Sun, Sea, Sand, and Byzantine Churches, or, Wot I did on my Holidays.

[liadnan]

Sooo....

Sun, Sea, Sand, and Byzantine Churches, or, Wot I did on my Holidays.

A play in Two Acts

Starring:

Marcus (or, occasionally Liadnan, it's a long story): A dilettante fop of a barrister who occasionally wishes he was still researching Byzantine and early medieval history, who drinks constant frappés or Greek coffees (when in Greece), wine and metaxa and smokes entirely too much (at least 40 full fat cigarettes a day when he can).

Rob: A dilettante fop of an Oxford-educated consultant who drinks Amstel, and other beer when pushed.

Steph: Not a dilettante fop at all, though she too comes from the Oxford wing of things. She drinks ouzo and is married to Rob.

Ruth: Very far from being a dilettante fop. She has known Marcus since their UCL days, a frankly terrifyingly long time ago, and they shared the terror that was Living in Grafton Way.

Fiona: she too has known Marcus since those far-off UCL days.

Dan: Steph's cousin. Would-be dilettante fops, quail before your master. He is writing a thesis on stuff that wouldn't impress the Daily Mail, but then the Daily Mail doesn't impress any of us, so who cares?

With a supporting cast of:

Divers cats.
Assorted Alarums and Excursions.
Leukia (a cook).
A Man (who cleans the pool).
More cats.
A Skanky Pussy (not a Cat).
Other people.

And Introducing, or at least consuming:

About 1000 cigarettes.
Alcohol (some).

Pictures taken on two cameras, a Canon Digital Ixus kindly lent to me by SteveF and a Sony something or other of Steph's. I trust no one is going to spend time working out which is which.

Prelude: the Agents of Elgin:

My solitary flight to Athens on Easyjet was uneventful. Having landed quite late I happily bounced (literally, despite technically overweight baggage I had only just managed to get away with) onto the airport bus to Syntagma, pausing only to buy my first packet of Assos in two years and lose my hairbrush: I didn't brush my hair for the next three and a half weeks and no one seemed to notice. The bus took about another hour, during which time I tried unsuccessfully to ring Rob, who had arrived with Steph some hours previously. (It later transpired he hadn't been in Athens more than an hour or so before he'd had his mobile phone stolen. This isn't, in my experience, typical of Athens, though things may have changed.) And, despite the growing weight of my bag I managed to find the hotel, and then Rob and Steph, without too much difficulty.

Dan and Ruth turned up at unidentified points in the middle of the night, despite the fact the stop for the airport bus seems to have moved since I was last there from where I'd told them it would be. (I wish to point out once again that this is hardly my fault: I can't really be expected to keep up to date with the positioning of busstops in central Athens from year to year. Essentially they'd swapped the arrival and departure stops from where I remembered them being, which I admit I did find disorientating, even though I know my way around central Athens fairly well by now and it's only a few hundred metres, but there's a corner involved...)
View from the hotel balcony. The point was the glimpse of the Acropolis in the background.

Next day was Acropolis blah... ok, so I've seen it all many times before and haven't actually bothered the last few times I've been there, but the rest hadn't and it is still breathtaking, despite the scaffolding. Acropolis museum, where the descriptions of the depredations of the Agents of Elgin were remarked upon (for what it's worth, love Greece and the Greeks as I do, I've never seen that the Elgin marbles are in much of a different position from hundreds of other artifacts in museums around the world). Agents of Elgin became something of a tagline for the rest of the holiday.
From left to right, Rob, Dan with Ruth in front, me. I appear to have acquired a gut, but I think it's just my bumbag as that's one accusation that's never been hurled at me.
More of the same. The additions are Steph and an unidentified small child. I'm sure he's lovely really.
Rob poses while Dan and I look over the city of Athens and talk about Important Things. Possibly. No, that isn't a bald spot, it's just the light. Possibly.
Yes, Parthenon. Scaffolded as ever. I have to say it looks almost identical to the way it did when I first came here in 1983.
More of Athens. On the far right the Olympic stadium can just be seen. It'll be finished on time. Definitely. Probably.

Moved from our nice Plaka hotel to a crummy Piraeus hotel that day, as I was worried about the early morning ferry the next day, and ended up spending the afternoon drinking on the dock. Rob and Dan began their lengthy and in depth comparison of the relative merits of Mythos and Amstel beer, while I stuck to frappé (a form of iced coffee only generally available in Greece so far as I can tell. Stuff masquerading as same or similar in chain cafés has invariably turned out to be a snare and a delusion.)

Eventually, after much drink had been Drunken, and siestas and the like, and the drinking of more Drink, Fiona, the last of us, arrived, and we went off for dinner.

Ferry at 8, so I dragged them all up at 7 and onto the boat as soon as possible, and four hours to Syros, my favourite island.

Act One: So Where Can We Buy A Villa Like This?

Every Cyclades island, indeed every Greek island, is different, Syros is more of a Greek holiday island than a foreign tourist one. I'd been there twice before, though only for a couple of days on each occasion (it's a convenient beginning and end to island-hopping holidays, as it has at least one boat direct to and from Piraeus every day, plus it has a beach on which it is far from obligatory to wear any clothes, of which more later: that wasn't particularly important to me when I first went there, but it was to Jenny, with whom I was travelling, and I caught the bug from her...) but it had been long enough to fall in love with the place. Mykonos, or Ios, it certainly ain't (still less Rhodes... Public attention had been drawn to Falliraki just before we left...). It's quite large and is rare in that it actually does do other things than cater for tourists, there's a fairly large town, Ermopouli, largely built after refugees began arriving during the Greek war of independence in the 1820s, with a huge neoclassical town hall facing an enormous marble square, and among other things a shipbuilding yard (for some time it was a larger port than Piraeus). The town essentially rises up two hills, one, Ano Syros, being the original medieval settlement and the Catholic side (like several of the Cyclades, the Venetians are responsible for a significant Catholic population), the other having been colonised by the Orthodox refugees from other islands (mainly Chios).

We waited on the dockside while I panicked biefly, wondering how exactly we were going to recognise the person supposedly meeting us and taking us to the villa I'd booked. Wondering, in truth, in my somewhat paranoid way, if it was all going to turn out to be a scam. Eventually the villa owner did find us, and took us off in two car journeys, to the villa. Which was, frankly, perfect.

I'm used to doing Greece the hard way, with my tent, and this was something of a different world to be honest. Swimming pool, kitchen, porch (I can't, I just discovered, spell verandah...), multifarious bathrooms... (multifarious?)

And there we stayed, for the next week. Various memories come in fragments: beaches, the Bad Taste villa (don't ask, not our one, the village of Dellagratsia/Possidonia, so good they named it twice, where we were staying, is said to be noted for its "unique villas"); the short cut through the bamboo which would indeed have been short if it hadn't been pitch dark; the stars; trying to find food to cook ourselves without going into Ermopuoli and buying assorted unidentifiable offal on one occasion (nevertheless, Dan and Rob managed to make something very good out of even that, and I hate offal); eating out lots; "this wine is.. interesting" followed, some time later, by "this is the best wine I've ever tasted" (yes, ok, that was me); climbing up both hills in Ermopouli and admiring nineteenth century architecture (v. interesting place if you're grabbed by architecture, neo-classical as is common for the period on Greece but with a definite Italianate influence); Rob and Dan's amazing consumption of beer; lots of Metaxa; the wonderful Leukia who made us breakfast every morning; nightswimming (no, it wasn't a quiet night) in the pool (no, I didn't); dogs barking; Mrs Mills and the cats in her head; a man purporting to be a Greek waiter with a little book about Socrates and a thing for Fiona, but who was quite obviously Timothy Dalton in disguise; "the crummy kiosk" (thought it was fine personally, but Dan disagrees), the Skanky Pussy... and eventually, far too soon, time to go. The following pictures will have to do the job of my failing memory...
First view of Possidonia/Dellagratsia, so good they named it twice, from just below our villa. Yes, that is a naval base. No, we didn't get arrested.
Sunset. Ah, pretty.
Me, with book. Not an unusual occurrence.
Our villa, the verandah, from the pool. It's very pleasant to be able to say that... even if it is only for a week.
Dan and a Little Fish are introduced to one another. A short, but close,relationship.
Dinner, with the Best Wine I Ever Tasted. And my cigarettes.
The Holy Spirit descends upon Dan, just before entering the bamboo short cut...
... and I lead them all in, nervously grinning. Only I knew what lay ahead, and I was pissed.
Armeneos Beach, one of my favourite places in the world. Unchanged after two years away, thank God.
Rob and me, after a day on Armeneos.
More sunset from the villa. Still pretty.
The first time Rob and Dan cooked dinner at the villa. And, at last, Fiona ceases to avoid this sequence of photographs.
More of the same party. Ruth and some pissed chap. Note the bottle of Metaxa in the earlier photograph...
Everybody smile for the camera...
Me, my knees and my cigarette.
These are all taken in the enormous main square in Ermopoulis, the capital of the island.
...as we prepared ourselves mentally for an afternoon of seeing Cultural Stuff.
.. Ruth looks determined..
Dan, meanwhile, was planning his speech to the cheering masses from the vaguely Cuban looking building, to be given after his Revolution. You think I'm joking? You think he was joking?
The obligatory cats. It's Greece. There are cats, lots of cats many of them feral. I love cats, but frankly these ones stank of piss.
The posh side of Ermopoulis.
The city is pretty much two hills and the port in front of them, and we were climbing up one of them: the gorgeous church of St Nicholas from above.
Not the best photograph ever taken of me.
The Orthodox cathedral, the object of our climb up the hill.
.. which we'd all made, if only just.
The Catholic hill, the old settlement of Ano Syros, from the Orthodox hill.
Some tourist chap posing.
Ah, cute little kids climbing up the hill. Most of the streets of Ermopoulis are like this.
See? Dan considers shoes a hindrance when climbing stepped streets. Actually, I agree with him.
I took lots of pictures of the domestic architecture, but I've spared you most of them.
Slightly blurry... what Ruth is gazing at in such fascination is the mini-Brands Hatch (max speed about 2 mph, av. age of drivers, 6) a few feet away. We wanted a go, but suspected only Ruth would fit..
Oh yes, and then we all got drunk and went swimming at midnight. Except me, who got drunk and didn't go swimming. I hate pools, particularly when there's an Aegean to swim in.
... see, I just stayed on the side and drank, while taking photos..
...while the others got cold and wet.
The Dan/Steph CousinMonster. A prize to anyone who can work out where all the arms go.
Meanwhile Timothy Dalton (who looked more like himself in the flesh than in this photograph) develops a bond with Fiona.
Proof, were it needed, that I am taller than Ruth. (Except I'm standing up and she isn't, so the caption is vaguely irrelevant, but I couldn't think of anything else.) I was never entirely sure if those were bites or spots on my forehead.
It finally happens: Fiona's hair sets fire to the restaurant.
I do not like the feel of the left hand way, and I do not like the smell of the middle way... It is time we began to climb.
Again.
And climb we did: the ravine at the back of Ermopoulis from the top of Ano Syros.
Dan's entry in the worldwide "just how camp can you look?" competition 2003.
I'm sparing on the "pretty flowers" shots, and haven't a clue what it is, but they looked good.
We went past the museum more than once on different days and the cat hadn't moved. Fiona went there once when, miraculously, it was open and tells me the cat was sat inside, still guarding.
Swarms of cats seeking scraps: there were more out of shot.
Something of a surfeit of places to eat in the villa: this was the courtyard.
The swimming pool and the villa behind.
The verandah, early on leaving day. Leukia's back can be seen sorting out our breakfast in the background. The bags on both sides in the foreground are all mine: my back has only just recovered.
Inside the villa: the gallery.
Possibly the worst photograph ever taken of me: I can't blame anyone except myself, as I took it.

Interlude: From a villa full of old friends to camping on a beachwith new ones.

And I was left alone, in the village of Galissas, where I usually camp, and where Armeneos beach, one of the seven or so places I love most in the world, is to be found.

Many would hate it, it's small, stony, has no facilities at all, and is reached by a long and fairly dangerous climb. And lots of people wear nothing at all, which isn't to everyone's taste. But it's beautiful, and feels like home. I stayed there for a few more days, and fell in with the people who come there every year, all of whom were wonderfully friendly, particularly the wonderful and lovely Carol and Dana, who lent and indeed put up for me a mosquito net (on the far right of the picture) so I could spend my last night sleeping on Armeneos beach, looking up at the incredible starfield from my sleeping bag and waking almost at dawn for a swim. They even put up with the fact I managed to lose both my torch and the string we rather badly needed. More memories, particularly of Metaxa till 2 or 4 in the bar every night.
You aren't really supposed to take pictures of sunsets like this, but I liked the effect.
About two minutes later.
A plant, and my feet, on the beach very early after dawn. It is fortunate the camera angle prevents more of me being visible.
I want to be there again now.

By Tuesday evening island inertia had definitely set in, and I desperately wanted to stay. Had I not, with malice aforethought, already bought my ferry ticket, I probably would have done so. Frankly, given half a chance, I'd still be there now. But on it was, on the night ferry to Piraeus. Memo to self, this time do try and remember that sleeping on the ferry, fine idea though it always sounds, is actually a really crap idea. Four hours on a hard deck does not a good night's sleep make.

Act Two: The Cultural Bit:

Huge intravenous injections of coffee early in the morning at Piraeus managed to keep me going for a while, but almost not long enough. My hastily evolved plan B had relied upon there being a hydrofoil to Monemvasia that day, which there wasn't, so it was back to Plan A: metro and bus to one of the main long distance bus terminals (with a heavy bag, through an unfamiliar bit of town, exhausted... not fun at all and bringing me to the conclusion that after several years of trying I was going to give up and admit I actually don't like Athens) and off to New Sparta (built on the orders of King Otto, the first short-lived attempt of the Great Powers to parachute in a north European royal family to run Greece, a Bavarian (one of Mad Ludwig's lot) fairly swiftly kicked out and then replaced by the current ex-Royals, who were Danes, if I remember rightly how it went) on the Laconian plain in the centre of the Peleponnese. I reached there about five and took the local bus straight out to Mystra, the place I'd been planning to visit for more than two years.

It's radically different scenery (and weather, there were clouds) there from the islands. Spectacular mountains covered in trees, surrounding the enormous plain full of olive trees (the Peleponnese is the main area for olives. Yes, all that green is olive trees, pretty much).

The campsite I was heading for was just outside the village of New Mystra, on the very edge of the plain, and was run by a large and jolly American Greek lady. The ground was rock-solid and I suffered almost my only injury of the holiday when, in a fit of fury, I smashed my rapidly disintegrating wooden mallet down on, not the last recalcitrant tent peg, but on my thumb. At which point I said Soddit, but not before I'd said Bollocks, very loudly.

Mystra is...amazing, a genuine treasure and, I think, a major Unesco site. Founded by the Franks after the disgraceful Fourth Crusade, it clings to the foothills of Mount Tagyetus, thousands of feet above the plain. After the Byzantine empire managed to take control back, for its last two hundred years of existence, it became a major city for the imperial families, commanding as it does much of the Peleponnese, together with Monemvasia (of which more shortly). As such, it became a centre for the last flowering of Byzantine art and culture, a kind of Indian summer. Gemistus Plethon, purportedly a theologian but in reality the last heir of Socrates and a man the Renaissance admired so much his body was later carried off to Florence, lived and died there; and Constantine Palaeologus, last heir of Augustus, was crowned there, just a few years before he was last seen on 29th May 1453, fighting alone and on foot in the breach in the walls of Constantinopole as the Turkish army flooded in.

People lived up there until a few years ago, though over the last hundred years most moved to New Sparta. The last few, except for the nuns of the Pandarassa convent, were moved out by compulsory purchase, to New Mystra, at the foot of the mountain. A really pretty village, and, at least when I was there, not submerged beneath a great weight of tourists. It seems to be pretty much run by one friendly extended family.

I spent ages talking to the beautiful Maria, who paints the best modern icons I've ever seen, in the proper traditional manner and inspired by the hundreds of frescoes surviving in Mystra. Had I had more hard cash on me, or had she (or anyone in the village) taken credit cards, my baggage would have been even heavier, but sadly 'twas not to be (next time, next time...).

I spent the entire next day wandering around the site. Like many cities of the period it comes in three stages: a lower town, an upper town and a castle at the top (actually there would also have been a peasant's town outside the walls, near their fields). There's an enormous amount to see, many, many churches with surviving and beautiful frescoes, near complete Byzantine mansions (quite interesting architecturally, the way they dealt with the problems of building on steep slopes: storage in the basement, living space on the top), the palace, the convent where I fell in love with a cat and a nun persuaded me to buy some lace, and, finally, once I'd summoned the energy for the climb (well, the whole place is a climb, it's built on the side of a very steep mountain, but this was a Climb), the castle at the top. Breathtaking views, precipitous drops, very little in the way of safety rails or, indeed, people... hurrah.

And, very.. very slowly back down to the bottom, via occasional sidetracks to investigate semi-ruined houses and the like that seemed almost forgotten. I think it probably says bad things about me that, with warnings of open cisterns vaguely coming to mind, the line "whatever you do don't leave the path" kept running through my mind.

The inevitable pictures: be warned, there be many churches and frescoes here:
The Upper City from the Lower City: the Pandarassa convent.
Water: Byzantine fixture, modern fitting. Oh, never mind, it amused me.
A church...
..or two...
.. or three... OK, I'll stop now. I could tell you which church was which, but time is short. Or something.
And then there's the frescoes, truly amazing, though the photos don't do them justice.
I couldn't work out what this sign was about and actually took this picture in he hope the zoom might make things clearer. It hasn't, yet.
More frescoes... a rather good Coronation of the Virgin if my scrawled notes say what I think they do. Looks like it anyhow.
And more. Apostles this time.
.. and yet more. Flight into Egypt. Very reminiscent of slightly later Italian stuff I thought. Unsurprisingly.
A modern installation in one of the churches. Beehive in the middle, surrounded by huge beeswax candles, with honeycombs on the walls. It grew on me.
The outside of that church. The narthex seems to have been a pleasant little sun porch.
From the Upper City, looking down.
Looking down on the convent yard from its church. The nun hiding in the corner managed to persuade me to buy a piece of the lace they make. I have no idea what to do with it.
Belltower of the convent church. My perch was a little precarious, which is why it looks as though it's leaning: it isn't, I am.
More frescoes...
And yet more. This group, and the last picture, from the same church, seemed incredibly fresh and vivid.
Mystra clings to one side of the mountain. This is the other side, viewed from the castle at the top...
More of the same, the start of Mount Tagyetus itself.
And this is why anyone wanting to control the Laconian plain wanted to own this castle. The city in the distance (a half hour bus journey) is New Sparta.
The Upper City from the Castle. I climbed a lot this holiday.
New Mystra, the modern village to which the last inhabitants were moved. The white patch top left was a marquee left over from a fair the week before, the campsite was just past it.
Not much to say about this: the overgrown and lost house just made me come over all Victorian Romantic. Cf Arcadia.
One last fresco: a rather fuzzy Pantocrator.
Kitten who adopted me and followed me all over the city: I had to deliver him back to his home in the convent eventually.
And the rest of his family huddling from the thunderstorm now rapidly approaching.
Constantine IX Palaeologus, last emperor, crowned at Mystra, missing presumed dead in battle a few years later on 29th May 1453.

Another night in New Mystra, mainly spent talking to Maria and her husband and having dinner and a great deal to drink, and back to the campsite.

I wasn't sure where to go at this point. It was Thursday evening and my flight was on Saturday night, so another two hours further on to Monemvasia and a day there felt risky, but in the end I thought, as ever, "soddit"; packed up my tent; and moved on there early the next day. The bus journey wasn't too bad, once I'd asked the driver to give me five minutes in a café so that my bladder didn't explode horribly, and I reached there about one.

It's a less beautiful site, but a more impressive one. Think Mont St Michel, only the mountain is bigger and the town smaller. Actually, that doesn't cover it. The mountain is frankly ludicrous. It's as though God, just for a laugh on Wednesday afternoon, decided to design the most impregnable fortress conceivable (if that isn't too ontological a statement).

Reached by a single causeway of about a mile from the mainland, this was the other main Frankish, and then late Byzantine, centre for control of the Peleponnese. The lower town is still inhabited, just, though there's also a settlement on the mainland, and it's more purely tourist orientated. Rather less in the way of frescoes, though the cathedral church is architecturally impressive, an enormous (by medieval Byzantine standards, not counting Hagia Sophia) basilica.

Conversely, while Mystra is although quiet, an organised museum site, the upper town and castle of Monomevasia are utterly deserted and little investigated. There's only one complete building, the church, but plenty in the way of ruins. It's fairly dangerous, but so long as you aren't an idiot and look where you're going it's ok. Bizarre little sentry posts on the edge of the cliff, looking over the south Aegean and towards Crete, vaguely reminiscent of Whitehall sentry boxes. I suppose one has to admit it's a kind of building which offers little in the way of innovative design...

Down again, down again and all round the town, viewed here from the ruins of the Governor's lookout post in the Upper City. The standing houses, some of which have been restored, are scattered somewhat disconcertingly among the ruins of the lower town (it had 60,000 inhabitants at its peak, there can't be more than 600 now) and eventually to Angelo's bar.

Many Greeks speak exceptionally good English, most speak some, but I hadn't met many (not counting expats) who were as fluent as Angelo. He seemed to spend his time making bizarre and enormous sculptures from candles, listening to jazz (he told me Benny Goodman had come to his bar some years before), drinking with his customers and, as is common, playing backgammon. So I sat there, before and after dinner, playing backgammon, drinking endless Metaxas and listening to his cds. I tried some Malvasia (ie Malmesey), now being regrown locally, and went and bought some, along with some ordinary wine also from Malvasia grapes. Eventually Angelo put on "Whiter Shade of Pale", which, along with "Come up and See Me (Make me Smile)" is perhaps my favourite song of all time, and I decided to go and sleep, for all of two hours.

For my bus to Athens was at 4:20, yes, 4:20 AM... Which made the room, where I received more mosquito bites than in the whole rest of the holiday, something of an unnecessary luxury at the enormous price of, um, 20 Euro...

And so to Athens, on a bright and quiet Saturday morning (so much so I decided that perhaps, after all, I did like Athens), with a kind bus driver who dropped me near Omonia and the youth hostel where I could dump my bag rather than dragging me out to the horrible bus station and thus saved me at least an hour and a great deal of effort. A little shopping, a wander round the less visited archaeological sites, like the Pnyx, and round the back of the Acropolis, and so on, via frequent stops for gyros, frappé and, eventually, more Metaxa, until it was time to head off for the airport. Where I successfully managed, I know not how, to check in baggage that was more than ten kilos overweight without paying, then add a further few kilos in the form of bottles and many, many cigarettes. (OK, it isn't duty free any more, but at 2 Euro a packet Greece can't be charging much duty anyway.)

The plane was late in but Easyjet managed to turn the flight round in under a quarter of an hour, impressively, and we landed at Gatwick on time, 1:30 AM BST. Followed by a twenty minute bus ride to the terminal and a half hour wait for baggage, then an hour's wait for the train (whereupon, lugging my bag, heavier by the minute, I failed to Mind The Gap, for the first time in my life, and banged my shin badly, it still hurts). By the time I reached Victoria I was almost dead on my feet, and vague thoughts of night buses were long abandoned: though it's against my religion I got straight into a black cab... and so to my flat, which to my surprise had neither burnt down nor been burgled, and into bed I fell.

It's taken me two weeks and more to unpack properly and put everything away.

Fin

Comments

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

No wonder you still hate being in London.... And thanks for the detailed write up - I think I am a bit closer to deciding what I am doing in Europe next summer. :)

[liadnan]

Glad someone actually read their way through it all to be honest.
Actually, Greece next summer may be a dubious idea. Olympics, y'see. Athens may be impassable (if I go out, which I had sworn I wouldn't, but am now reconsidering, I shall fly either to Thessalonica, which I do want to go back to, or to Mykonos, which is a short ferry hop from Syros). And I suspect the current ridiculously low cost of living may begin to be eroded for the same reason.

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed reading it..but you are right, Olympics would make a significant difference....but then again, there is something about olympics in Greece...
I have time to decide though. :)

[eccles.livejournal.com]

So you didn't get up to much then?

[liadnan]

Nah, just read a few books.
Actually, that is pretty much all I did for a week. Mini reviews of them at some point.

[calixtan.livejournal.com]

woo! sounds like you had fun.

welcome home.

[greyarea.livejournal.com]

Having just returned from holiday, I know I've no right to be jealous, but it does all sound rather fabulous.

"...so I could spend one night on Armeneos itself, looking up at the incredible starfield from my sleeping bag and waking almost at dawn for a swim" sounds about as close to paradise as I'd imagine you could get.

I shall await the photos with interest. From a purely selfish POV, it's good to have you back, however.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Damn it, had I realised you were going to be in Piraeus I would have recommended the best seafood restaurant in the known universe (Varoulko's, thanks to whom I know what sea urchin tastes like).

Cathedrals and nudists and verandahs, oh my!

[brenna-edana.livejournal.com]

No, you don't know me. I ran across you on a "primrose hill" interest search. I'm so very glad I did. Thank you greatly for sharing such a beautiful holiday. I am now feeling the need to nap on the beach and drink much metaxa...

Greetings from New Orleans.

-brenna

[(Anonymous)]

Stop hack the program!!!