Monday 28 November 2011

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

Autumn on the road in the Peleponnese

While we are touring around the small mountain roads of the Peleponnese, Minas often sees something that reminds him of his youth. It may be a tree, a bush or a plant but it usually has something to do with eating. I am typically admiring the scenery, enchanted by the Fall colours and lost in a reverie of one kind or another. Then the car screeches to a halt, pitching me forward, and Minas says, " I just saw something" and leaps out of the car. I get no more information than that and I am left wondering whether this thing he saw is animal, vegetable or mineral.

What are these fruits?
This happened just the other day on a dirt road through the Taygetos Mountains.
Minas "saw something" and by the time my feet were on the ground he was deep into some bushes hung with tiny red fruit. As I reached him, he mumbled enthusiastically, despite the red juice dripping down his beard, "Have some -- they are delicious". But what are they? Will I be poisoned? ...... Is there the Greek equivilent of Montezuma's revenge on the horizon for me? .. maybe just a sore tummy and a lost night's sleep. Whatever! I dove right in and consumed a number of the mystery fruit. They were.... interesting!! Not terribly tasty but quite juicy and with a pleasant texture. They would have made a nice jam.

Minas shows the ones that he left
What were they? We asked and were told first that they were called "mura" in Greek. Later this was amended to " koumara". In any case the dictionary translated  'mura' as mulberry although they look nothing like the internet picture of a mulberry. They did, however, grow on a bush and I suppose that we did look like the monkey and the weasel as we ate our way around the bush. Luckily there was no nasty aftermath of our road-side snack.


Cactus fruit anyone?
Not more than a day later, Minas did another "screech to a halt" just when I was admiring a grove of olive trees laden with fruit.  This time it was a stand of cactus with each paddle tail sporting a fat red fruit - very attractive and very prickly. This time I stood and watched as Minas took his trusty knife and cut each fruit off ; dropping it into a plastic bag. At home he removed the prickles, peeled each red globe and stored them in a tupperware container in the fridge. I got one cut up in my breakfast cereal the next morning. Another interesting fruit with a little more taste but many, many small seeds. Good roughage, I guess.

Closer to the village, when we go for walks on the hills we find lots of good eats lying on the road or not far off it.
Cathy picks up walnuts

the three stages of walnuts
Although walnut season was past when we arrived here in mid October, just this past week we found a tree overhanging some green space next to the village water cistern.  The tree was on the private property of obviously 'summer only' residents but the nuts were clearly on the public side of the fence.
They were hard to spy with all the fallen leaves especially as some were in their green coats, some in the already turned brown coats and some 'au naturel' as we know them. After two visits to the tree we now have enough walnuts for Christmas and beyond. Delicious they are, as Minas whacks them apart with a small stone against our stone balcony floor. They are so fresh and to me there is a green grass taste so different than ones that have been sitting in 'bulk bins' for months.

Cathy holds prickly chestnuts
And we still are tempted to continue picking up the last few chestnuts we find on the road even though the commercial growers have just finished their work . We enjoy them roasted most afternoons, but we still have several baskets of them left. I heard today that you can preserve them just as good as fresh-picked if you bury them in river sand and place them in a moist, dark place with no mice or rats to eat them. YIKES!

Minas covets this sign. Will I let him steal it?
Of course there are some things along the sides of the roads that are of interest to Minas but that I really don't think fall into the 'gathering category'. One of these things is a particularly beautiful road. sign. Translated it reads:
CAUTION Danger of fire!
He is even contemplating buying a battery operated drill so that he can dismantle it from its support. What  would he do with it even if he managed to steal it and then smuggle it out?

Goats cross the road

However, we don't gather all living things along the road. These goats have a definite mind of their own. And they make you stop while they cross to nibble their favourite things. It does give you a chance to see if there is anything you might want to snack on in the vicinity.






And gathering rosebuds you ask. Well would you accept rosehips embedded in chestnuts in a vase? 

Rosehips in chestnuts in a vase fill a corner in the apartment

Cheers until next time when we explore real food for people from the local markets.



Monday 21 November 2011

The Rhythm of a Village

Karyes as seen from the clock tower

No matter where you go in the world there are some commonalities to daily life and there are some differences. We have been trying to adjust ourselves to the way the day evolves in our Greek village under the banner of, "When in Rome......."
Karyes  has no mayor,  no village council, no committee of representatives but it is ruled nonetheless by a very large and imposing fellow.

The Karyes clock tower. The time is wrong but the bells are right
The major domo of our village is none other than the clock tower which sits at the top of the village.
It chimes out the number of bells, on the hour, all through the day and the night and it tolls out one bell on each half hour too. If you have one of those nights where you wake up at 3 am and can't get back to sleep then our clock lets you know just how long you have been awake.  In our early days in the village, it was the clock who alerted us to the fact that the time had fallen back by one hour. It took us all day to figure it out but by 6 pm, the time change, announced by the clock, was verified by the TV. Our clock is sometimes annoying but always helpful.

The church dominates the village skyline as you approach Karyes
In most of the French villages we have visited, it was the church that tolled the hours and was the centre of the village. Karyes has several churches. The two main churches:one in the lower village and one in the upper village take turns having Sunday services. We usually go to church when we live abroad but so far  the three hour Sunday morning service beginning at 7:30 am has seemed a little daunting and in the Greek language too. The main church on the upper platia  was built with money sent back by villagers working abroad. The group in Toronto sent such a sizeable sum that the Greek orthodox bishop of  Toronto came here to consecrate the church at its opening.

But the heart and soul of this village can be found in the central platia with its three cafenions and two tavernas, the church and the town hall. Here the day is marked, here the villagers gather and here you get a true sense of the village.

The platia at Karyes
The day starts early with the crowing of the rooster who lives next door and the sounds of gunshots echoing in the hills where it is boar hunting season for the locals. The  trucks are soon pulling out of the village and by 8 am, the children are walking to school. The local grocery shops open a little later and stay open until 2 pm. They close for three hours and re-open from 5 pm until 8 pm. Although the old men sit in the cafenions most of the morning and afternoon, the really busy times are between noon and 2 pm and between 6 and 8 pm. I don't really know the working hours of all the professions but it is consistent in any town to find the cafenions  crowded in those two time periods.


There is also a weekly rhythm to our village. Sunday is a special day not only because of the church services but because it is the day when families go out for lunch --- at 2 pm.
The taverna on the platia in Karyes
We have learned to eat later and we have plans to do Sunday lunches out. A few weeks ago we went at 1 pm to the taverna for lunch. 
It was crowded then; but by 2 pm people were waiting outside in the sunshine for a table to become available. Many were outsiders from a nearby city out for a drive and a rustic lunch in the country. And a hearty lunch of roast lamb and potatoes, local wine and bread it was. It was good that we had just been for a bike ride. But when we went for a walk at 4:30 pm, the taverna was still busy with folks.  In village Greece, they take Sunday lunch seriously.

the only diners outside at Kastanitsa
And so, we try to fit in. It is useless to think about going on a tour in the afternoon so we have learned to go in the morning. We come back for lunch late or we stop for a 2 pm lunch if we are far from home.
We often go to a cafenion at 5 or 6 pm for a tea called chai too voo noo or tea of the mountain which is really a wild sage type plant. We bought some in a nearby village and when not at the cafenion we make our own at home to go with our scavenged chestnits which we roast.

We are not used to living close to other people but the village is friendly and the noises are mostly of a natural kind. The wind often howls around the old stone houses much like the French mistral. The hunting dogs, kept chained, often set up their protests and the stray cats can yowl into the night. Several times a week, farmers drive their little trucks through the village announcing produce for sale through their megaphones; workers  are re-building a stone house nearby and we hear the saws and the hammers all day long . Georgis, one of the workers, who spent two years in Toronto has an endearing habit of driving by and calling out of his truck window, "How are you, dear lady?". To which I reply, "Poli kala.." And then there is the village telephone. When you want your kids for supper, there is no need to phone their friends, you just open the door and call their names. The response is almost instantaneous. This works for discipline too. I have heard George, discipline his son, Costas, with a loud utterance of his name when the boys were getting into mischief such as they did when they let the old lady's chickens out. And George never even leaves the job site.

Kitty eats on our balcony
skittish kitty doesn't trust the camera
Everyone is very welcoming but the one who loves us  most is this little black cat who sleeps on our door mat  We  feed him each day but he is still quite skittish. Black cats are my favourite. Truffles grew up with my kids and a black stray kept us company at The Tobermory all summer. Perhaps this one is the Greek incarnation.

Ta Petrina is the apartment we stay in

  All in all, the rhythm of life in Karyes suits us well. Until next time, "Yassus" and "Adeeosus"


 


Friday 11 November 2011

Lost in the Peloponnese

the road stretches forward to Aghios Petros

One of the things we most enjoy doing is exploring small roads, enjoying the scenery, finding small interesting villages, stumbling upon unique experiences and sometimes even getting lost. And that is easy to do here in the mountainous Peloponnese.
On our first trip out, armed with what we thought was a decent map, we were following the yellow-marked roads through the mountains to the coast when all of a sudden we found ourselves on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. We persevered for several hours. Thirty kilometres later, the only creature that we had encountered was this magnificent beast.

Is this really a wild mountain sheep/goat?
It certainly looked like a wild goat to me but perhaps it was just one who was fed up with putting up with the rest of the herd. However he was happy to pose as I snapped his picture from the car window.
On our second outing we were a little smarter and turned around when we hit a dirt road, although we were forced to abandon our outing in favour of a quick trip home on the highway .  Then we bought a different map - one intended for hikers; with isometric lines and roads that are listed as paved or not. I use both the maps, one to see where we are headed and one for the details. Our GPS is rather useless for the small roads of Greece.

marking a fatal accident
One of the other aspects of driving along roads in Greece is the constant reminders of those who have lost their lives in automobile accidents. There are, of course, few safety barriers and the roads through the mountains are perched on steep cliffs and unavoidably consist of many hairpin curves. The Greek families who lose loved ones, erect interesting looking glass and wrought iron, or glass and concrete miniature houses on poles. Inside there are lamps, extra oil in bottles, pictures of the loved one and religious icons. They are a sombering influence as you round just about every curve on every road and especially moving when there is a cluster of them in one place. 

We have found that Canada does not have a monopoly on the beautiful colour display that is Fall.
This year we are managing to enjoy the colours twice:first at home in October and for the second time here in Greece. I marvel at the beauty of the lower forested slopes and the stark rocky contours of the higher mountains and valleys. Much of the orange colour comes from the chestnut trees which are being harvested right now.


We have more than enough chestnuts in our house and we haven't paid a penny for them. Instead we pick them up on quiet little roads where they drop from overhanging wild chestnut trees. Sometimes they are loose from their prickly covering and sometimes it takes a bit of an effort with feet and hands to free them from their jackets. They fill vases and baskets in our little house and we enjoy them, roasted, as appetizers most evenings.

chestnuts in their hairy shells on the road
Minas picks up chestnuts



                                                                                            

      

 But chestnuts are not the only treasure to be found. I gather pine cones and rose hips, wild sage and oregano and take photos of the tiny pink orchid like flowers that have sprung up in the most unusual places.
orchid -like flowers emerge from a bed of dry leaves


But for me, the best experiences on our tours in the wilds of the Peloponneses are the  chance encounters with locals who really want to meet you. If the Greek bureaucracy is archaic and frustrating then the people of this area are charming, welcoming and will bend over backwards to help you. They even want you to take their photograph. This is Evangelis, the shepherd, whom we met on the road between Aghios Petros and Vourvoura.  Minas struck up quite a conversation with him while I admired his sheep. It must be lonely being out on the hills all day long with only your sheep for company. Minas took several photos with his permission and then printed them, framed them in dollar store frames and left then at the καφνίων  (cafe ) as a present for the shepherd. The lady who ran the cafe was extremely impressed that we would do that. 

Georgia, the shepherdess of Aghios Petros
the mule driver

Here is Georgia , the shepherdess , whom  we met  just  outside  the  town  of  Aghios  Petros  and  who was delighted to have her picture taken. And this is the friendly mule driver, who signalled, "Please take my picture," as he was walking towards us on the road. 
I have the frames for these pictures on my Saturday shopping list for Sparta.

But the true enchantment of a tour in the wilds of the Peloponnese is to stumble upon a fairy-tale village, one stuck in a time warp, where real people live, where tourists rarely venture and which provides me with the thrill of discovery. When seen from afar you never know if it is just a cute picture or a real find. And find some we have, but that's a story for another day.








Friday 4 November 2011

The Blues

the man square of  upper Karyes

The village is pretty enough,  and the sun is shining so why am I in a blue funk?

I think it may have something to do with the language. I don't have any!! 
There is a reason for the phrase, "It's all Greek to me". Why is it so difficult?   I can't read the language, I can't hear anything that I can make sense of and I can't say a thing. So effectively I am deaf, dumb and mute in this country of Greece and I'll be here for six months! The worst of it is that people are so friendly and talk to me and all I can do is respond with my well practiced Greek phrase, "I'm sorry, I don't speak Greek." There I sit, with the conversation whirling around me. They look at me and all I can do is look back and smile. I feel so isolated. 
a road sign in the Pelopponnese
 Minas tells me that he could have bought me a book on learning Greek. It is called "Learn Greek ... in 25 Years". By then I will be dead but perhaps my efforts in this village will kill me first. In school we used to chant, "Latin is a language as dead as dead can be, First it killed the Romans and now it's killing me". Substitute the word Greek and you will get the idea.

And then there is the house. My darling sister-in-law said it looked somewhat like the size of our shed back home and indeed it is about 650 square feet. I was discouraged when I walked in. It is clean and it has good heating but the walls are bare and the kitchen is woefully inadequate. Unlike the quaint old houses in France where you could rummage around in spare rooms and cupboards and re-purpose old linens, pictures and lamps, this is a new holiday apartment. We have sacrificed charm for hot water.  The only cooking apparatus is a free-standing unit with an oven and two electric burners on top. Think a toaster oven on steroids and you will be in the right ballpark. Of course you can only use one burner at a time. and it takes up all the counter space. It is difficult to make meals - pasta takes one hour - and I can't imagine how we are going to produce Christmas dinner. The fridge is a small under-the-counter unit and the dishes are on open shelves; so I get my daily squats without ever going near a fitness class. All of this for a girl who likes order, functionality and aesthetically pleasing surroundings. Hence the blues.
What to do???

Number one is to pull up my socks and decide that I will learn some Greek.  I bought a notebook and Minas lettered the cover with Catherine Learns Greek
So I must start with the alphabet and summon up all that I remember of sorority and fraternity signs, all the Greek notation that I have forgotten from math and chemistry class and apply it to daily life here. It is interesting that I find the capital letters easier as we always taught children to read and write with an emphasis on lower case letters. Were we wrong or is it just that the capitals have more of a resemblance to English? That and some memory work is how I will begin. Wish me luck.

As for the house, a 6 hour round trip to IKEA in Athens for kitchen equipment,desks and lamps, a walk in the forest to collect rose hip sprays, pine cones and wildflowers, some colourful free wrapping paper from the store where we bought our printer and I am in business. Not finished but on my way to "nest-building", as my friend, Louise noted.

the living room
the kitchen end

But a village with three cafes and friendly folks where the sun shines all the time is not a bad place to spend the winter.
two cafes flank a barber shop in the square of Karyes