Busy Week

What a busy week, first I had a visitor from San Francisco come and stay for 3 days. I worked with Jessica's mother, cousin and aunt at the Fountain of Health and she was on a whirl-wind tour through Europe and Israel and did a little stop over here before going on to Israel. I am so glad she stopped by, even though I only met her twice in the states by the time she left I felt like we had known each other for a while, she took all of the photos, so unfortunately I have none with the two of us.

Arthur's cousin Kostas had the baptism for his baby boy on Saturday, the whole family came out for the event.Me, Uncle Bill (Dads brother), Aunt Maria, second Uncle Viron, cousin-in-law Christos, second Aunt Irini, Aunt Maria (Dads sister, Kostas's mother), second Aunt Boula, cousin Dora.
Kostas, Christos, and Maria, first there is a speech by the priest outside and the Nonos (godfather) names the child. Then we go inside the church and the priest talks some more and then the Nonos covers the child in oil and the priest dips the naked baby in water 3 times. Poor Christos was pretty much screaming the whole entire time and finally fell asleep at the end of the event. We then went to a restaurant for the baptism party they served salad, lamb and potatoes.


On Sunday we went to Thessaloniki, this was my first visit to the second largest city in Greece. We were there for the International Exhibition, it was great fun but very exhausting, the expo was held behind this tower like building and it was like walking around our California State Fair. We ate hot dogs, french fries and soda and purchased caramelized nuts.
We also saw some of the sights while there in Thessaloniki, even though it is only a 3 hour trip we probably won't be going again any time soon. Here is the famous White Tower, it's actually kind of grey, but perhaps at one time it was white (Wikipedia it).
Pictures of the monument for Alexander the Great.

Next on our list of things we did this week was visit a vineyard to pick up grapes to make our own homemade wine.
We ate some grapes.

We picked some grapes.




We loaded the truck up and we weighed it. You weigh your empty truck coming in and you weight it on the way out, this is how they know how much you have picked.
People come from all over Greece to pick the grapes here, we are so lucky that it is only an hour away. Most of the grapes grown in this region are muscat (sweet red) which just so happens to be my favorite wine. Whenever I went to vineyards in California I would normally purchase the dessert wine which is normally made from Muscat.

We also had a visitor from Sacramento, Stephen taught a class about Greece that I had gone too. So when I moved here I e-mailed him to let him know that I had married and was living in Greece, since he had never been to Kalampaka (and has been to Greece many times) he came to visit me and check out the famous Meteora. I think he will be back, he enjoyed it very much.