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Published: March 26th 2008
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Well I know I haven’t posted in a while now, but all of the school computers (17 of the 20 of us took school laptops on this trip so we didn’t have to take our own) stopped working, well they stopped connecting to wireless, so we have been internetless for a while. Three people who didn’t bring school computers are able to get internet, so we have just been attempting to share those for the last week now. But anyways, we have been in Vamos, Crete since last Thursday. Vamos is a small town (pop. 665) between Chania and Rethymno. We are staying in cute little guest houses spread out all over town. We haven’t done a ton of stuff since we’ve been here, so I’ll just sum up what we have done over the last few days here. We went to an olive grove one day and got to taste olive oil that was made there. It was delicious. We also had some of the local wine too which was pretty good. It was wine that was made the very old-fashioned way; stomping on the grapes with your feet. So that was interesting, but really cool that some places still
make the wine that way. At this place they also raised chickens so we had omelets made with the eggs from the chickens. Both days on the weekend we had pretty much free, so that was really nice. On Saturday, Ingrid, Molly, Kelly, and I made lunch (the places that we are in have little kitchens, which is really nice). We made vegetable alfredo, fruit salad, garlic bread, and a chocolate mousse thing for dessert. It was all delicious. Brock and Erik came over for lunch and we all ate outside on the balcony, which was great. The view is gorgeous from here. There are mountains in the background and just little villages everywhere. Then, in the afternoon Molly, Brock, Erik, Ingrid, and I went on a hike. We had gone to the travel agency in town and asked them for a hike around the area, so we had directions to follow. The hike was on some main roads, some dirt paths, and some random paths through the woods and fields. We went through two little towns and saw a bunch of little churches along the way. The whole hike was eight miles, so it was a good workout. When
my computer starts to work again I’ll be able to post pictures from the hike and other things. On the hike we also found these really cool Venetian wells that still had water in them, so that was kinda cool. And that actually wasn’t on the directions that we had. We had gotten lost and ended up finding the wells before we found our way back to where we were supposed to be. We also found this really cool church in the middle of the woods. It was built into the side of a mountain so that was really neat. It looked like it has been used pretty recently because there was one of those things that the Orthodox church uses for incense in the church (it was more like a little cave thing). But yea, so that hike was really fun and a great workout.
One of the nights here there was some English music at one of the cafes. So we went to that, and that was pretty fun. It was kinda bluegrass type music and then he started playing some American stuff from the 80s. David and Carrie knew it really well and were dancing like
crazy. It was pretty funny. We were all up there dancing so that was really fun, and all of the locals got a kick out of that. I found out that there is a pretty big English community around here because a lot of retired people come here to retire. Also, some people just move here and live very minimally and work in the local tavern or is a musician and just plays local shows like the one that we went to. So I thought that was very interesting. There are also a lot of Albanians here that are in the 20s. They just come here to work, mainly building houses. Our guide said that it was very similar to the Mexican immigrants working in the US.
On Sunday morning we did a sunrise Easter service on the balcony here. That was really cool. It’s nice having Roy, the religion professor, be an ordained pastor because then he can do services for us. It is not the Orthodox Easter so we wouldn’t have been able to do church otherwise. And then the rest of Sunday was pretty much just a homework day. Yesterday we did a hike as
a group to some ruins and a monastery. Both were very similar to all the others that we have seen, but it was nice to walk for a while. It was about five miles, so again, another nice workout. Last night we had an interesting dinner… I’ll have to put up pictures later when I can. It was all fish based, and I really enjoyed all of it. The first course was a caviar paste that went on bread. That was ok. But then one of the other appetizers was fried anchovies. They looked like minnows. I told myself that I had to try one, so I did, and it really wasn’t that bad. So I had a couple of them. So I was pretty impressed that I was able to eat them and actually kinda like them. Then the main course was kalamari, which I actually really liked. There were still the tentacles on there, which I didn’t like that much, but I still ate them. So, surprisingly, I was very happy with our seafood filled meal. I hope I still like seafood when I get home. And, as always dinner was topped off with raki (the local Cretan
alcohol). Raki is made from distilled grapes, but it is still very strong. They gave us some honey raki one night, which was a lot better. They heated it up and put honey and cinnamon in it. Much better that way! But yea, then today was the anniversary of the Greek war for independence (1821) so they celebrate it and there was a parade in town, so we went to that. Obviously it wasn’t that much because the town is so small, but it was still cool to see a local celebration of it. Well I hope Concordia will be able to figure out what’s wrong with our computers soon, so we can all have internet when we need it. We are leaving Vamos on Thursday and then our spring break starts and we are in the Cyclades. We go to Tinos, then Mykonos, and then Santorini. So I am very excited about that! 😊
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