Happy Rooster Day!

Hi Everyone! Let me explain. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and despite our best efforts, we could not find a turkey anywhere in Thessaloniki. Apparently, butchers who sell whole turkeys hang on to them until Christmas so they can compete with those sold by the American Agricultural Univeristy here. Keeps prices down at Christmas time, but leaves out in the cold those of us wanting to celebrate Thanksgiving. So, Amanda stuffed and cooked a delicious rooster and she, Mom, and I had a wonderful Rooster Day. Hope you all did, too.

Amanda just dropped me off into a crowd of bundeled-up backpack-toting university students, and now I’m on my laptop at the campus Starbucks (the holiday peppermint mochas arrived last week...very excited), listening to Bobby Darin’s recording of Silver Bells. So far the day is a lot like being back at GW.

Sorry it’s been a little while since we’ve posted. We drove down to Athens two weekends ago to see John before he started his new job commuting to Zurich, and also to pick Mom up from the airport when she and Thia Marit returned from Crete.

[Quick side note: if I haven’t mentioned it before, the traffic here in Greece is horrible. It makes D.C. look like a leisurely Sunday drive. The worst of it is the motorcycle and moped traffic, especially in summer when it constantly surrounds you like a swarm of hornets. Well, it took four months, but I finally got in an accident driving around Athens the day before Mom got back from Crete—basically, both a motorcyclist and I tried to make a questionable move in heavy traffic at the same time. Luckily, it was a very small “fender bender” and no one was hurt. In fact, after it was over, Amanda told me how jealous she was that I actually got to hit a motorcyclist…she’s wanted to do that for four months now…]

We hadn’t seen my Mom since we were home in Erie for July 4th, so it was really great to see her again. We spent one night in Athens visiting some of her cousins and then Wednesday drove home to Thessaloniki. Two days later, Polly arrived for a long weekend. Seemed difficult to believe, but that was the first time Mom, Polly and I had been in Greece together since 1981!

Polly was so excited to be back. Amanda and I didn’t have much planned for that Friday afternoon because we assumed Polly would be napping off the jet lag. If she had any, she certainly didn’t show it. She wanted to go, go, go from the minute she arrived. We spent the afternoon walking all over Thessaloniki, sipping coffee as we walked along the paralia to check out the new Christmas lights. We strolled past Lefkos Pirgos and the statute of Alexander the Great, up Aristotle Square and then back along Tsimiski Street, the city’s main shopping drag.

To our surprise, there was a huge demonstration marching up Tsimiski. It was then that we realized what date it was: November 17. Thousands of Thessalonians, all carrying red flags or wearing red arm bands, were marching to commemorate a time when demonstrations and free speech were nowhere to be found in Greece. A little background: from 1967 to 1974, Greece was ruled by a right-wing military junta. Some Greeks believe that the junta helped Greece recover from its post-World War II woes. However, many remember it as a terrible time in Greece, full of mass arrests, martial law, torture, heavy censorship, and violations of civil liberties. When hundreds of students demonstrated against the junta at the Athens Polytechnic Institute on November 17, 1973, most were massacred by the Greek army (although there are no official records as to how many were actually killed that day).

In any case, every year the massacre is remembered, and many Greeks march in demonstrations to honor the murdered students and to voice their opposition to any type of totalitarian rule in Greece. And obviously, every year the marches are also a way for communist and socialist political action groups to distribute leaflets, and, incidentally, for people to loudly shout anti-American sentiments (as Polly commented, it was fine for us to quietly watch the march, but had we been standing there eating apple pie and waving Cadillac keys, we may have had a problem).

With the city center all bottled up the demonstration, Amanda, Polly, Aki, Maria, Runia and I went to dinner at a great hunters’ taverna in the mountains above Panorama where Aki and Maria live. We spent hours catching up over wild boar, chicken, beef, rabbit, and lots of great barrel wine. Polly and I spent so much time with Aki and Runia growing up; it had been 12 years since Polly saw them and twice as long since all four of us were together. A long meal turned into a late night.

Saturday, we drove out to Vergina to show Polly and Mom the tomb of Philip II that had impressed us so much a few weeks ago. It was a beautiful day and with Polly having such a short visit to Greece, we were all glad we could squeeze in at least a little sight-seeing. That evening we took it easy (except for dealing with a surprise power outage that was, well, comical) and turned in early to prepare for a long day in my mother’s village on Sunday. More about that in our next post.

By the way, how ‘bout them Cowboys?! Romo may be the answer, after all.

Yiasas for now…

Bill