Nearly three weeks of holiday went a long way toward restoring my vigor. Just before the break, work was nearly crushing me. Now, things seem under control. There’s imminent insanity, but it’s all manageable.

We went to Greece for our vacation and really loved it. We only hit two locales: Athens and the island of Lesvos. We picked Athens because of direct flights and the fact that everyone should see Athens, and we picked Lesvos because it seemed to have the best mix of cuisine, culture, scenery, relaxation and activities for us. I think we chose wisely.

We were aided immensely by one of the best free travel resources I have ever stumbled across on the world wide webs: Matt Barrett’s Greek Travel Guides. The deal with the travel guides is that a man who has fallen in love with Greece figured out a way to travel there professionally by making his own website about it. The writing is passionate and funny, the recommendations, when we followed them, were spot on (always do Trip Advisor to get contrasting viewpoints on Hotels, no matter who recommends them), and best of all, it’s free! The only problem is that you have to print out the pages yourself if you want to take them with you. The funny thing is that you’ll see IE-mangled printouts of his website all over Greece (why does Internet Explorer suck so much?). More on Matt’s travel site later.

Overall, Halane and I consider this one of our best vacations ever. We felt like everything was just about perfect, barring a few minor flaws in some of our accommodations. Athens was not nearly as crazy and dodgy as we expected, but quite the opposite (probably due it being the tourist “shoulder” season). Lesvos was absolutely perfect for us: great hiking, amazing food, mellow beach scene, tons of history and culture, and a very excellent view into “real” Greece. I hear it can get overrun by package tourism in the summer months, but the island shows little signs of it. There’s not high rise resort developments, very little in the way of cheesy tourism, and if one gets off of the slightly beaten path and does some hiking, one can see rural Lesvian life up close and personal. We went to Tavernas where the guy is working the gardens and livestock he’s about to serve up and Tavernas where the boat that caught the fish that morning is being maintained while you watch and drink ouzos. In Greece, it’s common to go into the kitchen and look around at the food that’s available that day, and I sometimes would select still-wiggling fish that were then dropped into hot oil or thrown on the grill right in front of my very eyes.

The flood of photos will be on Flickr, of course.

There’s nothing like traveling as a learning experience, and we learned much on this trip. Just the taxi ride in from the airport was amazing—the driver, a very nice man named Simos, ran through modern Greek history in the 45 minutes we were stuck in traffic. He told us about Kurds and Persians, dictatorships and democracies, war and peace; it was truly educational. He even discussed with us the legislation surrounding gyros and souvlaki and pointed us in the direction of the best gyros restaurant in the neighborhood of our hotel. Here’s something I never knew before: in Greece, it can’t be gyros and contain any ground meat—it must be made from slices of real flesh.

We also learned that Maple gets sick on planes. Every plane. Every time. And car rides, too. I quickly learned to snag every airsick bag from all of the seats within my reach. At first we thought it was due to the fact that she had a bad cold (I had it, too, and I was feeling quite queasy), but, no, even after it was mostly gone, she still threw up on the car ride to the airport and the plane ride from Lesvos to Athens and Athens to Vienna. Hell, even yesterday she started complaining of motion sickness on the bus ride from the 19th District back home. Cripes. It’d be annoying if she wasn’t so damned funny and cute.

While we were away, she named out home here in Vienna Spiddesee Oakentat. I have no idea why, but she made it up and so now when we’re arriving at our door, she says “ooh, there’s Spiddesee Oakentat!”
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Last pregnancy was all about Mexican food—specifically, Los Loros in Decatur, Georgia. Being in Europe and completely unable to obtain anything remotely resembling decent Mexican food, we’ve had to switch it up a bit. This pregnancy, so far, seems to be all about the Döner Kebab, or, as we called it where I grew up and Greek influence was much stronger, Gyros (I just realized I capitalized the food Names. This is a relic of my German usage, in which all Nouns are capitalized. The tens of readers will please forgive the inconsistency).

Incidentally, I learned much on my trip, as I mentioned before, but I really learned an important life lesson, too. Well, important if you want to avoid getting your neck slashed open by an irate Kebab/Gyro vendor. Here’s the deal: Greece & Turkey, as one can imagine, don’t like each other too much on the whole. This is obvious. But it goes down to the lowest of levels. So, for example, if you were to ask for a Turkish coffee in Greece, you’d probably get a bowl of piss. It’s Greek coffee there. After hundreds of years of occupation, the Greeks aren’t too keen to call anything they perceive as good, “Turkish”. So would it also be unwise to ask a Turkish Döner dealer for some gyros. I know many Turkish people here in Vienna, and they seem reasonable and perfectly fine with our Greek brothers and sisters. However, the Turks I know are not holding long, sharp knives and looking surly, but wearing stylish clothing and talking about project management methodologies and .NET programming technologies.
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We have visitors coming into town tomorrow. Chris and Clay, who have visited before, are currently in Italy but will grace us with their sunny presence very soon. Maple is very much looking forward to it. She sees Chris from time-to-time on iChat, but she hasn’t seen Clay since this incident. So, in a way, she still sees him every time we walk to Il Mare, our favorite Italian restaurant in the ‘hood.

Anyway, they’re coming, so expect some damage. In fact, May 25th (Friday) is the date. Contact me for details if you’re a Wiener and you’re interested or have suggested places that require demolition.