Greece
Wine Festival on Cyprus
August 15, 2010 by Susan McKee
A wine festival showcasing products from the vineyards of Cyprus will be held August 27 through September 5, 2010, in the town of Lemesos (Limassol). The Festival takes place in the Municipal Gardens, on the east side of the town near the sea. The first wine festival was held in 1961.
Although there’s an admission fee for the festival, once you’re in, Road Trips Foodies, tasting is complementary. There are pavilions on both sides of the main entrance belonging to the wineries of Lemesos (Limassol): ETKO, KEO, LOEL, SODAP, and LAONA. As the organizers say, “all the wines [are] offered to all visitors in unlimited quantities free of charge with the compliments of the Lemesos (Limassol) Municipality”.
Winemaking is an ancient art on the island, dating back to Classical Greece. In medieval times this island, the third largest in the Mediterranean Sea, was renowned for its wine (a 16th century traveler from Italy noted that “it possesses some healing qualities like a balm for the human organism”). The Wine Festival is a revival of ancient festivals in honor of Dionysus, the god of vine and wine, and Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love.
Lemesos (Limassol)…
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Star Clipper Mediterranean Cruise
July 20, 2010 by Geoff Edwards
This is a rough diary of a trip on Star Clipper, 4 masts, 21 sails, 360 feet long with a crew of 70, pampering 170 passengers. The crew was a jumble of 24 nationalities.
We started in Cannes, France, which to tell the truth looks a lot more glamorous in the paparazzi photos during the film festival. Once the stars blink out, it’s just a bunch of rich tourists, eager retail employees, and wide-eyed yacht crews.
Looking for dinner the first night, I wondered the streets near the waterfront and found three or four restaurants all offering the same menu; mussels, fish or meat dishes, and pizza. All was expensive if you were not Euro enhanced.
Thoughts about Cannes:
It must be quite dismaying to spend 50 million on a yacht, come to Cannes, and find you are the cheapest boat on the block. I saw some 70 yachts of all description, and all in a tidy row, and all BIG. Some even had helicopters perched on the top deck. By the way, isn’t yacht a funny looking word?
French truck drivers cannot drive well without a cigarette in their mouths.
French window manikins are far more attractive than ours.…
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Summer in Crete: A Journey to a Magical Place
July 16, 2010 by Eva Danadiadoy
Crete. City of Chania. All of a sudden, life has once again light, laughter, colors.
Palaiochora. According to travel guides, a quiet fishermen village at the farthest south point of Greece. Situated between two picturesque gulfs, in the Lybian Sea.
A quiet fishermen village? Don’t let them fool you. Keep your eyes and ears open, and you will not miss the extraordinary magic of the place.
It’s a place where the rocks and the trees managed to reconciliate over the years. So perfectly that stone reflects wood. If you don’t believe me, walk trough the Anidri Gorge and you’ll understand what I mean.
It’s a place where you can meet the famous pirate Barbarossa, sitting alone in a small tavern, drinking his “raki”, wearing a modern military uniform but still having those firy red hair and beard.
It’s a place where you can meet an ancient horseman from Thessalia, with his fair complexion and curly blond hair, who serves homemade sweets (roses and pergamont) in a nice little cafe near the port, and thinks he is just an actor, desperately wanting to play ancient greek tragedy plays.
It’s a place where Juliet’s governess, merry and full-bussomed works in a bakery…
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Lamb Burgers
July 9, 2010 by Maggie Canon
Watermelon & Feta
July 9, 2010 by Maggie Canon
Greek Summer Vacation
June 29, 2010 by Eva Danadiadoy
Going back, for the 2nd time, to Chania, Crete, for a 5 days trip. It’s a magical place, where the past has managed to slip into the present and nature is mighty and mild, tender and strong. It’s a place to visit and get to know. More on it when I get back.
Greece: Part III
June 25, 2010 by Susie Hughes
Having escaped from Ios, we made our way back to Athens to the Easy Access hostel where we had stayed when we first arrived. It’s apparently the only hostel in one of the safer areas of Athens, though there was a lively community of prostitutes hanging around, providing us with much visual entertainment.
We were quite tired from another long ferry journey, so we hung out in the bar and watched Denmark vs. Cameroon before calling it an earlier night than the few before. The next morning we got up early (actually too early, because I’ve apparently forgotten how to tell time and set the alarm for an ungodly hour) and had the free breakfast offered by the hostel – toast.
We decided to go explore a market we’d heard about and took the metro out of Athens, passing the Olympic stadium from 2004 on the way. Can’t believe those Olympics were six years ago. Turns out by ‘market’, our little info pamphlet meant ‘lots of expensive shops you can’t afford, like Gucci and Oscar de la Renta’, so that expedition didn’t last long and we went back to Athens.
After lunch we tried to visit the war museum, as…
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Greece: Parts I and II
June 18, 2010 by Susie Hughes
Well, it certainly was an expedition, but we did finally get to Greece! We slept in the ship’s bar from Dubrovnik to Bari, Italy, and then had 12 hours there to bum around with some guys from our hostel in Dubrovnik who were doing the same journey. It’s a nice town, Bari, but is certainly built for and around the large port. Not much to report on Italy, but we did have some nice pasta!
Then it was 16 hours from Bari to Patras in Greece, but the boat was pretty well equipped with a restaurant and comfy seats and whatnot, so after some supper I did actually manage to sleep for about nine hours. When we arrived at noon the next day, we had a four-hour bus ride to Athens and then got a bit lost trying to find our hostel. Once we did, we spent the evening tootling around the area and getting our bearings, because we’ll be staying there again when we go back to the city.
We had some dinner and both bought new sunglasses, which have been our only casualties thus far in the categories of theft and breakage! Joseph’s $5 Walmart aviators were taken…
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10 Things We Learned from the World Cup’s 1st Weekend
June 13, 2010 by Ray Lewis
1. U.S. interest in the tournament, which has been growing slowly since we hosted in 1994, has accelerated. ESPN is showing every match in spite of the time differential. Locally, San Francisco had the second-highest U.S. city rating for the match against England (11.2, second to San Diego’s 11.5). That is lower than this year’s U.S.-Canada Olympic gold medal hockey game (15.9 in SF) but the Cup is a social event and it was absurdly good weather yesterday so there was much more buzz in town for the soccer than for hockey in February, including well-attended open-air presentations of the game at both the baseball stadium and the plaza at City Hall.
2. The World Cup is bigger than anyone. Except Maradona. TV cameras showed the Argentine legend-coach more than world star Lionel Messi, eternally damned Robert Green or any other single person this weekend, and that’s not including any youTube videos of Maradona using his royalty toilet (please, no hand of God jokes). Also, he must have set a record for touches by a coach. I counted six times he kicked the ball back into play. Letting go is hard.
3. Since when doe
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Greece: Very Close and Personal
May 7, 2010 by Leda Karabela
DER TAGESSPIEGEL, May 6th
“The future of Europe may have been decided in a bank branch in Athens. The day before yesterday it was perhaps possible to look at the financial crisis in the southeastern tip of Europe with a Teutonic coolness … that is over. This is not about money any more. It is about much more. Peoples’ deaths have changed things…“
My Greekness has always been a source of reflection. I have a natural in-born tendency to oppose “belonging.” Having lived most of my adult life outside Greece, I have often wondered where “home” is.
But while the schema of my Greekness is blurry, the indisputable fact remains that so many people who matter to me are there today. And suddenly, and only yesterday, I made a discovery: As the news of the deaths and the massive protests in Athens unfolded, I found myself mourning.
I still can’t faithfully express what it is I am silently crying for. Greece - in all of its instability, frailty, intoxicating and irrational joviality, breathtaking natural beauty tantalizingly blemished by infuriating man-made urban ugliness, pollution, traffic, bureaucracy and stubborness of contemporary Greeks to see things more objectively…
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