more happy stuff!

xmas eve and xmas day sunrise xxxxxx

more Kalamata etc and Happy Stuff fore Everyone!!

so xmas is upon us, and considering the Greeks only exchange gifts on the 1st January, and just eat several various foods regionally on the 25th (such as turkey soup locally, and pork cooked in oven with shallots, which is beautiful, even made its way to our last pikilia in Logga) there are loads of street and private decorations and lights with hundreds of santas climbing on houses. We had a friday market visit to Petalidi, a big walk turning off the road to the hill, finding a nice little probably ancient well in a tiny place called Laina, ending up in Logga as per usual, and a Kalamata trip yesterday, Rosemarie again very kindly gave us a lift, first taking us to her local pharmacy for our flu shots, for 6 euros each. Interestingly, we were told not to drink alcohol, or eat chocolate, fish, eggs for a full day!. So we managed to keep busy and happy even without guests for a few days now. Tomorrow we'll get turkey in some shape from the local butcher as well as beautiful looking undressed prawns, and Rosemarie is bringing us 2 lobsters (!!) from Liddle, and she gifted us 1.5l of their own freshly cold-pressed olive oil. And in Kalamata I got cranberry sauce from a very good AB supermarket, as well as weird cook-in-the bad chestnuts and a bottle of Baileys, to surprise Szonya, who never reads the blog, don't worry. Happy xmas everyone everywhere, try not to worry about the badsadmad world for a few days!!

judith's and evelyn's pictures

so these are a selection of Judith's and Evelyn's mobile pictures, in A.A., Koroni and the Logga xmas-tree switch-on singing and dancing village-get-together, which was very friendly. Singing a bit crap, but the dancing very good. Also see the novel way the goat treated to stop it been naughty. The xmas boat - you have xmas boats here often lit up, instead trees. and the one old fashioned loo in Athen's bus station.We are going to Kalamata with them, to send them off to Athens. We all had a good time I think. I managed to cook some decent veggy dishes at home as well as having some nice ones elsewhere (Logga, Koroni) maybe tonight farewell one planned in the bus-stop place, curious if they do hortofaghos,

yesterday's adventure

so we got the 10:45 bus to Vounaria, which is about 5 minutes drive from A.A. one stop after Nea Koroni. Sitting on a hill, visible from A.A. It is a sleepy little place with 2 little shops, all restaurants etc being part of the holiday industry and secluded to the beach a few km down from the village and closed, though one had olive pickers who let use the five star loos. We had a beautiful walk down, found an incredible beach, mostly sandy, some swimmers and their dogs, and a greek old lady with a stick, ho showed us she's been bitten (a little) by one of those dogs. Must have been overexitement due to seeing another live soul besides their swimming masters, who stayed in the water all the time we were there - at least 40 min, so my suspicion, that the water is still wonderful when you are already in it, must be true. I haven't been in it since with Marta, with the cooler breathe I didn't feel like it. Anyway, we wanted to walk back to the hill on a different way and got lost, found another tiny place called Kompoi, instead. (I find it hard to call them villages, as in my eye, if even a few houses are sort of wall-to-wall with little shops, than that is a town) anyway, we had no idea which way to return to Vounaria, so we asked a nice old man, who invited us in for a nice cup of greek coffee, which was ordered of the woman invisible to us, who stayed in the kitchen, unless she was the young one, who sneaked upstairs without saying anything. It turned out that the old man used to be a sailor, been to Liverpool, and Budapest and is a communist, very worried about the world, and stressing, that people are the same everywhere. We agreed, shook hands and were on our way, not really that far lost as we thought. Mind, that all through there are views of the sea, olive groves and the Taigetos, where the snow is meltng, but still there on the highest peaks. Meanwhile Rosemarie got us Port and hopefully some other tid-bits for xmas, no custard powder and marzipan yet. But xmas pudding and mince pies probably. I will have a go making cake, with or without marzipan. I could experiment with chestnut mass, it is marzipanish... anyway, we got back to Vounaria just before the little shop at the bus stop closed for siesta, managed to secure a bag of chewy pretzels, tomatoes and drinks. Though Alan couldn't finish his beer, as the bus arrived on time to take us back. So we did at least 10kms, some quite steep bits included.