Merry Christmas, once again, dear reader from Crete. This time it’s a belated one, where in the last post the wishes were early. Greece’s main holiday is not Christmas, but I was pleased to see that some restaurants and cafes were decorated in old Town Chania. So what do you do, in a country where the main Holidays are Easter And August 15th which is the assumption of the Virgin Mary? Why, have the most fusion Christmas ever. My brother-in-law was adamant that he wasn’t going to do any cooking, which is fair enough as he does most of the cooking normally. So of course, my sister volunteered my services and asked me to make a Southern meatloaf like my mom used to make. It has become a bit of a specialty for me. We had about 16 people, 12 adults, and 4 kids. Since I thought I was the only one cooking, I planned for no other main dishes but mine. Two kilograms of ground beef and 2 kg of potatoes would have been just enough. Really it would have. But, dear reader, I told you that this was a Cretan Christmas.
One of my sister’s friends brought spinach pie, green beans, and some Christmas cookies. But there was another friend of my sister who really took the cake. And I mean that literally. He decided to make a salmon starter, a traditional British Christmas pudding from the previous year. But the kicker was 6.5 kg of pork. I was surprised that my meatloaf was the hit of the party and there was none left at the end. In contrast, there was a lot of pork.
In terms of presents, dear reader, it was a bit of a sparse year in terms of volume for me but I got a really nice new phone, a Samsung Galaxy Flip 3. I am currently trying to dictate a blog post to you on that phone, and I’m finding that switching from Apple to Samsung is a challenge. You’ll probably remember that the Tuesday before we left for Greece my phone fell on the ground and the screen cracked. I had been using jasper’s old phones until Christmas eve, which is when the Swedish Santa comes to bring one present to each member of the household. Mine was the phone. The functionality is much better than the one that I was using. And is different from my Apple. It is definitely going to take some getting used to. But all in all, I’m pretty happy with it. The only downside is that I still have six months left to pay off my Apple and I’ll also have to pay a deductible for the repair.
A mark on this perfect Christmas vacation is the lack of my sister Tatyana. And that’s even more so than my dad, who was the instigator of Jasper and I coming to Greece in the first place. The other mark on Christmas was the fact that I got a cold and lost my voice. Let me tell you, dear reader, dictating a blog post is not easy when you have no voice. This particular post has taken n hour to dictate. Voice to text is not accurate at the best of times, but it’s even worse when you can’t speak. I will say in comparison to Apple, Samsung is more accurate.
It really was a bit of a working vacation this week, but only 6 hours of teaching total, and most of those on Tuesday. I had to teach because I wasn’t going to take the chance that I was going to lose students. The teaching went well though it was a little bit difficult when there was a lot going on in the house, like trying to get ready for Christmas My sister’s house is pretty big, until, well, it isn’t. Such was the case when I was trying to teach on Friday when Jasper was getting a massage which I had bought him for Christmas. I had to move into the playroom so that he wouldn’t get in my way, nor I in his. And my student I suspect, would not have looked too kindly on that. Or last night’s student, who had to sit through my niece and nephew playing in the room while I was trying to teach. Luckily, it was ShinWei and he has a sense of humor and is a copasetic kind of guy.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
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