According to Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw, this is a joke every European knows

Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw’s  book, Europe 101: History & Art for the Traveler, contains this joke that everyone in our family thought was very amusing based on our experiences in some of these countries.

In Heaven:

• The chefs are French,
• The lovers are Italian,
• The mechanics are German,
• The policy are British, and
• Everything is run by the Swiss.

In Hell:

• The chefs are British,
• The lovers are Swiss,
• The mechanics are French,
• The police are Germans, and
• Everything is run by the Italians.

For your enjoyment.

A note about the blog technology I’ve used – WordPress.com and Windows Live Writer

If you’re not interested in the software used to create a blog, skip this post.  Its aimed at those who might be wondering how an amateur like me could put together a blog.

I hadn’t setup a blog before (but I’ve been reading them for a couple of years) and was inspired by my brother Jeff and his family’s blog of their trip to Europe in summer 2008.  Theirs was hosted on wordpress.com so when it came time for me to select a blog service provider, it was the only one I considered seriously.  I found plenty of documentation on the Web and it was quite simple to set up a (free) blog and use some of their web-based tools to create a few initial posts.

However, I knew that I would not have sufficient internet access to create and maintain the volume of blog posts I was expecting.  So I went looking for software that enabled blog posts to be created without internet access that would operate on the Windows XP-based, Lenovo T61 laptop computer we had along for the trip.

There were a surprising number of tools that supported these general requirements and many also supported programming interfaces of a number of the major blog service providers.  Since I’d already selected wordpress.com as my service provider, I limited my survey to those that offered this support.

To make a long story short, I downloaded and started to use Microsoft Windows Live Writer and have used it to create and maintain all of the posts on this blog.  I would recommend its ease of use and function for the types of posts you see on our blog and for use with WordPress.  Any problems I’ve had creating posts off-line and publishing to wordpress.com are probably explained by the quality and capacity of the internet connection I’ve used on our trip.

I’m looking forward to trying more Windows Live Writer features when I get home to update and add more content and will post more impressions.

Dec 17 – 19, 2008 – Gialova, Greece – Methoni Castle

A short drive south of Gialova, is a city called Methoni.  It looks like many of the other cities in the area – and not as cute as Pylos, but it has an old Byzantine castle that we explored on an afternoon drive through the area around Gialova.  It turned out to be very scenic.

For our family any place located on the ocean (or a sea) is automatically attractive and when that sea is breaking onto land, we get even more interested.  When the ocean is breaking against a centuries-old castle, its pretty much irresistible.  Methoni Castle had all these things.

This was one of our first views of the castle after we parked our car and walked 50 meters to the ocean.

Charlotte and Laura-Lyn walking towards the bridge over the moat that leads to the entrance to the castle.

The site was quite large and it was late in the day and we almost didn’t walk down to the end of it.  The castle was supposed to close at 1500 hours but it was already 1605 when we took this picture and we joked darkly about spending the night on the site if we went down and explored this end.  We were glad we did (and we didn’t get locked in!).

As we got closer to the edge of the castle grounds we could see this guard house through some gaps in the fortifications.  We headed towards an arch that looked like the way you got an unobstructed view.

But as we passed through the arch and emerged on the other side of the fortification, this was the view that greeted us – the Mediterranean surge passing through this arched bridge – very neat!

 

This was a photo of the surge as it approached the arched bridge.

This photo was taken from the guard house back towards the fortifications and the arched bridge and shows the surge  through the arches.

Dec 17 – 19, 2008 – Gialova, Greece – Bird sanctuary visit and ******** sighting

On the same day we visited the beaches, we also visited the bird sanctuary.  In other posts, I described the lake that is right next to the ocean that hosts a number of birds on either a year-round or migratory basis.

As I described in another post, the water at the bottom of the following photo is ocean, the body of water above it is the lake in the bird sanctuary, and the water at the top of the photo is a bay of the ocean that Gialova and Pylos are located near.  The pictures in this post are taken overlooking the lake in the bird sanctuary, the middle body of water.

Having spied the bird we’re interested in looking at more closely from the high ground with our binoculars, Charlotte and I are walking along the edge of the lake to get closer.

On our way we passed some herons or egrets that we’ll need our friend Warren Drinnan to help us identify.  But we have birds that look similar to these in Western Canada.  Our real target was a different species, one that doesn’t get as far north as Canada and we had not seen in real life before.

Our real quarry was flamingoes.  We’d heard from our guide books that we were at the right time of the year and George, host at Mylos Apartments, confirmed that there had been flamingo sightings.  We saw this group feeding and headed towards them.  The light shapes, in the distance, at the middle left of this photo are another flock.

When feeding, they stick their heads under the water and for much of the time we were watching them, all 9 or 10 birds in the flock were doing that.  As we got closer, they seemed to sense us and stopped feeding.  First they walked towards the sand bar and gave Allister the chance to take these excellent photos.

As they reached the sand bar they took flight and showed us the beautiful dark highlights of their wings.  After a short flight to the other part of the lake they settled into the water and started to feed again.

Their new feeding spot was more in the middle of the lake and not a place we could walk for another viewing so we gave thanks for our luck and headed back to the beach.

Dec 17 – 19, 2008 – Gialova, Greece – Natural beauty and its beaches

One of our days in Gialova we headed out in the car to look at the surrounding area.  There had been heavy rains and thunder during the night but the day was cloudy with lots of sunny breaks and temperatures approaching 20C.

Signs directing you to the sights is not a strong suit of the Greeks, and Gialova was no exception.  However, its hard to hide the ocean and beaches are only found near it so we headed in that direction using the roads we could find and came up on this beach – sandy and strewn with rocks that appeared to be sandstone or some other type of stone that eroded with wind and water.

Here is a picture of Charlotte and Allister on this beach.  They could have happily spent hours here.  A great beach.

I liked this photo – it looks as though it was posed – but if you think that, you don’t these two.

We then drove further along and walked up a height of land and had this view.  I’d like to explain something about this picture.  It consists of different bodies of water.  The first body of water in the foreground is a bay of the Mediterranean that we explored a little later that day.  The second body of water, in the middle, is a lake that was part of the Gialova bird sanctuary (more about this in another post).

The final body of water is the Mediterranean Sea, in the form of a large bay, guarded by the island at the right of the picture.  Both Gialova and its neighbor city, Pylos, are located on this bay.  Very scenic.

At the top of the hill where we took the picture above, a small church looked out to sea.  LL went in this church (it was unlocked) and was obviously still active.

This is another view of the first body of water in the picture above.  It is a beach that the Gialova tourist brochure says the New York Times described as one of the "10 best beaches in the world".  It was scenic with its opening to the Mediterranean and waves lapping on the sandy beach.

One thing that detracted was seaweed washed up on the sand.  Laura-Lyn thought that seaweed lived at sea but died in the winter and some washed up on the shores.  She wondered if winter storms would sweep the beach clean of this algae so that it was clear again for next summer.

Another view of the beach.  Its easier to see the dead seaweed in this picture.

Dec 17 – 19, 2008 – Gialova, Greece – Sights from our stay

The next stop on our round-the-Peloponnese tours is Gialova (see this Google map link for its location).  Its a stop on our way to Olympia and back to the east coast of the peninsula.  Its claim to fame is its location near a picturesque small town named Pylos, its distinctive setting and natural beauty that includes unique beaches, and a bird sanctuary. 

When we arrived in Gialova, George, our host at Mylos Apartment told us a special bird had been sighted at the sanctuary.  More on this in a separate post.

This is a picture of the Mylos apartments that George rented to tourists or Greeks that visited Gialova.  We had the top two floors of the middle (stone-faced) apartment.  Lots of space and a good price, even for Greece!

We were right in the middle of the olive harvest.  Behind our apartment was an olive grove and on our first day here, people were working in the grove.  They seemed to harvest the olives by shaking the branches and collecting the fallen olives on tarps laid out on the ground.  They also pruned the olive branches at the same time and manually picked olives from the pruned branches.

They packed the olives in sacks like these and delivered them to what appeared to be an olive co-op where they would be packed for shipment.  The olive growing industry seemed very decentralized – all kinds of people grew olives on different sized plots of land.  Another type of processing that we saw in both Italy and Greece was the making of olive oil.  Olives (probably a specific type) would be picked and then transported to a place where the olives would be ground into oil.  We didn’t see this but had it described to us.

George, our host at the Mylos apartments, also had a stake in an orange grove.  On each of the first two days of our visit he brought us at least six huge oranges.  We ate nothing but oranges while we were there but they were excellent.  In Canada, the largest oranges are often not as juicy or have more membrane – not these oranges – they were as good as the best small oranges we’ve tasted in Canada.

One of the kid’s home schooling assignments was a report on Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece.  During our time in Gialova, they got started on organizing all the material we had collected and writing the report.

Here I’m hard at work on blog posts.  I wanted to enough information available in time for Christmas so that our families and friends could share our experiences during the holidays.

As we were leaving, George’s wife insisted on giving us a bottle of wine as a parting gift (oh, OK.)  She told us her daughter, who lived in Pylos, had grown the grapes and made the wine.  Just another example of Greek hospitality that was the best we experienced on our trip.

After all their exertions, Charlotte and Allister share a moment of repose on our way to Olympia.