And just like that, August is almost over. Been a good one too! The weather's been fine, mostly, but nothing like the week we spent in Greece! Which has to be the absolute highlight of the last few weeks :).
Now, despite coming close a few times, I've never actually spent any time in Greece. (No, the transit through Athens airport does not count :).) So when the invite for a friend's wedding appeared, it was not a difficult decision. Especially given the surprisingly affordable direct flights between Oslo and Thessaloniki.
Now, you might be thinking, if this was a first trip to Greece, surely the places to go to would be the properly famous bits in and around Athens? Or the famous Santorini perhaps? Well, the wedding was happening in Halkidiki, in the north. In what the Greeks insist on calling Macedonia and the (North) Macedonians had to end up changing their country name over. So we figured why not just explore this part of Greece!
Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece and as such does rather seem to go on forever! We ended up spending the first half of our week-long stay there. We had originally thought to spend at least one of those days driving around to explore the countryside outside the city, but the mesmerizing spread of old and new meant we decided to spend all the time we had just exploring the older part of the city on foot! As an added plus, the majestic if somewhat camera-shy Mount Olympus was a permanent fixture on the horizon :).
Firstly, there are the layers of history to the place. All the way from Alexander the Great and the ancient Greeks, through the Roman Empire and early Christian times, through the middle ages, the Ottoman Empire and finally post liberation modern Greece. (Which is only apparently about a couple of hundred years old! Mind-bogglingly, for me at least, this actually means that modern Greece is actually a younger political entity than the USofA!)
Then there is the way in which said history coexists in the streets, parks and cafes of Thessaloniki. In the middle of bustling thoroughfares, there are exposed architectural ruins of various ages. The cuisine is clearly (once you've dug a little) a mix of ancient and more recent influences. And even the buildings all around seem to be a random mix of Byzantine and modern with smatterings of everything in between!
Then of course there was the food! Oh how I love Mediterranean food :). And it wasn't just that the moussaka and the soutzoukakia that I was already vaguely aware of was just better in Greece, but the sheer variety of flavours! From stuffed vine leaves to eggplant fried in various ways, from amazing salads to odd stacked pancakes, from Greek yogurts and cheeses, to ouzo, to local made beers and desserts, the more we experienced, the more the world of Greek food seemed to enchant us and open more doors for us :).
Yup, it really was that good :).
Of course, there was also the heat. But to be honest, being right next to the Aegean and seeing how things never really got much worse than 34 degrees Centigrade at any point, it wasn't that bad after the first couple of days. We did, in very non-European tourist fashion, retired in the middle of the afternoon each day.
We'd start in the mornings, take in some part of the city and then by not long after midday find somewhere nice for a long and leisurely lunch. Then we'd head back to our rented apartment and only emerge once the heat of the afternoon started to abate and stay out till the early hours of the morning :).
Almost made me feel like I was back in India :). An odd feeling of something almost like home-sickness hit me the first evening as we sat on our balcony above a narrow street with a narrow view of the sea, and a sudden rain shower proceeded to pound down onto the awning and blur the world around us. The particular smell of fresh rain wetting hot tarmac and concrete :).
All that was only half the week though :). We then decided to take a very circuitous route down to Paliouri, closer to where the wedding was to take place. On-route, we experienced just how hilly the northern bit of Greece can be! And how wiggly the roads are. Provided one avoids the big motorways, of course :).
The wedding of course was gorgeous :). But Paliouri itself, and the outer parts of the Kassandra peninsula, were amazing in their own right. The polar opposite of Thessaloniki, Paliouri is a pretty small town. Mainly serving as a residence of most of the staff serving the many resorts and hotels littering the coastline of the peninsula.
Here the food was even more fun to explore, life much more languid and the beaches beautiful and accessible. Given we ate a few dinners in the middle of town, we got to notice how the locals seem to be fond of eating out in large groups. The food was almost always ordered for the table with everyone around just picking and sharing as they liked (again, very reminiscent of Indian restaurants). There were always groups of kids playing on the streets while the parents relaxed and chatted at their tables. All in all a very different and chilled out pace of life :).
Oh, it also provided the opportunity of the perfect swim in the sea. You know, the kind where you walk into the water and after the briefest moment of chill, the water feels just the perfect temperature to go all in :).
Eventually it was time to make our way back to Thessaloniki for the flight back, but we made the most of the day driving back hugging close to the coast and stopping occasionally to get a bit more of a feel for the place.
Sadly, the late flight back meant all the regular modes of transportation were long gone once we made it out of Oslo airport. So we did the sensible thing and just checked into one of the airport hotels to sort of extend the holiday just a little bit, get some sleep and a good old Norwegian hotel breakfast before heading back home again :).
Compared to that, there's not really been that much else going on to be honest :). But I have been reading more Banks. So, it took me a little bit longer than I'd have expected to get through Excession. Not because I didn't like it, but because it felt like this was a book better read in longer stretches. Snatching a few pages here and there, on trains and so on, I had to keep going back and forth a bit, to catch some of the references.
This, again, was a completely different sort of story to the previous Culture books. Again, in a good way :). Here, finally, the Minds had their say. The pan-human and other species characters took more of a back-seat in some ways. True to form, I needn't have bothered going back and forth to keep things straight in my head, because Banks would subtly and carefully help out by explain just enough so you didn't feel lost. But I really wanted that thrill of having figured some of it out for myself already :). Fortunately, there wasn't quite the bombshell ending as in Use of Weapons. If anything, things were rather tame, but overall, another greatly enjoyable read.
Inversions, initially, doesn't even feel like a Culture novel at all! But I'm convinced one or more of the characters are actually Contact. Maybe even Special Circumstances. The hints are there, and I'm itching to find out if I'm reading things right, or just seeing shadows :). If it goes as I suspect (and hope) it will, then this is really a masterful work in subtlety!
Oh! In between, I decided to read this month's book club book one evening. It was in some ways an odd suggestion for our book club. Tao Te Ching was, well, interesting. Fortunately, it was also brief. The contents of this book I suppose have been subject to much speculation, study and philosophical scrutiny. Read quickly, and with no real intention of getting to the bottom of any of it, it can be rather funny :). (I feel the need to add the caveat that much of the mirth is probably a lack of understanding on my part of the social, political and historical context of the material. I don't intend this deprecatingly towards anyone who takes it seriously, just that I was not prepared to.)
