I cannot count how many gyros we’ve had in the two weeks we have been in Greece. They put french fries inside the pita, genius! So good and so cheap it’s suspicious. They have all kinds of yoghurt and cream sauces that they apply liberally. When school house rock said “don’t drown your food with mayo, ketchup or goo,” they were directing the goo at the Greek. We’ve grown a liking to moussaka, which is like an eggplant and potato lasagne. Souvlaki is also found everywhere and it’s basically shish kebab.

One of my favorite snacks, other than ice cream bars, is corn roasted over wood chips seasoned with a dash of salt. They have sour cherry juice that we are quite fond of too.

We did finally try grilled octopus yesterday and it was rather tasty. Not chewy at all and the suction cups were kinda fun to crunch down on, although they lose their suction when you cook ‘em.

-Mary

They have a lot of rocks here. And they like to pile them up, especially way up on the tippy top of rocks and hills. Then the raids, earthquakes and gods messed up the neat piles so now ruins are scattered all over Greece. There’s so much of the stuff that you can’t build a subway or foundation without unearthing some millennia old artifact, much less walk down the street without tripping over some temple to Zeus.

We clambered our way up to the top of the Acropolis to see the Pantheon, dragged our feet up through Delphi to see the Temple of Apollo, braved the tour groups at Olympia to stand in the original Olympic stadium, used the fallen city of Mystra as our jungle gym, and threw caution high into the wind to explore the monasteries built on rocky cliffs in Meteora. Twice we hiked to the top of Meteora…

-Mary

We landed in Greece July 15th and were faced with yet another language – and alphabet…

So our engineering degrees are finally coming in handy. We can decipher the road signs using mind numbing engineering mathematics to theorize that DLFI = Delphi. It’s slow reading but it works.

-Mary

They filmed the Harry Potter train scene at King’s Cross station a block from where we were stayed in London. Steve gave it a go, but apparently he’s too old for Hogwart’s. I’m actually reading my first Potter book, the latest one. It was either that or Dicken’s Oliver Twist. Yikes, I “saved” that one for Steve.

-Mary

London’s been fun. We spent 4 days here taking in the basic sites. London is cool and all, but the most impressive part was probably that we had 4 days of absolute sunshine. It’s been beautiful here. The local papers even talked about the heat wave that’s been disrupting everyone’s life.

Aside from the remarkable weather and the usual stuff, we noticed a few cool things here:

#1 The first is actually not very cool. Everything costs twice here what it does in the states. a can of coke is $2-3. We saw Pirates of the Caribbean at the (rather nice) cheapie movie theaters with a student discount for $40. that’s just the tickets. The bus is $3 and the subway is $7 a trip. Day pass on the subway for 2 people: $25. People look a bit thinner here – because they can only afford walking and a cup o’ noodles. Speaking of movies, you get assigned seats (which we moved from because we’re Americans) and there is literally 25 minutes of ads before the movie starts. Oh – remember that some of Pirates was filmed in Dominica? The bog scene with the witch is definitely the river we were on. cool.

#2 Spending an afternoon sleeping in Hyde Park is more fun than walking around museums. Although, we saw the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. Mary thinks that’s super cool. They also have a Moai from Easter Island. It’s a little kiddy one. Kinda cute, but not so impressive as the mondo ones on the island.

#3 We are being followed by the film industry. Minding our own business taking pictures of the London Bridge, two helicopters spun into the viewfinder. Right in front of the bridge, one came down and picked a car off a barge on the river and then swung it around in front of us for 15 minutes. The second copter was the film crew doing an ad for the new Opel Corsa. Then we’re looking to go see Pirates and there’s a huge crowd in front of the theater. It’s some kind of premier for Stormbreaker(?) and there’s paparazzi cameras everywhere. We just missed the big stars and only got to see some girls that we don’t know the names of. BUT – I saw a picture of Ewan McGregor taken not 5 minutes before we showed up on the camera of one excited girl. And another had his autograph. Sue excitin.

#4 Italians know amore. The BBC holds a summer concert series at the Royal Albert Hall called the Promenade or commonly “Prom”. We saw Mozart’s opera “Cosi Fan Tutte”. The title translates to “All women behave like this!” I expect the literal Italian is more like “they’re all the same”, but the printed program has the first translation. Mozart was very wise and is my newest hero.
Oh, the concert was broadcast live on BBC3 radio, so our clapping was ‘heard round the world.

*Men and women are forbidden to hold hands in public, but men are unabashedly clingy to one another.
*Hawkers are like vultures and everything is “best price for you” and “looking is free”.
*They say “inshallah” to everything, this translates to “god willing”: we will come back to your carpet store, inshallah, the bus trip will be four hours, inshallah.
*You have 1 in 4 chances of guesses a man’s name, it’s either Mohamed, Ali, Said, or Hassan.
*Women cover themselves up so much you can barely see their pupils peeping out from their scarves, even at the beach.
*Hair is alluring to the point of vulgarity; mine drove an old crazy lady with cataract in one eye to pull my ponytail while cursing.
*There is a countless number of sad kitty cats here.
*Stubborn camels are pulled by their nose rings; apparently they really don’t like that.
*Every city picks the worst callers for the 5x daily prayer over the tinny megaphones.
*Even in the underground slums where the descendants of the Sudanese slaves live they have satellite tv, but we can’t get it to work in our hotel.

Funny thing happened on the way to the desert. We ran into a couple from Miami doing a similar trip to ours. Quit the jobs, sold the condo and ran for the hills. We were stuck in the desert and they had a car, so what the heck. We can put up with Americans for a free ride, right? First mistake: buses have A/C, cars don’t.

We traveled together for about a week, passing through the eastern desert to Zagora, into Marrakech and hiking the Atlas. Must have been tough for Mary and Mac as boys will be boys and Scott and I did our best to act like teen-agers for a week. Nobody ended up in jail, but I got run up another palm tree.

By the way, that tree is higher than it looks and those frawn stubs are sharp. This climb was actually less fun than scurrying up the coco palms in the Dominican Republic.

After the laughter has subsided, you really have to respect the ingenuity and resourcefulness of people who don’t have the benefit of 7-11 and a throw-away economy. I’m not sure how many sacks of rice this wheelbarrow contraption will carry, but it is the best use of a bleach bottle I’ve ever seen. Well, other than holding bleach.

We saw a few variations on the refrigerator while hiking in the Atlas mountains. It gets plenty hot and the melting snow pack provides for nice cool drinks.

Nope. Can’t do that here. There are even signs at some intersections to remind you “No bobsledding”. Not that anyone pays attention to the street signs here…

Speaking of winter sports, you can brush up on your mogul technique in the dunes here. We didn’t because it is really hot and there’s no chairlift to the top of the dune. But people really do.

From the small mountain town of Imlil at 5,100ft it was a 2 day hike to the 14,000ft summit of the Atlas mountains and back. Toubkal mountain is the highest point in North Africa, third highest in Africa after Mt Kenya and Kilimanjaro. The hike was monotonously uphill and hot. Lunch was 2hrs later at a small shack where they used the snow chilled waters to refrigerate the sodas. Our mule handler also doubled as our cook, a precarious combo of chores. It was a farther 3hrs of up before we got to the mountain refuge. Outside were numerous tents in the gale force winds; luckily we were staying inside the stone walls. The sleeping pads were small and laid up next to each other so it looked like a wall to wall cushion and rolling over meant invading your neighbor.
At 5am the refuge started to stir as breakfasts were started and the refugees were stumbling their way to the public facilities. The morning hike was to the summit, 3 miles to the top with an elevation gain of 960m. Every step was up and the loose pebbles under foot made each step a struggle to gain secure footing. The mountain was just a massive pile of small rocks that slid towards the earth with every step. Some areas were so steep and loose that it required crawling to gain any altitude. The day was sunny but the wind howled and tried to push us off the mountain. During the strongest gusts you could see each successive hiker stop and turn their backs to the wind and wait for the worst to pass. The temperature was a chilly 47F, not including the substantial wind chill. Not having expected the low temps (thank you, useless guide!), Steve and I were hiking in our sweatshirts, sports sandals and socks so stopping to rest also meant a drop in body heat, but it did give us a break from staring down at the path so we could take in the rugged scenery. It took us 3 hours passing one stunning panorama after another until reaching the penultimate pano at the top. As difficult as hiking up was going down was even more treacherous. With each step we brought a little of the mountain down with us. There was no sure footing as the pebbles under foot acted like ball bearings and we all slid part of the way down on our bottoms. When it came to the snow our sandals doubled as makeshift skis. It took an equal three hours and a second aleve to make it down. Lunch at the refuge was short as we had the journey back down to Imlil. At least the rest of the way down was easy because the path was well worn and stable. But 17km is still 17km, especially after the rough 9km morning hike. When we were done we were covered in dirt and completely exhausted and ready for a civilized Thai dinner back at the hotel in Marrakech.

- Mary