...have been filled with adventure, romance, wonder, celebrations, scandal, cross-c0ntinental travel and more food than I thought it was possible to consume in a month, let alone a few weeks.
I'll start at the beginning, which was approximately December 24th, when Joe, my boyfriend, arrived in Thessaloniki. In fact, here's a picture of the two of us on the waterfront. I actually asked a complete stranger to take our picture, and she did so without running off with my camera, a fact for which I am very grateful. (Perhaps it's because I am from New York, but I am very neurotic about that sort of thing.)
We spent most of the next few days hanging around, wandering through downtown, and sitting in tavernas where I ordered different kinds of Greek food and made Joe try them. As a matter of fact, I would estimate that 85% of December 26th was spent in various restaurants, from the creperie where we had breakfast, the souvlaki place where we sat for two hours at lunchtime, to the waterfront cafe where we had afternoon tea and hot chocolate, and the taverna where we had dinner with some fellow Grinnellians. It wasn't our intention to spend the entire day in restaurants, it just sort of happened, mostly because we discovered that all of the non-culinary establishments were still closed for the holiday and it was a bit rainy. Actually, I think that spending multiple hours lingering over food and hot drinks is a very authentically Greek way to spend a day.
Joe eventually tried pretty much everything I suggested, including retsina, tzatziki, ktipiti (cheese salad), shrimp saganaki (even though the shrimp still had their heads on), domlmadakia (stuffed grape leaves), and a whole bunch of other things. He did not, however, try octopus. I wanted to order it for him, but I managed to come down with some sort of awful fever on the day that I had planned a trip to the seafood taverna, and so we ate noodle soup instead. I did however, show him the octopus for sale at the fish market, which is rather an interesting sight if you've never seen fresh octopus for sale before.
Unfortunately, I could not get him to eat the octopus by washing it down with his favorite alcoholic beverage, as Scruffy American and Enorkos suggested, because Joe doesn't particularly like any alcohol. He just doesn't like the taste. I tried to explain this concept to one of my Greek friends, and he was rather stunned. "You mean, he just drinks wine sometimes?" he asked. "No, I explained. "He really just doesn't drink." My friend looked at me as though I had said "He doesn't like to breathe." I was trying quite hard to hold back my laughter. Alcohol is much more a part of everyday life here.
I was also going to plan a trip to Pelion for us- Pelion is a peninsula in Central Greece which is, I hear, quite lovely this time of year. However, we were slowed down a bit by my fever, as well as the fact that most of Thessaloniki was closed for much of Joe's first few days here. This might be a good time for me to comment on the fact that I never know when the hell things in Greece are going to be open. I'm finally used to the fact that things close for a long afternoon break between 2ish and 5ish. I don't necessarily love that system, since afternoons are, more often than not, the times I have free. I have adjusted, though, and I no longer try to go shopping at 4pm. However, I did not realize that everything would be closed on the day after Christmas, nor did I realize that the buses would run on Christmas but not on New Year's Eve. Oh well. We did make it all around Thessaloniki eventually, including several walks up to the old town, trips to several museums, several trips to my favorite taverna in Athonos Plaza, a walk up to a nearby suburb on a hill, which had some lovely views (unfortunately my camera stopped working that day) and one rather sickly trip to the local masoutis (Greek grocery chain) to buy a thermometer and soup ingredients.
We did take a brief trip to Edessa, which turned out to be quite a lot of fun. Edessa is a town about an hour and a half away from Thessaloniki, and they have very nice waterfalls, and quite a pretty old town. They also have some massive dogs that will follow you around until you manage to convince them that you don't have food. That is quite common in Greece, actually; this whole country seems to be filled with stray dogs, who are almost always massive, docile, friendly, and will follow you wherever you go unless you manage to lose them or pawn them off on someone else. Brad and I were once followed by two big dogs who actually waited outside for several hours while we were at our friend Will's place.
Anyway, here are some pictures from Edessa. It's up on a sort of plateau, so the view is quite nice, especially at sunset. We found a tiny little church from the 14th century there, and a little tiny cave behind the waterfall. We also found the train station, but that was mostly because I got lost on our way to the waterfalls.
Coming Soon to a Blog Near You is Week Two: Emily and her family in Istanbul
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