What’s for dinner: An artistic illustration of Astipalea island’s scenic Chora village appears at the top of the menu on the outside wall of the Astropelos taverna in Livadi. Below is one of our photos of Chora, shot during our May 2009 visit to Astipalea.
A view of the enormous Kastro (castle) that towers above Chora on Astipalea
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Aerial visions: I never need inspiration to plan a trip to Greece, but today friends of mine passed along a link to a stunning video that I couldn’t resist sharing. it’s called “Visions of Greece,” and it was posted online by YouTube member Chania Crete. The video is 54 minutes long, so pour yourself a glass of your favourite Greek wine or ouzo, sit back, relax and enjoy the breathtaking scenery. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself checking airfares to Greece after watching!
Click on the image to view a small-format slideshow of photos posted on Flickr.com, or click here to view full-size photos directly from the blog’s Flickr photostream
New Year, new photostream : Regular readers will recall that my blog posts often included links to online photo albums that I had uploaded to Webshots.com. Unfortunately, the company that owns Webshots decided to close it down last month, so the thousands of photos I had posted there are no longer available for viewing.
I’m pleased to report that I have established a mygreecetravelblog.com photostream on Flickr.com. It’s still in the early stages of development, with just three collections of pictures available for viewing so far (sets of photos from Ios in 2011, and from Paros and Mykonos in 2012). But I will be creating new albums and uploading more photos regularly.
Please bear with me while I gradually rebuild an online photo collection. I had around 20,000 photos of Greece in over 200 different albums on Webshots, and can’t possibly recreate all of those albums because of the amount of time it would take. But you’ll still be able to see plenty of my photos on Flickr — there are already more than 1,700 on my photostream.
Happy New Year, and happy photo viewing!
A yummy Greek salad and an ice-cold bottle of Mythos beer
Favourite snack: When I was grocery shopping one day last week, I got a sudden craving for a crisp Greek salad — our favourite lunchtime “snack” and dinnertime starter when we’re in Greece. So I picked up some feta, cucumber, olives, green peppers, tomatoes and a red onion. The salad I assembled back home looked appetizing enough, but was a huge disappointment to eat. The vegetables were crunchy but bitter (the onion actually gave me severe heartburn), while the tomatoes were tasteless and had the texture of soggy cardboard. The feta felt almost spongy, and had a sharp, slightly sour flavour, while the olives also seemed spongy, and tasted bitter and salty. Major letdown!
I should have known better — the taste and texture of our vegetables, even at the best of times, is never even remotely comparable to their flavour-packed counterparts in Greece. And now that we’re heading into winter, our vegetables will be even more dreadful. So no more Greek salads until next spring. With luck, we’ll make it back to Greece at that time … and if we do, you can be certain we’ll enjoy an authentic, tasty Greek salad with nearly every meal.
Until then, I’ll try to satisfy my cravings by pretending I’m back at Taverna Glafkos in Naoussa, on Paros, enjoying the delicious Greek salad pictured above that I enjoyed for lunch one day last May.
A quiet moment at the Santa Maria Village hotel swimming pool
September swims: For our fourth trip to Greece, in 2007, we decided to travel during the second half of September instead of taking our holiday in late May or early June as we usually do. We figured that, after a long hot summer, the sea would be comfortably warm and so would hotel swimming pools. At least, that’s what seasoned travellers had told us to expect, and that’s what I kept reading in the TripAdvisor.com forums.
But when we got to the first hotel of our island-hopping trip that September — the Santa Maria Village at the port town of Adamas, on Milos — we were shocked to discover that the swimming pool water was ice cold. Other guests who said they had been expecting to do a lot of swimming were also taken aback by the water temperature.
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