Category: Greece 2024

Taking advantage of the weekend to explore a little further afield — and yeah, this means an alarm was set. And honored this time! We were out the door by 8 and out of Lefkada by 8:30, tiropita in hand and coffees sourced.

This weekend’s target: Ancient Olympia, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the original location of the Olympic games! It also was the home of the 40-foot statue of Zeus that was considered one of the “ancient wonders of the world” (before they carted it off to Constantinople where it met it’s doom).

Olympia is down in the southwestern part of Greece so we crossed the bridge at Patras and then took a detour to go around the coast.

Part of getting out early was to make sure we avoided any road closures between the island and the highway — they’ve been working to expand the road out to the island, and on the weekends they’ve been closing up the road (since it’s small) for a few hours at a time. The detour is fine to drive but would have added a few hours onto the drive, so getting out before they close at 9:30 was critical if we wanted to go into the site today.

Patras is a bigger town than I thought it was. We got off the highway on the south side of the bridge and drove through the town’s coastal section which looked prepared for beachgoers despite the fact that it really has no beaches. And of course, similar to Athens, when the town ends, it ENDS, the road goes back down to one lane each way and you’re driving through undeveloped wetlands.

We made it to Olympia without any fuss and, since we couldn’t check into our hotel room until 4, decided to go ahead and take the afternoon and head into the site.

Most of the site is dedicated to the athletes who competed there — the first section is a long rectangular ground with columns that served as the preparation site for the athletes. There are ancient baths, a training school, a temple to Hera (where the Olympic torch is still lit at the beginning of its journey to this day), and even the stadium where races were run and the games were judged. The back part of the site is dedicated to the temple of Zeus where the statue set, as well as the workshop where the sculptor built the various gold-plated pieces that ultimately made up the statue.

(I took mostly video, I know I keep saying I will put them together, and I do need to do that, so watch for a later update.)

The site was almost completely empty. I imagine it was partially due to the time of year — winter isn’t really a tourist season for most of the country — but it also may have had to do with the time of day, as I suspect any tour groups on busses probably showed up first thing in the morning and might be long gone by now.

(Despite us spending a good three hours in the site, we still didn’t see it all, but there was no rush since we knew we could come back. We skipped the stadium since there was a good amount of people there every time we went by — we’ll check that out tomorrow, along with the workshop and whatever else we missed.)

We hung around the site until close to closing time at 3:30, then headed back into town and checked into the hotel. The hotel was an older model to be sure, but one of the very few hotels open during the winter. After getting the old skeleton key to the room (true story), we wandered into the main square and went looking for an early dinner. Found a coffee shop and cafe on the main street that was open, and got a well-deserved big beer and glass of wine, and at the urging of H, ordered pastitsio, to compare a “restaurant quality” version to the one I made this week. (The meat sauce had some different spices, maybe cinnamon, maybe clove?, but overall it was pretty similar.) (And tasty.)

Took it easy after that. With the town closed up, we relaxed back in the room until late into the evening, when a desire for more soda sent me out into town to find if anything at all was open late. Found a little souvlaki shop and took back a chicken stick and a pita for a late night snack.

Tomorrow: Into the museum and then back into the archaelogical site to see the parts we missed.

Finally getting around to walking down into Agios Nikitas, after two months of taking photos from the ocean-side overlook, and then turning around in town at the intersection where the pedestrian section starts. It always looked cool from the overlook, and had a nice little beach that probably will be full of people in the summer.

We parked up at the top of town, said kalimera to the two old guys sitting at what ended up being the only place in town that was open, and then started down the hill into town. Lots of cute white and blue buildings, closed up for the winter, lined the cobblestone pedestrian street that wound down to the beachfront. Definitely saw more cats than people, including three that popped out of a dumpster as they heard us approach, as well as a couple super-fluffy youngsters in the middle of town with a full-on gang of cats. Barely any people around, even though we could see evidence of them, if only in the food bowls and water bowls left out for the feline population.

Got down to the beach and found that parts of it were actually sand! I could hardly believe it. That being said, still mostly pebbles, which are zero fun to walk around on, but I braved it and stuck my feet in the sand and the water.

Was hoping there might be even one taverna or coffee shop down on the beach that might still be stubbornly open, but to no avail. Just some great photo opportunities.

Quiet few days as H recuperates. She was feeling better today so we got ourselves out of bed and took a little drive around the mainland side of the island, looking to loop around the little harbor and see if we could find any views back at Nydri and the harbor. The roads ended up being pretty narrow and didn’t have any easy spots to get any nice photos — but we’re still enjoying checking out the parts of the island that we haven’t explored yet.

Did try again to get a “local” iced coffee option, and got myself a “espresso freddo” for the drive. Same sort of action as the frappa, but with an actual shot of espresso rather than powdered instant coffee. Marginally better, and something I would order again, although maybe with a little sugar to cut the bitterness of the espresso shot.

(I grew up on Sunday Coffee and Donuts coffee, I’m not a hardcore coffee enthusiast!)

Big adventures in dinner tonight — finally ran through all the easy stuff in the kitchen and had to buckle down and make the pastitsio that I had acquired all the ingredients for earlier in the week.

pastitsio | παστιτσιο | Greek layered pasta with beef and bechamel

(I had to put a stock picture in there because neither of us took any pictures of the final product.)

I used this recipe because it specifically called for Greek brands of tomato paste and crushed tomatoes, and they just happened to be the same brands that I had already been buying in the local grocery store. Felt like a sign that the recipe had solid roots in actual Greek ingredients.

(I didn’t use penne, I used the actual pastitsio pasta shape, which is readily available from a number of brands here. They look like giant pool noodle bucatini.)

It had some structural issues — I expected the noodles to be “pan length” after being cooked, but they were way longer, and I got concerned that it wouldn’t look quite like the cross-cut of every picture you see if I couldn’t line them up manually — and so I didn’t do quite what the recipe said in terms of “tossing the noodles with cheese” because I wanted more control of how I got the noodles in the pan. I think ultimately however that if you get all the noodles into their layer, that no matter what way you cut, you’ll have all those noodles lined up.

Next time.

And there will be a next time because it’s pretty tasty stuff. Glad there’s a whole pan of leftovers for this week.

Decided to take an easy day since H wasn’t feeling a hundred percent. We cruised around town, got peinirli and a few coffees, and mostly just rested in bed and took it easy.

We did stop at the other coffee chain at the top of town, Mikel, and I attempted to order what I thought I saw some guys getting when I was in there the last time — shot of espresso and ice cubes blitzed in a blender, then poured over more ice. Espresso slushie sounds pretty good! So I ordered two “frappas” and that, unfortunately, was not what those guys were drinking. A frappa ended up being instant coffee, whipped up in a milkshake machine, and then poured over ice. Interesting idea but let’s just say Mikel’s instant coffee isn’t quite up to the standard of their normal espresso. Or Coffee Island. Or coffee.

Next time I’m just gonna ask the kid behind the counter.

Second attempt at Parga today.

Another historic site distraction as well, but this one we planned for, since I had already wanted to check out the Acheron River — the “River Styx” that Charon the boatman used to ferry the souls of the dead into the underworld. What I hadn’t seen at our first attempt, but read about in the meantime, was that we would also be right by the Nekromanteion, an ancient Greek temple that was supposedly used to speak to the dead, and that Odysseus used to speak to the dead and then enter the underworld in the Odyssey.

The site itself was (of course) destroyed and buried and built on top of by the various conquerors of Greece — I think the last structure was built by the Ottomans — but excavations in the 1950s turned up the original site and were matched back to descriptions by Homer and Herodotus.

(I lamented, again, to H on our drive home that I feel like I am not properly using these ancient Greek sites for their intended purposes. Here I am, in a place where you can speak with the dead, and I ask H who she would have talked to and she says Augustus Ceasar or Marc Antony, and the best I can come up with is Marilyn Monroe.)

We also did actually make it to Parga, a little touristy town on the Med that was occupied by the Venetians for a good piece of time, and sports a big castle on one end, and a hillside full of colorfully-painted houses reminiscent of the villages of Cinque Terre.

We parked and wandered along the waterfront, taking some pictures of the castle and the houses and the tiny islands in the harbor, then found a cafe looking out at the sea and watched the sun set with a beer and a plate of charcuterie.

(We did attract some strays towards the end, and after we got up to leave, one of them jumped up on the table and snatched a skewer of cold cuts. He ate like a king that day.)

Took a bunch of video at the Nekromanteion and will piece it together into something watchable.

Went into town today and got my hair did.

I was pretty desperately in need. Things you don’t think about when you set up shop in a new place for three months — are you going to be able to get a haircut, or are you going to have to rely on H taking a pair of scissors to it at some point just to get it off your ears?

(Or are you going to just grow it out again?)

(OK, let’s not get silly.)

We had been in the town square a few weeks ago, though, and I clocked a place on the edge of the square that had a single barber chair (and a mural on the side announcing the “Barber House” in big letters), so it was just a matter of figuring out the schedule and making it work. I tried yesterday but this guy is evidently the only barber in town, and he let me know I needed to make an appointment. Thankfully he had an opening today.

It looks a little floofy — H says it’s a “Greek haircut” whatever that means — but it’s short again and who am I to judge. It’s not like there aren’t already a few other floofy bits to me.

After yesterday’s excursion down the Nydri hillside and seeing the lagoon from up above, we took a short ride today to see if we could get around the lagoon and see what other villages or beaches might be in the part of the island we still hadn’t explored. We missed a little turn off and ended up heading up to higher elevations, and while we didn’t find any beaches, we did find a little village called Poros that billed itself as “the village of knives.”

Sadly, no open knife shops were found.

I could get a Greek knife. Why not.

Headed up into the middle of the island today, looking (ostensibly) for both a mountaintop church and an abandoned radar station — not necessarily to spend a bunch of time at them, particularly because it was super windy, but just to get a feel for the area since we had been sticking mostly to the coasts. Didn’t put eyes on the specific locations, but did drive through a couple cool villages up in the mountains that we’ll likely come back around to.

We started out around Agios Nikitas, on the ocean side of the island. Apple Maps has a deep love for putting me on single-track roads on this island, and the path up the mountain was no different. The first village, Karya, was pretty closed up, except for one taverna in the middle of the village, where four old guys were chatting around one table, and four old cats were sitting in the same pattern under the table next to them. Eglouvi was higher up, and had some pretty narrow streets both going in and coming out (and some directional signage that felt a little like a Wile E Coyote trap).

We went out the back of Eglouvi and down the inland side of the island, hitting a few overlooks of Nydri and the mainland.

Reminded us we need to go back to that slope as well, as Nydri has some waterfalls that are supposed to be quite picturesque.

We’re both feeling a little under the weather today, so an easy day mostly indoors and enjoying leftovers.

Did learn that DJI has a new microphone set that I desperately want despite not having an immediate use for them — I still maintain though that there has to be some entertainment value in listening to H and I during our adventures. I had desperately wanted the original microphones when they first came out and never could find them in stock in the places I normally frequented.

That led to a little rabbit hole of other smartphone video accessories I quote-unquote needed, including a magsafe handgrip with a bluetooth activation button even! With these bear mitts I am constantly in jeopardy of fumbling my phone (or, more likely, getting my finger in view when I’m making my films).

Haha, H will like that. FILMS!

(of course I read that back and it sounds dirty)