Limnos

I've been going to Limnos since I was 11 months old. I learned to walk there. I learned to fish there. I had my first crush there. I've been to baptisms, weddings and funerals there. It is more home to me than any place on earth.

For those that dont know where it is, Limnos is a medium sized island in the northern Aegean sea, about 3 islands down from the mainland of Greece and deangerously close to the western shores of Turkey. When most folks think of Greek islands they think of Myknonos and Santorini. They dont know that's what they're thinking of, but the white and blue buildings of the cycladic and dodecanese islands are prettier on postcards than what is more common I guess.

Limnos does have a pretty storied history though. It was a key launching point for naval battles ranging from some small war against a little town called Troy to berthing large warships during WWI. There is also a large Genoan castle in the main town of Myrina which dates back to the 14th century. Granted you wont find the magestic ruins of Athens, Rhodes or Crete here, which makes me guess that Limnos must have been a rarely visited gem back during the Golden Age too.

By first impression Limnos would look non-descript, barren and boring by tourism standards. Limnos is not touristy, although it is becoming more and more visited or should I say, discovered. Limnos doesn't have villages of neatly stacked, pristine white buildings, massive cliffs, black sand beaches, miles of olive groves or world renown nightclubs or boutiques. Limnos is genuine. It is arid. It is rocky. It lacks much vegetation. You'll not find a drunken northern European roaming the streets at 3am. You wont be kept awake by the incessant 'bmp-pss, bmp-pss, bmp-pss' of discoteques.

Limnos does have gorgeous beaches like Keros Beach and Evgati. It has amazing restaurants like Mantella. It has great nightlife with clubs like Karagiozis. It has breathtaking sunsets over Mt. Athos (100 miles away) and sunrises over Turkey. Myrina, the capital and home to about 8000 people has more life than many cities of millions that I've been to. I've been going there for more years than I can remember and somehow on every trip I seem to see or experience something new. It's quaint, it's quiet, it's unspoiled and it's mine.

With that, I decided to sum up in images what Limnos is to me and what it has meant to me over 35 years. My Limnos.

Lost in Translation

My posts about our recent vacation will not necessarily go up in a linear fashion as far as date goes. Some things I'm just going to post as they come to me. Like this little goodie!

In most touristy places like Greece and Italy, restaurant menus are usually written in English, French, German as well as the native language. As a native Greek speaker I'm always interested to see how certain things get translated. I like to do this with subtitled tv shows too.

Anyway, my wife and my mother and I were dining at a quaint little seaside taverna in Mitilini (see picture above)- which is the main town on the isle of Lesvos, Greece. Yes, that Lesvos. Along the harbor there are several restaurants which serve fresh seafood, grilled stuff made to order (tis oras) as well as usually a rotating selection of more complex baked items (magirefta). That's the standard model for Greek restaurants. This menu was packed with items over like 8 pages, all with fairly small print and set up almost like an excel spreadsheet. Needless to say, I had to review the menu very closely. Now normally I would be looking only at the Greek menu but since my wife doesn't speak Greek, I tend to look at the English menu with her more often than not.

Well, as we were perusing the long list of delicacies my eye came across an unusual listing. I sat there looking at it, taking it all in and then asked my wife and mom if theirs said the same thing. Much to our shock, it was. Clearly written in all caps. It read "FAGGOTS IN RED SAUSE". (Here's a picture if you dont believe me!)



Never mind the shock of what it said, what could this possibly be a translation of?!? I'm feverishly flipping back and forth from the Greek to the English to make sure I had the right item, all the while my wife in tears laughing and my mother positively horrified and planning how to point out the inequity to the proprietor. I looked and looked and then there it was. A dish with Ottoman roots called Souzoukakia. Souzoukakia are sort of elongated meatballs cooked in the oven in a kind of cumin flavored red tomato sauce with potatoes. The "...IN RED SAUSE" part they got right spelling aside, but not quite sure how they came up with the other part.

By studying the menu it's quite obvious that there are several other errors and misspellings, but none quite so perplexing. When the server woman finally came back to take our order, my mom pointed it out whispering (in Greek) [excuse me, uh, there seems to be some sort of an error here. Somehow whoever translated your menus for you wrote "faggots in red sauce" for souzoukakia. Not only does that not make sense, but they said "faggots" not "homosexuals in red sauce", which is really rude. I think someone's played a prank on you!]

If anyone has any clue how this may have occurred, please let me and your local GBLT group know.

Sea Bounty

Everytime I've been back to Greece over the last say 10 years, I have had a thought - really more of a regret - about a certain device that would make my Greece experience that much more "rewarding". The device that I am referring to is a metal detector.

I've spent a fair amount of time at American beaches over the years in Florida, South Carolina and Virginia. One thing that is a common sight in the morning hours at these beaches is a middle-aged to elderly male with a metal detector wearing a set of large headphones and slowly pacing up and down the coastline scanning the ground for the telltale beeps and whirrs of sea bounty. Really it's more like careless tourist bounty, with these guys seemingly always coming away with anything from pocket change to jewelry, safety pins to watches, you name it. This is finders-keepers-losers-weepers in action.

Back to Greece. In all of my 30+ years of going back to the homeland and in all the miles and miles of beaches that I've dug my feet into, I have never once seen anyone with a metal detector! The apparent lack of loot detecting equipment has naturally lead me to daydreaming my way to all the riches I could potentially fall upon if I were resourceful enough to someday bring one over with me. I envision piles and piles of gold crosses, gold kombolois (worry beads), gold watches, millions in Euros (and likely in worthless Drachmas). It's enough to make a man go mad!

Well, that time is here. For my birthday this past May, my lovely wife bought me a sweet-ass metal detector! After all the years of me painting magnificent visions of the fortune we could amass with the help of a booty buddy, she made my dreams come true! I have yet to use it as I have been waiting to let it fulfill its destiny and my dreams all at once. So, this past Monday, I packaged it all up, took it to the local post office and sent it on its merry way to my cousin's house in Greece to await my arrival in a few weeks.

The only thing worrying me now is putting all my hopes of financial indepence in the hands of the Greek postal service. I need my komboloi!

Connections

Our trip plans are now complete! This might not sound like much of an achievement, but what many may not realize is that when I say "yeah, we're going to Greece" getting there is only the beginning.

Greece may be on the Euro and Athens new airport may have been voted tops in all of Europe, but my homeland is not too many years removed from antiquity (more like antiquainted). That is most apparent on Greece's national airline, the majestic Olympic Airways. The clerks still smoke at their desks. The flight attendants still wear the same uniforms that they were issued in 1963. And most annoyingly, if you wish to fly to any island or city in Greece, you MUST fly through Athens! That means that although far more time efficient than taking the boat, you'd never be able to go from say Limnos to Chios (which are fairly close to eachother) without going via Athens. Crazy! What this also means is that you have to buy all these tickets pretty much a la carte which really adds up.

So, with family scattered all around Greece, getting to Athens is only the beginning. One of the funny things about that is that it can actually be cheaper in some cases to fly to another country altogether! And that's exactly what we're doing! Rather than go to Corfu to visit yet another cousin, my lovely bride and I are taking a 3 day side trip to Venice. We sort of figured that since Venice is slowly sinking into the Mediterranean, we only have a finite amount of time to actually see it. I hope the Italians there are friendlier than the lady who works at the pizza place at the Rome Airport that we always seem to run into. She's not so nice.

While I'm excited to see Venice, the canals, the architecture and the gondolas, I have to say, what I'm really excited about is getting to go to a Prada store and a Diesel store IN Italy! They MUST be better!

Summer

This has been a very busy summer, marked most notably by the recent departure of our dear friends who planned, saved, packed and moved to Paris. Seems like pretty much until they left this past wednesday, I've spent the summer thus far just working or spending time with them, not accepting that I'd soon have to find other things to do with my weekends. With my mind so occupied with work and their goings-on it sort of dawned on me that I have not only not blogged in over a month, but I have also not really paid much mind to my own upcoming holiday - back to Greece.

I got my first passport when I was 11 months old and was immediately whisked away to Greece to visit my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. For most of my childhood my parents, brother and I would return to Greece and spend the entire summer. I'd come home several shades darker and barely able to speak English. As I got busier with my schooling, the trips became fewer and further between with a couple of 5 year gaps when money was tight. Since I finished university I have been very diligent on returning to Greece every other summer for 2-3 weeks. It's an expensive trip and with only 3 weeks of paid holiday time per year, it's difficult to do much more than that. Last year was supposed to be a "Greece Year", having been last in '04 during the Olympics, however with a complete renovation of our kitchen which turned into an 8 month ordeal and major construction project, well broke we stayed put.

This year we were dead set on going and purchased tickets several months back for September. With as crazy as the summer has been and as far out as Semptember seems to feel in the Spring, I've just not had the time to think about our trip. Until now. My wife and I will be flying out on the 31st of August and will stay until the 18th of September, which although shorter than the 3 months I'd spend as a boy, will undoubtedly wash away the stresses of the last 3 months of my adulthood.

When we fly into Greece what I like best is that first burst of pure heat that hits your face when you exit the airport, not unlike opening your preheated oven. Then we board a tiny little plane and fly to Limnos where we arrive a mere 30 minutes later. As a child we did this trip via boat as it was much more economical but at this point in my life I'd rather pay 3 times as much and save myself the 8 miserable hours on the ferry.

Our days on Limnos usually consist of the same things that we've done for the last 30+ years. Wake up, drink a frappe, walk down Myrina's high street down to the harbor. Hit some shops, watch some kids fishing, watch a ferry boat come in or leave, then walk back. A wonderful and healthy mid-day meal is usually followed up by another quiet stroll which is different that the morning walk due to the fact that 90% of the residents are enjoying a nice siesta by that point. All the walking then just makes us want to go for a swim at one of the beautiful local beaches, or maybe we'll take drive to another part of the island to a more obscure beach. Perfect.

That's a snapshot of what's to come. I like that as the years pass, people move or die, stores and restaurants come and go, but Limnos never loses it's charm or compromises it's soul. That's what I love about it so much. As we fly over Paris in a few weeks I'll longingly peer down from above with a touch of sadness in missing our friends but knowing that it will all be washed away by the cool meditteranean in but a matter of hours! That and our December trip to Paris will be here in no time.

iReturn

This almost feels like an entry into the diary of a man who's been stranded on an island for several months. Like Tom Hanks kind of in CastAway (actually, I've always loved that subtle play on words in the way they wrote the title). I have been on an island I guess, Long Island (which if you read more below you'll see just how fond of it I am). I have been stranded too amidst loads of meetings, proposals and genuinely time consuming nonsense (but not the good kind).

I was flying back from Boston the other night and in my delirium of changing flights, delays due to weather and lack of sleep, I was both antsy and bored. I must say, I do love my ipod to get me through pretty much any mind-numbing occasion, and this being one of them, I thought I'd spend some time going through all the layers of the menu. I dont think I'd ever done that before.

Well, one of the options happens to be language choice. Hmmm, I thought to myself. I wonder if they have Greek? I scrolled down and there it was, ellivika (I dont have greek on this keyboard). Curiosity got the better of me and I selected Greek as my new default interface language. Magically all the menus, options and details are translated and written in Greek. How cool! Greek is my first language, so naturally I am comfortable looking at things this way. But after a while of reading the annoying translations (you've got to realize that Greek being thousands of years old, doesn't have actual Greek words for like "playlist")I wanted to go back to good ole English....

I cant seem to be able to figure out how to do that.