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.