I guess we should have expected it, really. On May 15 we hiked to Marmari (Μαρμαρι) Beach, a 2 hour round trip on rough, hilly paths (plus half an hour of swimming and beachcombing).
Our reward was nice swimming and the filthiest beach I have ever seen. I don't directly blame anyone.
It seems that certain beaches are just well-positioned to catch every bit of floatsam around, and this is one of them: the litter on the beach was surely not the result of visitors to the beach, as the character of the debris wasn't right: not enough broken liquor bottles, too much stuff that looked like it washed overboard: milk crates, orphaned sandals, broken up plastic bits of just about anything imaginable, what looked like a marine transponder or radio, and so forth.
[Another reminder that I'm giving away a Flip Mino HD, courtesy of AXE, makers of fine body washes for teenaged men, and those who want to smell like them. I have had a chance to use both now, and can report that they both work surprisingly well. TLO's opinion of the "Shock" flavor have been notably positive. My tasting notes say the nose is good, with aromas of seaweed and menthol, and no bitter aftertaste. Or was that the wine from last night?
Today is my rest day from riding, and instead I did some gardening with my father-in-law. The "planting" we were doing involved, quite literally, breaking rocks with a pick in the hot sun. It was fun! It was fun because I only do that sort of thing once a year or so. Let's not dwell on it. Instead, some notes on my recent bike upgrades, which I put together the very first day we got to the house. Priorities!
Before:
After:
It's my ridiculous city bike.
This thing rocks. I've taken a basic 5-speed city bike and added just enough parts to make it into a happy set of wheels for Syros.
It does no good for me to pretend to have a special insight into Greece, its economy, its national character, or its current role as bête noire of the Eurozone. But I'm here, I was recently delayed by riots, and if I was shy about offering opinions based on scant evidence, well, what kind of bloggery would I be engaging in? I'm not a mommy, after all, so I can't tell you what my kids or my appliances did.
[Now with photos. Also, please to be entering contest and maybe winning Flip MinoHD (kindly provided by AXE) when I return. -RjC]
The ridiculous modern magic of air travel is seriously diluted by the real-world implementations of it.
That's not an amazing insight. But don't let it distract you from the modern magic that causes it: air travel is really, really cheap. Maybe even deliriously so.
So I left on a jet plane earlier this week, along with TLO and her parents. We had the misfortune to be traveling to Athens via Frankfurt, and on the very day when a general strike closed the Athens airport (and later in the day, saw three people die when an associated protest march turned riotous and firebomby).
With our FRA-ATH flight cancelled, the YVR Lufthansa people advised us (surely correctly) to just fly into Frankfurt and take pot luck with the next day's flights.
