelling agenda. This Saturday we'll be moving out of Halkidiki and flying to Crete for some island adventuring. As of now we plan to see Crete, Mykonos, Santarini, and maybe a couple of others. After about ten days of island hopping we'll land on the familiar shores of Athens where we'll take a couple of days and visit some sites we didn't get to see the first time around. After thaaaat, we fly back to London to catch a three day screenwriting seminar and visit a few sites we didn't get to see there in February. Then, after a few days there, we head to Spain. So, that's the scoop.

Paul headed to Thassaloniki to run some errands and I stuck around the house in Kassandra in order to finish my second book of the trip. Can you believe it?! I've now completed a cool book on wines and an even cooler book on screenwriting.

I'm hungry. Time to fire up the BBQ and burn a little H1N5 off of my chicken.

By the way, I have TONS of pictures I'll post when we locate some high speed internet... perhaps, Athens or London or both? So, hold on kids. They're coming.

Happy Birthday, Paulie!!!

Today, Paul is the big 29! Wow, the age that all old people want to be... Why is that? Hopefully Paul figures it out in the next 365 days.

Just so I feel like I'm truly updating... Today we went to Aristotle's birthplace and saw basically nothing because all of the sites were closed for some reason. What's up?

Besides Aristotle we've had crappy weather and are waiting for sunshine so that it will make better sense for us to be wearing tank tops!

Happy Birthday anyway, Paulie!!! Love ya' man!

Halkidiki, Greece

Well, we finally have access to decent internet. Our manager installed a dial-up network in our house so, no pictures for now, but here’s the scoop:

We’re living in the town where Aristotle was born. Naturally this makes us feel much more intelligent as we wake up every morning at about 11am and stare out over the Aegean coastline. I cleaned up our private section of the beach. This took approximately 4 hours and 7 trash bags. Anyway, the beach is clean and we spend a large portion of each morning and afternoon lounging around in the sand reading a book or playing the guitar or swimming. We’re trying out the local restaurants and are both in agreeance that one could easily live off of Greek food for the rest of their life and have no culinary complaints.
Today, we tried to mix it up and grill up some pork chops and sausage… I need to preface my small story with this:

PREFACE: So far we’ve had no neighbors since it’s been a weekday up until today. Today being Saturday, we now have many neighbors. In our small community there are two BBQ fire pits that we had assumed were for community use.

Well, we were wrong because when we attempted to use one we were quickly confronted by one of our kind old neighbors. She greeted us with, “No! No! No!” We tried to explain ourselves, but the language barrier was too strong. As we sulked back to our house with raw pork chops, other neighbors laughed at our ignorance from the safety of their balconies. The Greeks have all of the hospitality of a French anti-war activist.

This story concludes with us driving ten miles down the coast and purchasing our own little BBQ. We overcooked all of the meat and, on top of all of that, the experimental local wines we bought were duds.

Anyway, we’re going to watch Sideways now. On Monday we’re going to check out this ancient monastery on the third peninsula and later we’ll check out nearby Mount Olympus.

P.S. Paul says "hi" and wants everyone to know that I finally cut my hair. It's true.