7 posts tagged “greece”
Show us the best beach you have visited.
Submitted by Marko.
in general i'm not much of a one for beaches. deep water frankly scares me silly and i'm always nervous of being dragged out to see in a rip and eaten by sharks. but there is one beach which i just adored from the moment we arrived - red beach on santorini, in the greek islands. you have to practically climb down a mountain to get there, and the sand is black and blazing hot (not fun on the feet and i highly recommend hiring a sun lounge unless you're made of asbestos) and the water was really rather chilly with tiny little fish swimming about. barely any waves and very calm, even though a decent depth - a perfect wallowing beach.
Show us the best picture you took in 2006.
Submitted by Captured Moments.
hmm. it's kind of hard to pick just one out of sooooo many (455 - and that's just the ones i've posted!) even though i think i posted a lot of rubbish to flickr this year for which i humbly apologise. not sure what's happened really... anyway, so here's a selection (although some of the rubbish is because my camera has taken to just putting a sprinkling of digital noise all over everything so it's rare i get a crystal-clear shot any more)
first, from around london:
from vienna:
from greece:
and i think the best drawing i did in 2006 was this one:
we were wandering through the crooked streets of mykonos yesterday evening, trying to decide whether, after an assortment of snacks involving hand-made halva, greek chocolate, sesame seed sticks and some other stuff (not to mention the previous two days' enormous if fabulous dinners), we could actually face dinner at all when i heard an almighty ruckus happening a couple of streets away. i can't keep away from vigorously out-of-tune procession music so i shot down an alley, with djelibeybi and son trailing after me, to find it was a school band practising in a room with an open door in one of the back alleys. What a glorious sound - so discordant! so enthusiastic! quite a masterpiece of its kind. of course i didn't have my walkperson with me though, so all i have is 40-second bursts from my camera on "voice" setting. turn your sound down a little if you usually have it loud - they're pretty enthusiastic, especially the bass drum, and the sound quality is rather cruddy...
i haven't been able to figure out how to turn this the right way round yet - will try to fix that up when i get home and maybe get some video-editing software (and no, the picture's not supposed to move cos it's not actually a video but i don't seem to be able to separate out the sound from the image.
As you can see, at the start the square was pretty deserted. i was trying to keep out of sight of the door so i didn't put them off, but pretty soon whole bunches of tourists started to congregate, waving camcorders and cameras and nattering away at the tops of their voices. the band drew quite a crowd in the end!!
... and a big happy wave from mykonos, in the cyclades islands!
yesterday we were in santorini and went on a tour out to the (active) volcano, climbing its extremely rocky slopes in the noonday sun (no shade) and gasping at the view from the top and the tales of destruction relayed by our guide (the photo at left just shows a low part of the volcano - it was a good deal higher than this!). we also got to put our hands in a hole in the ground which was warm enough to boil an egg in twenty minutes - how's that for exciting?????!!!!
volcanic hot springs at the smaller island were also exciting - we had to swim out to them from the boat to get to them, which was somewhat bracing at the start and end, but very refreshing.
and our day ended with a hike up 270 steps from the sea to oia, doing our best not to be either flattened against the cliffs or tipped over them by stampedes of donkeys taking those who sensibly were not prepared to walk most of the way up. i am not good with farmyard animals of any persuasion which was why we chose shank's pony instead!
santorini, i have to say, truly lives up to its reputation - just stunningly, jaw-droppingly gorgeous - although unfortunately, being so beautiful, it is of course packed up with tourists - and consequently with tourist-trap restaurants and souvenir shops. we did, however, manage to get a really first-rate meal from a restaurant recommended by lonely planet, "naoussa" - i had the lamb in lemon sauce while djelibeybi had grilled sea-bass. djeli's son resolutely stuck to his spaghetti bolognese, which we seem unable to pry him away from (although he has been trying small pieces of what we're eating) unless it's for keftethes (= meatballs). but we're having a fine time with the food. i am now a total convert to greek yoghurt with honey for breakfast - so delicious!
so today we've arrived in mykonos and about to try yet again to hunt out a fairly authentic sort of taverna and avoid the hideous overpriced tourist food. tomorrow we board another boat and head off to ancient delos for the day to check out where apollo and artemis were born and see the ruins. then on to athens the next day.
i now have 4 cds-worth of photos i've taken and not even one week into the trip - when on earth am i ever going to get to go through them all?????
... that whenever i go on holidays i always end up absolutely killing myself for the whole week before i leave? why can i never manage to go anywhere without a major panic attack over something trivial like "did i pack enough socks?" or "will i run out of things to read?". is it just me or do others do this too?
i attempted to alleviate said pre-departure panic somewhat tonight by taking myself off to the "kandinsky: the path to abstraction" exhibition at the tate modern, which i have to say was bloody marvellous. really perked me up. composition vi in particular totally blew me away. then i decided "what the hell" and went and checked out the pierre huyghe exhibition too which was exceeding cool - dancing doors, neon signs and a funky animatronic albino penguin - how could it not be?
only problem is - now it's nearly 2.30am and i'm still not done with the pack'n'panic and i have to be attempting to wake up at six in order to make sure i'm up by 7 to be ready to leave by 8 (allowing 15 minutes final panic and 10 minutes bus-wait) to ensure i'm in good time to catch the 8.45 heathrow connect to get me to the airport by 9.20. hum. ain't a holiday grand?
heh. so i guess i should wave a fond farewell to my vox buddies for the moment. i'll be back in october, and will hopefully get my act together and get back to my flickr posting then too. xoxo.
on saturday i invested in the dvd of "zorba the greek" figuring we should watch it as preparation for the greek trip and because i'd heard it was an awesome movie. i think i saw it years and years ago, probably when i was way too young because i didn't actually remember any of it when we watched it on sunday - but wow! what an incredible film. i'm pretty sure we're not going to witness any stonings, throat slittings, disgracefully inebriated greek orthodox monks or people ransacking the houses of the newly deceased in the two days we're on crete, but i do have to say that 2 days later, i'm still thinking about this film and the philosophical approach to life it presents. i'm tempted to go forth and buy the book too...
today i borrowed a book from the library called greek in three months. i leave for crete in eleven days. gee whiz i hope they speak english.
