Ain’t no hay bale like an Iowa hay bale.

I can’t speak for Molly, but my end-of- and post-Barcelona time has found me saddled with decidedly bad luck.  Aer Lingus lost my backpack, for example.  Which I handled like a pro, thinking, “Hell!  I’m almost home!  Meh!  These things just happen!”  True enough.  And anyway, the nice Irish-accented Aer Lingus lady told me they’d FedEx it and I’d have it in 1-2 days.  “Sorry, these things just happen sometimes,” she said.  “Yes!  These things happen!” I cheerfully agreed, happy to just be away from French teenagers.  But you know what DOESN’T just happen?  Your bag of pretty souvenir scarves you bought for grandma and mom and your sisters DISAPPEARING from your backpack so that when you finally get it from the FedEx man you throw a HUGE fit and your father for the first time learns about the true versatility of the f-word, which as we both discovered, can be used as a noun, adjective, adverb, interjection, gerund, and even an entire subordinate clause.  So we did learn something from this whole debacle.

The other big happening of the week: while eating breakfast in our hostel one morning, we got up to leave, only to realize that my messenger bag was GONE.  We’re still not sure how this happened…we were sitting there, we were awake, surrounded by people, Molly’s usual hangover had dispersed unusually early…but there it was.  Robbery.  After two months of watching our shit like a couple of nervous rural Midwesterners abroad.  So we went to the police station and filled out the requisite forms and so on, and then Molly left me alone in the hostel room so that I could have privacy for a small, pillow-throwing, cussing-filled temper tantrum.

OK, so now that I think about it, that was really our sole “bad luck” per se in Barcelona…unless you count Molly’s bad luck in finding a pair of truly irresistible yet relatively expensive pair of boots that caused her to uncontrollably throw her credit cards at the sales clerk.  Despite a few face slaps, “Pull yourself together, woman!” moments, acknowledgements of lack of suitcase space, and reminders of the Euro exchange rate, the forces of commerce prevailed, and Molly walked away bleary and blissful, teetering in her impractical yet gorgeous slouchy grey suede boots with impractical yet stylish heels, smoking a post-spending cigarette and glorifying in the fact that this purchase would necessitate Danielle writing a 50-comma sentence on the blog. 

Bad luck all around, I say.

Anyhow, due to my loss of bag, debit card, and a bit of cash, it was decided that (a) I needed a new bag, preferably a cute, inexpensive, bright-yellow shiny vinyl one that nicely balances professionalism with whimsy, which lo and behold I FOUND, thankyouverymuch (I suddenly realize that this blog just went way Sex and the City…stopping NOW)…and (b) it was time to stop doing tourist things (i.e. museums, cathedrals, and things that in general cost money and also, incidentally, tend to bore the pants off of Danielle, who by now was fragile and faithless in humanity…not to mention that require us to wander at Molly’s maddening gawking-tourist walking pace) (sorry, Molly) and start doing free, relaxing things.

Hence, numerous visits to the beach.

The normal laws of the universe do not apply on Barcelona beaches.  For one, every woman — regardless of age, attractiveness, build, and <cough> the pull of gravity — is totally comfortable wandering around without a swimsuit top. 

Not horribly shocking, perhaps, but the men didn’t seem to notice or care.  Woman wandering topless down La Rambla?  Riots ensue.  Woman’s towel slips in the hostel bathroom?  Endless jabbering, whispering, pointing for days.  HUNDREDS of breasts, just out there swaying in the breeze, humming contentedly to themselves as they soak up the sun?

Nothing.

But upon closer inspection, the men usually had better things to do than gawk.  For example, roughly half the men at the beaches were vendors of some sort, wandering about screaming, “Coca Light?  Coca?  Coca Light?  Coca?  Cerveza?  Coca?” and getting in the way of your sun rays.  Some also sold pieces of coconut.  These vendors inexplicably wandered around yelling, “Da-doo-da-doo-da-doo-DA-DOO-DA-DOO!”  (And though I haven’t looked it up, I don’t think “da-doo” is the Spanish word for “coconut.”)

The other half of the male beach-goers were British 18-to-20-year-old men on what Molly called “The 2008 Losing Your Virginity Tour of Europe.”  These young men spent most of their time talking in Cockney accents about what a ”smashing” and “brilliant” night they had last night with “that bloomin’ bloody blinkin’ big-titted girl from the club.”  “Oh, really, Cecil?  THAT strumpet?  How simply delightful!”  “Indeed.  Oh, drat, there is sand in my marmalade.”  “Oh, your bloody crumpet is ruined!”  “Quite!”  In between gloating over girls, they flagged down the vendors and quietly engaged in transactions that involved rolls of Euros, large amounts of marijuana, and very little Coca Light.

Consequence-free nudity and drugs.  God bless you, Barcelona.

Incidentally, this same college-age Brit male crowd made up a striking proportion of our hostelmate population as well.  And it was at the hostels that Molly and I really started to feel our age.  We were the old girls lurking in the courtyard, sipping a beer (singular) while reading New Yorkers and Newsweeks sent to us by our families, who then snuggled in at 10:30, talking about how tired our feet were from the EXHAUSTING walk to all those museums and cathedrals.  Everyone else in the hostel rolled in around 4:00 AM, each one on their 15th beer of the night, scantily clad, awash in sequins and lycra and eye makeup (fairly often regardless of gender, God bless ‘em), usually with several MORE 18-to-20-year-old British men in tow.

Of course, I exaggerate, because 4:00 AM is when Barcelonans call the sitter and put the kids to bed.  My morning runs (around 6:00 AM) were both agility and endurance exercises, as I was forced to nimbly dodge the packs of stumbling-drunk fools on La Rambla.  It was rather nice, actually, not being the only person out and about early in the morning (running down dark unfamiliar urban streets alone = panic attack), though I occasionally attracted douche-baggy packs of drunk clubber men in shiny silk shirts who thought it would be fun to run with me.  Fortunately, beer is kind of hard on the ol’ motor skills, and with enough evasiveness and strategic darting, I was able to run several of them into lampposts to get them off my tail. 

Anyhow.  I am now back in Iowa, where it is warm and sunny and flat.  I have finally had the time to pause and reflect upon my adventure, and I have come to one chief insight: Europeans have no effing clue how to make a hay bale.  Between Greece’s wire-bound monsters, Italy’s wet and moldy beasts, and Spain’s positively soaking wet, 5-ton bastards, I learned to appreciate how Iowans do this until-now-seemingly-simple task.  I realized this the other day, as I unloaded several racks of hay bales for my dad and contentedly juggled the nice, dry, under-75-pound, rectangular bales before casually tossing them off the rack.

And I’m getting PAID for it.

God bless America.  It’s good to be back.

————————————————–

Alright, this blog is about tapped out.  But stay tuned for <sniffle> THE FINAL POST.  Oh man.  I think I need to lie down.

 

Doing the Hula in Italy

WWOOFing seems to bring out the sulky teenager in any otherwise self-possessed and rather charming 20-something.  We’ve seen it in our co-WWOOFers, and we saw it in each other as well during the last couple of weeks at Ca’ del Buco.  There is legitimate reason for this metamorphosis — a WWOOFer is essentially in the position of a 15-year-old.

Living under someone else’s roof
+ eating someone else’s food

+ someone else doing your laundry (our hosts have thus far insisted on doing it themselves…)

+ the fact that a WWOOFer is usually WWOOFing to travel on the cheap (and thus probably doesn’t have the funds to leave early and live at a hostel for a few weeks)

+ limited transportation options

= regression in maturity level

So the last few weeks could find us rolling our eyes when “Mom” and “Dad” yelled for us or gave us tasks.  We cussed even more than usual.  We consumed enough extra food and wine to sufficiently consider ourselves “inconveniences,” which is sort of how we were treated anyhow (for example, they forgot to feed us on several occasions) (and locked us out of the house at the same time) (thus cutting us off from all food aside from what we could scrounge from the garden) (and the rabbit pens…YUM!).

(I am not joking.  They really neglected to feed us.  A few times.  If you know me, this puts a person on my permanent shit list.)

Anyhow.  We are officially Italian 18-year-olds: out of the house and ready to do as we please.  I am happy as all get out.  Ecstatic, overjoyed, dancing happily down that highway, all the way to Torino, even while wearing my 200-pound backpack.

Yes, for the first few days ol’ whats-his-face was a charming facsimile of an Iowa farmer type, and the food was good and plentiful, we ate as a big happy family, and Allie was around, and I went to bed each night with a delightful “good kind of hurt” ache.

That was the first few days.  I now stand corrected.

Fortunately, one can always put on some rose-colored glasses.  And so I give you:

THE GOOD THINGS ABOUT OUR ITALIAN WWOOFING EXPERIENCE

1) Buffness that is only brought on by over 12 hours a day of manual labor.  Seriously, have you ever made lavender sachets for hours?  We have, and our hands are effing SEXY.  Major wrist definition.  Aw, yeah.

2) Varied work. One minute could find me putting labels on bottles of lavender oil (please, someone, tell me a purpose for this crap), the next picking 50 pounds of plums (and operating at a 1:3 eat-to-pick ratio), the next in my sports bra and jeans in the 95-degree heat, swinging a pickax into the dense Italian clay-packed soil as I attempted to make a nice deep grave to accommodate several bunny corpses.  Surprisingly enough (or maybe not), I enjoyed the grave-digging most.  To be perfectly, morbidly honest, I lately found myself secretly hoping that more bunnies would die, so I could be put on graveyard duty instead of whatever other tasks there were.

Speaking of varied labor, I also ended up hanging out with the children at Paola’s farmy day camp thing.  And if you know me and Molly, you know that she is generally the kind, personable, good-with-kids one in this operation.  I, on the other hand, am the big, sarcastic, cynical one with a potty-mouth that only a drunken sailor could love.  So one day I am in the middle of a three-hour raking-up-weed-whacker-droppings-for-goat-feeding-purposes session, singing dirty Tenacious D and rugby drinking songs to pass the time.  And of course, because she hears me singing, Paola comes up to me and says, “Ooh!  Next week is music week at our day camp!  You should help with the activities!”

In Paola-speak, this is not a suggestion.  It means, “Help me with the children or you are going to have to gnaw on weeds and goat haunches for the rest of this trip.”

If only she knew better English.  If only she knew that half my songs were about beer and rugby and the others were full of creative sexual euphemisms.

<sigh>

So I ended up playing duck-duck-goose — which I realize has nothing to do with music, but no one seemed to care — with the kids when Paola felt tired of hanging out with them.  Fortunately, though the kids knew little English, they did somehow know “GAME OVER!”  And when they finally screamed it, I said, “OK.  Do whatever!” and happily made a dismissive gesture.  Then I snuck off and downed some limoncello.  The day got much better from there, probably for both the kids and for me.

In short, it was hard to be bored.  Exploited, yes.  Bored, no.

3) The accomodations. Our room was in the agriturismo part of the compound, so it was clean, with a lovely shower and nice toilet and multiple pillows and towels and sheets we could change whenever we saw fit.  Granted, we were never granted express permission for this, but we were also never prohibited.  So there.

4) The “Camp English 10″ Factor. (This will only make sense to NIHS alums.)  Eventually we took to calling our farm “Camp Fascist,” and then the more-fitting “Camp English 10.”  Much like the North Iowa High School incarnation of English 10 when we were there, WWOOFing at Ca’ del Buco taught us that sometimes people have unreasonable, arbitrary rules and are just unpleasant for no particular reason.  It seems that at every meal we and the fam ate together, we would have some variation on the following conversation:

“Hey!  Don’t use that ________ (sugar/milk/butter/jam/cheese)!”

“Uh…OK…?”

“We only use THAT ________ on Thursdays/cloudy days/Arbor Day/etc.!”

“Uh…”

<then we would go replace it with ANOTHER milk/butter/etc.>

“NO!  That one is even WORSE!  We spit and pee in that one!  EVERYONE knows that!” <they shake their heads, unable to BELIEVE the idiots they have hooked themselves up with>

5) Advancing my stick-driving skills. Now I can go into second gear!  Ooooooh…

6) Pietro and Marta (Roberto’s parents). These two were friendly, kind, patient, generous, helpful, etc., and the best people we met in Italy — all without speaking a word of English.  Marta helped with work and patiently gestured at us when we didn’t understand her. Pietro wandered about, smoked clove cigarettes (though, given the smell of his car, he may or may not smoke other things…), and made up nicknames for us — Molly is forever “Princess Stephanie of Monaco,” and I am “Julie Andrews.”  This pleased us both greatly.

7) It strengthened our friendship. Or, depending on how you look at it, it introduced the strange new dynamic of making me fiercely protective of Molly.  This is because Paola decided early on, seemingly at random, that Molly would just be the one to pick on in the new batch of WWOOFers.  Like I said above — arbitrary and unpleasant for no particular reason.  So whenever Paola yelled at Molly, I knew it meant 15 more minutes of holding Molly that night while she gently sobbed.  I’m a friend.  Such duties are part of the package, I suppose.

8. The animals. I thought the goats were a riot.  Molly loved the rabbits.  Feeding the animals was a simple pleasure — you give them food, they immediately love you and happily munch.  By the end of our time there, the goats would come running if they saw me approach.

(Oh, and in response to Catherine’s question, the rabbits had been for eating, but all that stopped when they caught the plague.  I have no idea if Paola and Roberto and Co. will now eat the bunnies that are left…)

9) “The Hula Game.” Yet more evidence that we have LOST IT.  The Hula Game is a sort of “who’s-on-first” back-and-forth that we do for two major reasons: (a) we hate cleaning wool. HATE IT.  And yet we had to do it all the damn time…bags of the stuff…by hand.  Its purpose remains unclear.  (b) To make fun of Paola, who pronounced “wool” “hoo-la.”  A typical Hula Game session was a riff something like this, with one of us playing Paola and one as the hilarious American WWOOFers:

PAOLA: Girls!  Please start with the hoo-la!

US: …seriously?

P: Yes!

U: You have that here?

P: Yes!  Lots of it!

U: I mean…I thought that the hula was a Hawaiian thing.

P: Dammit!  It’s time to do the hoo-la!

U: OK!  <removing clothing> You got a coconut bra or grass skirt or something?

P: What are you doing?

U: The hips gotta show!  They tell a story!

P: DO THE HOO-LA!

U: Calm down, woman!  The hula is a dance of relaxation and beauty!  You’re just introducing tension.

P: DO IT NOW!

U: I am!  Watch my hands!  Every movement has a meaning, you know.

P: I really can’t wait around for this.

U: Listen, if you want artistry to happen, it takes time.  Sometimes I wonder if this is all a ploy to see us half-naked and wiggling…

P: I really want this hoo-la done before you leave!

U: …Paola…is the hula ever really done?

Ahahahaha.  Such moments of genius make this trip even more worth it.

Anyhow, tonight we are in Torino, as we were last night, and it is one of the best cities I have ever visited — gorgeous views (cathedrals and castles!  mountains!  rivers!), delicious food (I ate an entire pizza yesterday) (and two gelatos) (among other things) (no joke), outstanding public transportation, wonderful running trails, and things are a bit cheaper here than in Milan or Bologna.  Molly and I live for these 2- or 3-day vacations after farmwork, so I’m sure we’ll pull out all the stops in Barcelona.  Tomorrow we get to go on a train ride through the south of France, and in two days we will be at our Spain farm.  Cow-milking!  Yes!  I am excited already (that wasn’t sarcastic, either).

This was long but worth it.  I hope you agree.

 

Conigli morti

We have arrived in Italy, and the trip was magnificent…

• First, Ioannina, Greece. A beautiful little city on a lake, where we saw our first precipitation on the whole trip and stayed in a beautiful hotel room. And where we each did indeed take obscenely long showers and watch some TV. Though one of the only English offerings on said TV was ”How to lose a guy in 10 days.” –slams head against wall– Maybe the big hippie-WWOOFer gods are punishing us for wanting a little TV. I dunno. Anyhow, we went from Ioannina to…
• Igoumenitsa, where we discovered the joys of ferries. This is officially my new favorite way to travel, and I believe Molly would agree with me. Our Eurail passes got us deck passage aboard a ferry bound for Italy. What is cool about deck passage is that you take your sleeping bag and pack, stake out some property, and camp out somewhere on deck (or, as some intelligent passengers did, on a couch in the corner of the bar/casino). And yes, there is a bar/casino, as well as a hot tub, a (laughably small) swimming pool, several restaurants, showers, and BRITISH TOURISTS! YES! THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE! THE SWEET MUSIC OF THE GODS! But we had to bid farewell upon arrival in…
• Ancona. As Lonely Planet puts it, ”Ancona’s biggest tourest draw is leaving Ancona.” Enough said.
• Then we took the train to Bologna (the simply GORGEOUS city where I am as I type this), where we hopped on a bus to…
• OUR FARM. Our farm is an agriturismo, which is like a B & B where the guests get to see farm life and help out if they want. The place is run by a couple, Paola and Roberto, who have a son who is not here for the entire time we are…and, though children are a blessing and all lovely and innocent, blah blah, I believe I speak for both of us when I say that we are welcoming the reprieve.

Anyhow. Roberto reminds me a lot of Iowa farmers. He’s very nice, works really hard, helps with the cooking, and is encouraging and totally forgiving if we make any mistakes (snapping a string on a hay bale, etc.).

Paola, on the other hand, is a hard-ass, to put it lightly. We’ll keep it at that.

Speaking of hard-assness, they run a tighter ship here than in Greece…a ship where, apparently, there is a stash of speed somewhere on-board, because we still haven’t figured out how Roberto and Paola maintain their energy for the work they do. Roberto is a sanitation worker for the city of Bologna, and Paola is a judo teacher. IN ADDITION to the farming, which is, as I said, hard-assed. For example, our first day consisted of waking up at 5:30 a.m., loading and unloading hay bales with Roberto, bundling lavender (dear God, the effing lavender), cutting lavender (unnnnnnngh) (also, bee stings galore), and then much more hay, and then lavender-cutting (I hate lavender so much at this point that, if I ever set foot in a Bath and Body Works store again, I just might snap). At around 9 p.m., I ran up to the house to nurse a bee sting, and Roberto made me sit down with him and eat supper, as Paola was insisting on cutting lavender until dark. ”But, Roberto, Molly and Allie (co-WWOOFer) are still working…” ”I will go get them. Paola is crazy. You eat.”

So since we didn’t finish the lavender, we got up the next morning at FOUR A.M. YES, FOUR A.M. I gathered a bundle of lavender and promptly got stung.

”Impossible!” said Paola dismissively. ”The bees aren’t out yet!”

As if on cue, a truly monstrous bee flew out and landed on the back of her shirt, and she begged us to brush it off.

Heh heh heh. Suckah.

Anyway. The food, once again, is OUTSTANDING…even better than Greece, though prosciutto and other meats factor heavily into the meals. Which is fine (and by ”fine” I clearly mean ”heavenly”) with me, but inconsequential to Ms. Molly Vegetarian Angstman.

The only other real news from the farm is the rabbit plague, due to which we have learned a new Italian phrase — ”conigli morti,” or ”dead rabbits.” Every day, for unknown reasons, three rabbits have died, and we are down to about 15 rabbits now. This is sad (and gross, as we have to carry the stiff, dead corpses to our rapidly growing rabbit cemetery), but it did mean that yesterday Allie and I had the laughable task of catching the remaining little suckers from the large pen and putting them in separate cages so they could be sort of primitively quarantined. According to Molly, we looked hilarious, all hunched over and concentrating fiercely. But concentration is necessary, as even the chubby rabbits are surprisingly quick and good at putting up a fight. Futhermore — to my horror — rabbits can SCREAM. Seriously. Grab one when it doesn’t want to be grabbed, and it just HOWLS, which scared the living bejeezus out of me the first time it happened. However, rabbits being infinitely stupid, you can make them calm down by holding down their ears, which is one of the stupider evolutionary tricks ever…right up there with fainting goats. God gave rabbits a giant, obvious off-switch right on top of their heads. Genius.

Well, our bodacious, farmers-tanned deltoids are sore from all of that hay-baling (but not the lavender…let us never speak of lavender again) (ever) and we should go nurse them. By burying our faces in a trough of tortelloni. –dies of happiness–

 

Cat poop.

We are currently in Volos, killing time until a bus can take us to Ioannina, from which we will go to Igoumenitsa and hop on a 15-hour ferry to Italy.  15 hours of overnight ferrying and I’m STILL excited!  Eeeeee!

Anyhow, lots of business to take care of today, so a quick rundown of final-Greece-stuff:

1) First a shout-out to the Greek people.  Yes, we complain about the fact that the culture here has yet to hear about things like, oh, I don’t know, respectful treatment of women, the impoliteness of staring, etc.  BUT.  The Greeks have been very VERY hospitable, especially to us foreigners.  They try really hard to speak English with us (and usually do it pretty well) and, failing that, to understand us when we are trying to jabber in garbled Greek.  And, even including the strange (Tourette’s-stricken?) woman at the village bakery who just liked to yell at us, they are all quite friendly and not-frustrated while doing it.  Great job, Greece!

2)  I now appreciate showers like I never had before.  I plan on taking one that is an hour long at our motel in Ioannina.  I just may eat and take naps, coffee breaks, etc. during it.

3) The other day (about which I’m pretty sure Molly is also blogging) was pretty much a landmark day in terms of the children.  Even without Yanni (the knife-sharpening minion of Hell), the girls reached new heights of disorder and dysfunctionality.  It was a morning of howling and wailing, complete with Katerina running around completely nudy and crying.  The nudiness just makes it all more pathetic and makes you want to comfort her more — sure, it’s 100 degrees out, but this poor child is sad AND unclothed! — and yet you have no idea how, because who wants to pick up the nudy crying child with lots of snot on her face? Also, it made me want to just shake Sofia, because somehow it seems even meaner to hit your sister when she’s naked.

Anyhow.  Sofia and Katerina spent much of the morning hitting each other, and then much of what would have been a wonderful lunchtime (scrambled eggs, MASHED POTATOES, salad, copious amounts of ketchup*) being homicidal alternately toward each other and — you guessed it — the kittens.  While Hallie, Anika, Molly and I were washing dishes and admirably ignoring the Iwo-Jima-intensity fighting outside, in comes Katerina in the following state:

a) bawling her eyes out

b) wearing undies incorrectly, in a way that can only be described as “sideways,” with the crotch on her hip and…yeah.  It would have been comical, except for…

c) POOP ON HER STOMACH.

And she then screams, “MAMA!  CACA!  MAMA!  CACA!”

Molly looked horrified, nearly dropped her dish, and skittered backwards.  I, stunned, stared in horror as my brain said, “Ok, kid.  At least tell me that’s not YOUR poop.”  And then, “Wait.  Tell me it’s not your sister’s, either.”

As it turns out, she squeezed a kitten a little too hard and it defecated all over her.  Anika took her outside to hose her off (I am not making any of this up).  We all died a little from an intense mixture of horror and comedy.  Which was intensified when the new WWOOFer, Margaret, showed up yesterday.  Before she had yet met the children, I told her this story and we had the following exchange:

HER: Wait.  How OLD is Katerina?

ME: <deadpan> Fifteen.

HER: <horrified silence>

Anyhow.  The children were actually mostly good this past week, despite this incident, and they colored with us a lot.  It is very possible that I enjoyed it even more than they did.  Coloring is even more fun than I remember it being.  Perhaps my brain has turned to mush.

4) We learned last night from Margaret that Nikos has MADE A CD OF HIM PLAYING THE BOUZOUKI AND SINGING.  Nikos plays the bouzouki all day, all night, rain, shine, and of course even if we are sleeping, and especially even if Anika tells him to stop, and especially especially if there is pressing work to do.  Anyhow, we were sad, because this is a GOLD MINE of information, and we only found out last night.  <sigh>  Ah, well.

Well, that’s it for now.  We head to Italy soon!  SO EXCITED!

Thanks for commenting, friends and family et al.  I am happy that all this writing and story-recounting is not all for naught.

Danielle

*Regarding ketchup: a shout-out to Margaret for reenacting the Prairie Home Companion ketchup commercials with me last night.  Made my week and made me miss the Midwest.  Also gave me an opportunity to whip out my “Midwestern middle-aged woman voice.”

 

WWOOFing Eve

A quick post before we leave tomorrow…

Currently we are at the Minneapolis Airport Ramada Inn.  I just thought it fitting to mention that we are in our motel room getting into the Greek spirit by

(a) researching the Athens terminal map

(b) going over Molly’s Greek vocab list

(c) watching 300 on TV. (See a trailer here…or an EVEN BETTER trailer here.)

…300 being a movie that, I’m sure, captures what Greece is all about, if Greece is really all about pornographic violence set to pounding guitar riffs, slow-motion, really cool lighting and special effects, and men in red capes and black briefs.  And let me point out that these are REALLY RIPPED men in red capes and black briefs. The thing is that Molly just told me that this movie did REALLY well over in Greece, so if they’re OK with it being sort of over-the-top, then I don’t have to feel so guilty-pleasure and “in spite of myself” about REALLY enjoying it.

Like, really.

In conjunction with Molly’s “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” binge, we pretty much have our “how Greek people are” perceptions set.  

So this really wasn’t about traveling at all, but I suppose we can file it under “Greek culture.”  Right?  Right!