Kastoria, Greece day sixteen. Twenty days have come gone since we started this journey. Despite the rain we ventured to a lake high in the mountains about an hour and a half from Kastoria. The Greek – Albanian border divides Lake Prespa somewhere near the middle of the body of water. At the Greek Shore there are Greek police waiting to catch illegal immigrants. We departed a little later from the house than I had planned, however this did not ruin our schedule, just something of note. We had our cameras, the tripod, some maps and a few snacks – we were ready for our excursion. We traveled along a very scenic highway littered with poppies and other wild flowers. The highways here are much like the ones of other countries with one exception, the grade of incline and decline here is higher than I remember seeing anywhere else. It is quite common to see a 10-12% grade here, for miles at a time not just for one hill but one after another for thirty-five kilometers. The weather here can be quite tricky, as we have learned from other daytime excursions. It can be raining here at the house and be sunny at our destination, and vice versa. It was raining at the house but we still held hope of playing at the beach and getting some sun. But after driving for about three hours we arrived at our destination only to find a monsoonal rainstorm. We drove around the lake a little hoping to find a single ray of sunlight, no joy! So we gave up and stopped at a restaurant for some lunch. The building looked like it was once a Greek village type cottage. Unlike the other houses like this that I had been in so far this one had exposed rock inside. The effect was a comfortable but cavern like setting. Inside we found three customers sitting at two tables arguing about how foreigners were taking all of the room at the collages and taking their education and leaving the country, thus hurting the economy. Then in the next breath they were talking about hoe foreigners were taking all the jobs. It seemed sort of contradictory. The woman that ran the place was very nice, she gave us menus let us look at them for a minute then told us that only four or five things were actually available. The meal was pretty good. Since the weather was so horrible, we just decided to head for home. There were so many hills, and so little power in that little KIA. We were listening to a CD by a Greek band called “Pix Lax” their music is very good. They have a song called “Thalassa” (The Sea) that describes life at sea or in the Navy very well. Once we arrived back home the sun was out and it was warm, we were told that at home it was a nice day the whole time we were gone. Despite this news we still had a great day.

¶ 6/08/2005 07:46:00 AM //

Kastoria, Greece day Fifteen; we have been on vacation to Greece for nineteen days now. Today’s date is 07 June 2005. We rented an auftokinito (automobile, KIA Picanto to be exact) today and drove to the horrio (village, Mesovraho is the name). Stella wanted to show me around a little more, show me some of the things she used to do when she summered there. When we arrived we met with her Grandfathers brother, Uncle Chrisostomos (Chris). He and his two Albanian friends, the brothers Kadiu, Defrim and Maurem were repairing an old barn type building. The building was originally built using mud and rocks, now where the mud has been washed away by the rain they are replacing it with cement. This has been done to many of the houses that are still standing and in frequent use. It seems to work quite nicely. We were greeted graciously and quickly brought up a hill to see the new well he had built from a spring in the mountain side to water one of his fields. It was fairly large and well built. After he showed us this, he returned to his work, Stella and I continued up the road to take in the view and light a candle at the little “mini church” of which Greece has, most literally, MILLIONS. We have stopped at about 134 of them so far. The next stop on our journey was to the home of her grandparents. We cleaned up the place some and since we were there alone for the first time… looked around a little closer than the last time when her two uncles were there with us. Things looked as if her grandparents went out to do some shopping and never returned. There are still glasses, plates, and spices in the cupboards. The drawers still have tin foil, oven mitts, silver ware, and a pack of cigarettes, Cooper 100’s, with just one having been smoked – the other nineteen remained. The wood burning oven had a pot inside that looked like it was there ready to cook meal that was never made. Ashes from the last few uses still in the burn side of the oven never cleaned out. The two couches and a few boxes are gathered in one corner of the room covered in a plastic painters drop cloth to protect them from dust. One of the two bedrooms has a bed still made up from the last time it was slept in. The other is empty except for a decorative woven blanket that depicts some wildlife scene. We were about to wrap things up there when Chris stopped by and asked us if we wanted to join him for a walk. We agreed. The course we took brought us down the two main roads in the village, past some houses, the church that is no longer in use since the priest had heart surgery and retired. We were taken past the vrici, a spring that is capped off and has a pipe that delivers the water out a hole in a wall and lets it run in to a basin that fills up about one foot deep, one foot wide and about fifteen feet long. This one has a nice roof built over it and the wood work is nicely stained and shines in the sun with a new coat of polyurethane. We climbed up a steep road that was dug out, on the day of our last visit, by a sheep herder that used to work as a bulldozer operator. He still owns his own machine, so that is what he used to make himself a new road to get the sheep from one side of the mountain to the other. At one of the turns near the top of the mountain we veered off the road onto a muddy trail that had fresh BEAR TRACKS on it. This trail led to an area of land that belonged to Stella's grandfather. It was simply beautiful. Then we started down the hillside toward an orchard full of walnut trees. Then down another trail alongside of a creek that led to a vrici that Stella's Great Grandfather built in 1932, I know the exact year because the date is built into it. The area here was very peaceful in a part of the forest that had many old growth trees. In the basin was a baby frog that Stella and I played with like little kids for a few minutes. From here it was a short walk down the trail and we were very near where we had begun two hours before.

¶ 6/07/2005 08:45:00 AM //

Today on our fourteenth day in Kastoria, Greece we met a family from Canada. They are living the Greek dream. Maria opened a beauty salon, Yannis is a furrier, and the two daughters Dina, nine and Jenny, sixteen go to school. They have been living here for two years now; before they came here they lived and worked in Toronto, Canada. My hair was getting out of control. Before you start thinking I am some kind of beauty queen worrying about my hair on my fabulous vacation, let me explain. For the last five or six years I have kept my hair very short, shaved even. For this trip I started growing my hair out. Not a big deal, but after three weeks my neck hair was like a lions mane and my ears were covered with hair from the sides. For a Navy Man it was just UNSAT. Having noticed that there was a salon across the street, I ventured over there. I was pleasantly surprised that the family spoke English, well Canadian but that is close enough, eh? After receiving a very nice haircut I inquired for Stella if there was a time she could come over and get her hair done also. The time was set and Maria invited me to come with Stella and we would have coffee and chat a bit during the appointment. On arrival for Stella's date with hair history revisited, we were invited to sit on the couches in the corner of the salon. Maria served us some cookies and coffee (American style). We sat and got acquainted for about thirty or forty minutes, though it did not seem that long, before Stella was ushered to the chair in front of the mirror for a discussion on what she wanted to do with her hair. Before I even realized it, Stella’s hair was being dyed “blue/black”. This was the color Stella had for the first three years I knew her, then again for a few months some where in the months before we left Hawaii, and now again eight years later she has this color again. It is very becoming on her. She is absolutely gorgeous, not that she wasn’t before. We were invited back to visit before we leave in a few days. Our schedule on these last few days will be tight, but I would like to do it before we are gone. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we are renting a car and going to the village again. Then the next day we are going to go north to the Albanian border to a lake that is sure to be awesome. Then on Thursday we are going south to Meteora, a place where there is a monastery built on top of some cliffs, like a mansion placed precariously on top of a needle. Friday we have to take the car back, that night there is a concert in a classic Greek stadium; cool huh? Then on Sunday morning we are going to leave for Thessaloniki a night, and the vacation ends at 0615 Monday as we board Alitalia Flight AZ735 to Milan, change planes for flight AZ626 to come home to Chicago. It all has gone so very fast. It has been great so far.

¶ 6/05/2005 11:33:00 PM //

Kastoria day thirteen; the big family Bar-B-Que. I can’t remember the last time I saw so much meat. Maybe twenty pounds of meat in all. They had friends over, Yeorgos and Vaso. Yeorgos makes his own wine and tsipouro; he treated the alcohol he makes like it was his finest product, he was so proud of it. He asked me to try it countless times through out the day, I politely declined. Stella finds out that Vaso is her Dads first cousin and her Moms second cousin??? -Which fits nicely with the book she is reading. GROSS. The family cooked and cooked and served and ate and ate and ate and ate (get the picture?) all day long. It was a chore, this all day meal that never ended. I was hot the flies were horrendous, and I was sweating. I got tired so fast. I hope I did not offend any one when I went to bed. I needed a nap; the problem is that when I did this I ruined my night. I could not get to sleep until 4am. Note from Stella--> Art seems to have become more sensitive to nature’s creatures the older he gets. There were about 5 flies outside, and while they all seemed to love him, it was not as if we were in the depths of a south Asian jungle……<--End Stella’s mindless jabber.

¶ 6/05/2005 03:37:00 PM //

Kastoria day twelve. June 4, 2005. Today we went to Marianthe’s village. Getting there was interesting; Stavros was at work with his car so the only other vehicle was Evangelos’ (Laki) work van. There are three seats in front and in back it is refrigerated to keep the meats he sells cold during delivery. Because there are no windows back there the police stop vehicles like his all of the time looking for illegal Albanian immigrants. On the way there Stella and I rode up front while Joanna and Marianthe rode in back. We passed a police officer that was in the process of arresting an Albanian man that he caught in the trunk of a taxi. If he had not already made that stop we would have been stopped. In comparison to Stella’s village this was huge and quite populated. We met Marianthe’s father, but her mother was not there. She is in Athens getting treatment for an illness. She is doing well enough to come home tomorrow. We went to the village church and to an archeological site that was an ancient church and then they just found out there is a church under that. It was just amazing. I took about 300 pictures. I may or may not post them. It was very beautiful. In the mountains and all that.

¶ 6/04/2005 02:22:00 PM //

Today is Friday May 3, 2005. Stella and I have been on vacation for fifteen days, the real world is gone, and there is no need to go back now. Someone send me our children and I will find a job here. Today we took a cab to the oldest church in town, a Byzantine era church that is still in use today. It stands on top of a hill in an open square that it shares with a Post Byzantine church and a modern high school. Stella’s mother went to that school. She would be appalled at the sight of all of the graffiti on every exposed surface of the building. Within a 500m area there are eight ancient churches, a modern church and a cathedral. Some of the older churches were open, had candles lit and were available for picture taking; others had pad locks on the doors. There was one that looked like it was half buried on the up hill side, and falling down the hill on the down hill side. What was interesting about this church was I could see the damage that the Turks did to the churches when the occupied this area for 527 years. In order to break the morale of the people they went to all of the churches and carved out all of the eyes of the icons painted on the walls. This church had the paintings on the out side of the building and the carved out eyes were over an inch deep, so it is not like they just rubbed the paint out, they dug holes in every person depicted. Every new corner of this town, this country, has some history to it, a new story to be discovered. It can be almost overwhelming.

¶ 6/03/2005 01:21:00 PM //

June 2, 2005. Let’s review the count one more time, Kastoria day ten, Greece day fourteen; that leaves us with ten days left. Let’s call this Monopoly day. All day the only thing we did the whole time was play that game. It was a lot of fun. The game is all written in Greek and uses the old money system of Drachmas instead of the new Euro. I needed help translating some of the cards, it was still fun.

¶ 6/02/2005 11:20:00 AM //

Kastoria day nine. I awoke at 0830, this trend has to end or my vacation will be ruined. Today was the day of the big bizarre. It was nothing like I had imagined. First it was much bigger that I thought it would be. Second half of the whole thing was food, vegetables, fruit, eggs, chickens, live and dead fish… the other half was clothes, imitation name brands, some genuine, house wears, shoes. Basically all of the towns shops set up shop in this big parking lot and do business in one spot. Not at all like the one at Aloha Stadium in Hawaii. The one in Hawaii was geared to tourists, this one is for the ease of the towns citizens. We picked up a few things, nothing to write home about. After walking through the maze of vendors at the bizarre we finally picked up the boubenarias from “Felicity”. They are cute. In this small world, this small town, it should be no surprise that the shop keeper and her parents remember Stella's grandparents. Many of the shop keepers around town have asked what family Stella belongs to. She answers Sarros and Fisseas. Most of them know one or both of the families. We had just gotten back and sat down for dinner (lunch) with the family when one of Stella and Joanna’s friends stopped by. Demitra was her name. I don’t have much to write about her, I was not feeling well so I took a nap. When I woke up, drenched in sweat with a pounding head ache, she was gone.

¶ 6/01/2005 12:19:00 PM //