Buona Pasqua

I know it is a bit late for an Easter blog, but the Interweb was wonky and well, you get the idea.

So, Easter is probably the biggest holiday for Italy; maybe Christmas is bigger but Easter is a big deal. Here it is celebrated with all sorts of church things, as well as an immensely huge feast on Easter Monday. So Sunday we had tons of work in the kitchen washing dishes and prepping food for 77 guests and family. Yikes. And that went fine: good food and a really great time in the kitchen with the Italian staff. We were blessed to sit at the family table and enjoyed the thoroughly Italian experience.

On Monday, the Italians, or Calabrians, as they are proud to announce down here, arrived for lunch. The whole morning was spent preparing food. Antipasta, two pasta courses, pork leg slow roasted in a wood oven and countless other tasks. We were to host 75 this time and only for lunch. They began to arrive around 1pm in their obviously expensive cars. Immediately their presence was felt as high fashion and arm charms guzzled wine and beer and loud chit chat was overheard from the heated kitchen.

The courses came rolling out just as promised, and were promptly devoured almost as they hit the table. There were a large amount of bambini crying about, big hair and gold everywhere. When the pork finally emerged from the oven everyone popped out cameras and started paparazzing. After two or three hours of eating and maybe 25 litres of wine, the guitar was born. All the luncheon party began to sing songs of the region, canciones Calabrese. Nice. It was fun to listen to as we washed and dried and put up hundreds of dishes.

One ominous fellow overheard me speaking English in the bowels of the kitchen and approached me with a stern Hello. He was curious what we as Americans were doing so far south here. I was curious about the huge half moon scar on his face. Needless to say my curiosity did not seek an answer.

Everyone all full up from wine and food spilled outside for more drinks and song. This lasted till around 5pm or so when everyone gave a hearty Ciao and lunged into their cars to speed off to God knows where. All except one poor fellow in a brilliant black Armani. He had the unfortunate religious experience of the technicolor yawn right there in the carpark. He was cool though; after paying his respects he promptly alerted andiamo, jumped into the driver's seat and sped off, sending the limestone flying. A colorful bunch those southerners.

We are looking forward to our last few days here at lovely PiraPora. And also ahead to AsvaNara, the horse farm near Arezzo. We will also spend a couple days in Rome and Florence. From there we will finally say goodbye to Europe, Asia and Africa and hello once again to... Jamacia! What!!! Yeah, we figured after such a grueling year away from home we should do ourselves a favor and lounge on the beach for a couple weeks.

Haters gonna hate.

Peaches and cream baby.

Love and Peace to all!

[Editor's Note: the picture was taken of a creche in a cave at the bottom of the rock wall holding up Tropea... leftover from Christmas and a real treat to see at the end of the 198 steps we walked down to reach the beach.]

Mama Mia!

It is nice to have a birthday; it means you have survived another year on the planet and beaten the odds. Well, Big C had a good one this year. I think she reached the point where you stay the same age each year, maybe not. [Editor's Note: Absolutely not. I am happy to be 37 and won't stop counting for a long time yet.] Anyway we all went into Tropea for the day. We usually don't have weekdays off but we worked extra the previous week in exchange for a few days off around her birthday. This was worth it, but the work was hard. Not like mentally challenging, like chain gang, cool hand Luke hard. Sifting and moving 4 yards of limestone gravel and spreading it all over using my wheelbarrow. My good old carryola. Anyway, off to Tropea we went.

The weather cooperated and it turned out to be a beautiful day. We ate pizza and gelato, chilled out on the beach, checked out some old cathedrals and snuck glances at the Al Pacino's in their track suits adorned with gold chains. It was super fun.

Since we are not close to any gift stores we decided to make presents this time. Isaiah made a wooden bookmark that said I Love My Mom on it. Diego made a mosaic drawing on a card that had nice things to say about mom. I made a small statuette of a woman from a piece of old olive tree from Nonna's farm. Olive wood is insanely hard; had I known this before I started, it would have been made from pine.

The guests have arrived and are all German... maybe an Austrian family too. Lots of kids running around as if they had never been outside in their lives, or had just gained entrance to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. We all eat together in a large restaurant in the evenings around 7. However we sit at a side table in a smaller alcove while the guests all jumble around a long table, Viking style. We sort of feel like the Patrick Swayzee's (God rest his soul) of Dirty Dancing.

We have taken to the work here and have something new to do almost every day. Cadence especially likes helping in the restaurant. The staff here are really cool. The carpenters are just like any where else: trash talkers and beer swillers. The kitchen work is good, and Stefana the chef is great. Enza does breakfast and we help with orange juice and bread. I got to work with Master Cono the builder on the pergola outside Giovanni's house. After a bit of glaring and mad dogging he said he would like to come to America and work with me there.

Pasqua is coming up this weekend and it will be very busy with guests, many Italian. Also there is all sorts of traditional food served at this time. Leg of lamb, some other stuff, and these little raisin pies that Cade helped make. Like 1,000 or so. Johnny, (thats what we call Giovanni) has had me working on this old table his uncle made a century ago trying to get it ready for the weekend. I think it will be done by 5 or 6 tomorrow. It took something like 30 days of sanding and one kilo of putty to fix up the top. Hundred year old walnut that was previously a painting in an old church; now it's the top of this old table. I signed it.

That's about it folks.

Lots of love to all our friends and family around the world! A special big love to Grandma Irene. We're thinking of you Grandma!

Springtime in Calabria

Ah, to sit and relax under an orange tree during the heat of the day. Watch the sunset over the volcanic island of Stromboli as it quietly smokes away. Take eggs from the chickens and at Nonna's lead the goats out past the olive trees to eat the fava leaves. Hike down the washout to the Marinella and cook sausages and fish right from the sea. Brave the cool Med and swim to the crashing rocks. A glass of wine with a splash of water, fresh homemade cheese from Nana, soprosseto, anduilla, zucchini pate, a rare homebrew beer, hot bread, and always extra virgin organic olive oil.

The food here is really good, mostly vegetarian, but delicious. When we do get the chance to eat fish, pork or beef, we do so like pirates, throwing ourselves into it.

We are working much as things get going and we prepare for tourists to arrive on the 15th. There is a large workcrew here at the moment: two carpenters and a mason from a neighboring village. Italian, Libyan, and Romanian. Also two cleaning ladies have arrived, one Argentinian and the other Italian. Us and the four other PiraPora owners round out the crew, and it will be a pretty tight squeeze to get everything done by said time. Besides moving boulders, chainsawing wood, burning bonfires and raking acres of grass, I have been given the task of fixing an ancient table, while Cade built a giant, rad herb spiral. The table top was shot so we looked around the farm and found an old painting on wooden planks that had lost its paint decades ago. The wood is olive and in two massive slabs. It came from an old church that was demolished 50 years ago. If the nails I pulled out tell correctly, it is pre 1820. And sitting out in the rain for decades has only given it the slightest bit of rot. So, now it is the top for the new serving table. It is almost finished and will look really cool when done. The carpenters here took a good look at it and finally approved.

We work six days a week about 5 hours a day normally. However this week we are working more to help get everything ready. This we will exchange for a few days off next week. So far on our one day off per week, which has been Sunday thus far, we have gone to the Marinella.

The Marinella is a beautiful little cove you have to walk to from the back of the train station. A well beaten path takes you down, down to the beach. About a 15 minute walk with a 3 year old. Once here we pop some beers, start a fire, grill sausages and bread, fish if we have it, and chill out all day. I guess the place is a bit more packed in the summer but so far it has just been us. This last Sunday I went swimming for a bit. The water is begining to warm from its long cool over the winter, and had I remembered my goggles, I would have stayed in for longer.

We love it here. Everyone is super cheerful and the view is postcard material. Our time is up here around May 15th. We will head north to Rome for a bit of tourism and then on to a horse farm in Tuscany that has accepted us for a couple weeks. Maybe a day or two in Sicily before we head north... we will see. Enshalla.

Hoping the best to all!

Ciao!

PiraPora

Well, here we are in the south of Italy. It was no easy task to get here. We said goodbye to our friends in Crete and boarded the ferry around 8 pm. Normally it leaves at 9 but on this occasion it waited till midnight before departure. I am guessing some military reason, seeing as Crete is so close to Libya. Anyway it didn't really matter and in fact worked out for the better for us as we got to Piraeus at 8:30 am instead of 5:30. We knew where the bus stop to the Athens airport was and were at the ticket counter by 11 am. Our flight was set to leave at 1. We arrived in Rome an hour flight later and sat around for a three hour layover in the lovely Roman airport. After faffing around for a while we flew to the little airstrip of Lamezia Terma. This flight was delayed an hour for security reasons. A short taxi ride, whose driver tried to scam us by saying the train did not go to Zambrone, took us to the train station. The scammer taxi driver turned out to be almost right as we had only 5 minutes to catch the last train of the night. It was a 40 minute train ride and about 8 pm when we were greeted by our hosts here in Italy.

There are two brothers and their respective families living on the agrotourism farm PiraPora. There are 3 really nice huge dogs and 4 kids besides our own, ages 3-16. Many kinds of fruit trees, sweet lemons like lemonade lemons, olive trees and huge garden space make up the farm here. They also farm another parcel farther down the hill from us at their parents house. Many chickens provide eggs and the farm is self sufficient enough that shopping at the store is rarely done.

It is stunning here. Quiet and peaceful, and immensely beautiful. The sea is a 20 minute walk down the hill and the train runs every hour to the south and north. We went to the ancient town of Tropea on Saturday for market shopping and just dinking around. Tropea sits up on a huge cliff above the sea some 300 feet. Super tiny streets and good gelato and pizza, although it is rather touristy. There is a museum there and an over abundance of dudes in track suits with gold chains. Really.

We have spent the first week here cutting back the hundreds of trees and burning huge bonfires. This must be done at this time of year to prevent fires in August. We are working about 4 hours a day from 8:30 or 9 til 1 or 1:30, six days a week. We take lunch together with everyone and have eaten well since our arrival, everything fresh and homemade. Sausages are made here when the pig is slaughtered and wine is made in October, 2000 litres. This is all part of our reimbursement for working. What a deal!

When we have time we go to the beach. This Sunday we will all go for the day and have a fish fry at one of their favorite places. We have til the middle of May here and plan to explore as much of the region as we can. Hopefully Sicily and Rome as well.

Everyone here is great, friendly and working together. Language is not a problem as everyone speaks English, although they speak Italian together. And now we are learning a bit of it. The tourists begin to arrive in mid April and we have much to do until then to get the place ship shape.

Ciao bella!

Poli Oreo Skala

So I hope everyone figured out the last blog title was Greek for Crete. This one means "very beautiful stairs." And they are. It took us about 6 days and an average of 3 people working 8 hours a day or so to complete it. In the end we had a handmade log cabin staircase built almost entirely from eucalyptus trees, which had been cleared by our friend a few years ago when he built the road up to his home. Everyone helped to strip the bark, sand, and stain the wood. We used a small chainsaw and a grinder plugged into a gas generator to make all the cuts. A large knife was used to strip the bark. It was a fun project and the stairs turned out good and strong in the end.

The weather sort of cooperated with us but was a bit cool... not totally uncommon for Crete in March. We still managed to get to the beach at Tris Iklesis for a giant pork roast and some swimming, (go Iz!) in the Med.

We also checked out Knossos, which must have really been something in its day. The road we took to get there took us past a part of Crete famous for wine. Back in Minoan times an aquaduct was built here to ferry wine barrels down the hill to the palace of Knossos. The palace is in a state of semi rebuild; it houses some incredible murals and giant rooms and pots. You could look through grates in the floor to the fabled maze below. We were lucky to arrive at a time when there were only about 5 or 7 other people there. We were told this is usually not the case and as we got ready to leave, tour bus after tour bus came rolling into the parking lot with dozens of camera laden tourists. Lucky.

As we head to Athens, and then Italy we are looking forward to the chance of doing some work at Pirapora, as well as looking back to the wonderful time we had working and touring around here in Crete. Efkharisto poli to our lovely hosts and friends here in a bit of paradise. We are all glad we had the chance to explore this ancient outpost and recomend it highly!

Next up: Last stop...

KPHTH

Who would have thought we would have to come to the south of Crete to experience our first and hopefully only snowfall of the year. And in March; and a total blizzard. Oh well, the Cretans say it is good luck. I am just glad our friends have a wood stove.

Isaiah and Diego had a big snowball fight and made a snowman. We enjoyed the amazing view from our friend's home, at the top of the village of Pirgos. The house is entirely made of stone in the fashion of the Minoans. Our Cretan friend has worked with stone for years and has also worked on many archeological sites here in Crete, including Knossos. The house is spacious and beautiful, poli oreos!

Crete is incredibly beautiful, full of huge mountains that are covered in snow, thanks to the blizzard. Pirgos is almost the southern most village on the island, aside from Tris Iklesias which sits on the sea. About one hour directly south of Irakleon, it rests on a small mountain on the southern side of a huge valley bordered by giant mountains north, south, east, and west. There are maybe 1000 residents here, all related or close friends. And at least one of them speaks English. The food is so fresh, all from people's gardens, and everyone is real friendly. We have met many friends and family of our friends, and have been treated like family in every occasion.

The home we are staying in is not quite complete but has every convienence except electricity, which is not really a problem. Candles and a gas lamp do pretty well and we can charge phones, cameras, and the messiah at our friend's mom's house nearby. To top it off, our friend has some 400 gallons of homemade wine... amazingly good, organic homemade wine.

So far we have explored a bit of Chania, a beautiful port town where our ferry docked. Also the ruins of Gortyn, which contains the oldest written legislative text in Europe. Phaestos was another ruin we explored; this is an ancient Minoan city of the same time period as Knossos. Phaestos was cool, set on top of a small mountain with 360 degree views. We went to Matalla, a beach town with Roman tombs carved into the sandstone cliffs on one side. Agia Galini, another beach town that our friend went to to be a fisherman at the age of 13. Also Tris Eklisies, probably the southern most town, a fishing village with 50 or so houses. Here lives another friend, a part time fisherman who comes on the weekends from Irakleon. We played on the deserted beach, littered with goat bones, and then were treated to a feast of spaghetti and fish. So fresh it was still moving, almost.

We are working here, helping our friend with things around his home. Planting seeds and sorting them too, hundreds of varieties. Also building a staircase to the second story using huge eucalyptus trees. Log cabin style.

We have fallen hard for Crete. Everyone is so nice, the food is delicious, the scenery is so beautiful it seems fake, and aside from the freak snowstorm, the weather is close to perfect. What else? The soil is prime for growing, there are ancient ruins, gorgeous beaches, music and dancing (graceful big dudes). The work we are doing is rewarding, and honestly, we don't want to leave. We have a week or so more and it is obvious it will not be enough. We are already trying to figure out how to come back. Well, we have a staircase to build and the maze of the Minotaur to explore still. Also Irakleon and maybe camping at the beach.

As they say here in Crete, "A ti yamas!

Hoshchakal Istanbul!!!!

The freezing weather made it harder to do all the sightseeing, but we still did quite a bit. We explored many neighborhoods, palaces, statues, yeah whew! Now we are getting ready to fly to Athens. From here we will take a shuttle to Piraeus, a port town where we catch a ferry to Crete. The ferry is 10 hours or so and overnight as well. We get a sleeper cabin with a little window. It will be a bit of a hike to get there but we have some great friends awaiting our arrival. I have no idea if internet will be close by to us so we may have a bit of catch up to do once we get plugged back in.

I know it is redundant to say again but we love Istanbul soooo much! This city rules, and it has been even better because of all the incredible people we have met while staying at PlanetPaprika Hostel. Hostels are cool, with more of a community feeling than at a typical hotel; and generally filled with great people doing all sorts of different things. We met a couple really fun guys from New York; one is now living in Riyadh working as a consultant. The other guy is from Brooklyn and has traveled all over, so cool. An Iranian doctor was so nice to talk to and hear about her home. There were Germans and Italians, Dutch and French, Syrian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Turks, jeez who did I miss. Oh yeah, Australians too. Anyway, everyone had great stories about where they were from and what they were doing. It was so great to get to know all of them and go eat, dance, shoot pool, and check out the city together. Hello to all of you!! We feel so blessed to have met you all and for the chance to get to know you a bit. This world is small and if you happen to find yourselves in our neck of the woods one day, look us up!!

As we look ahead to the next bit of our journey it is hard to avoid glimpsing the finish line. It has been quite a while but we still have some amazing things to do. Home is in our minds... but only just. Crete and Italy are calling!!