So I made a declicious goat stew last week. A few of us went to the biological market (organic food) and we were getting stuff and asked the butcher what was good. He told us how to cook some goat up in a stew. The goat is all local - you can see them wandering around the hills. The stew turned out great - the trick was to add fresh squeezed lemon juice at the end just before serving. I ate that for at least four straight dinners. The lemon I used was picked off a tree in nearby Troianata. There are lemon, orange, fig, olive and almond trees all over the island. I would love to be here in the fall when they are harvesting. Oh - but I got my confirmation the other day for WWOOFing in Bulgaria! I will be working full time from July 21 to August 4 with the option to stay on part time afterwards - probably for the festival that they have each year! Last weekend we took an "organized" tour of the island. A lot of the typical touristic things were closed because their season has not quite started yet so we didn't see the underground lake and caves that are pretty popular but it was great going to certain places with not a soul around! The locals all stare at us since their are relatively few foreigners on the Island right now. Apparently that will all change May 1 when the place starts swarming with British, Italian and Australian tourists :( We started our tour in the neighboring village of Troionata. It is a farming village of about 100-200 people. Apart from farms, goats and an olive press there is one little restaurant, two coffee shops and a little old lady who makes hand woven rugs in a dilapidated building overrun with vegetation. The coffee shops also sell homemade wine, olive oil and vinegar. The wine tasted more like sake but it was a pretty incredible little place. From there we headed to a medium sized wine cooperative on the Island called Robola. They run a fairly modern operation and we saw their facility and got to do a whirlwind wine tasting of their 6 different wines. Considering it was about 10:30 am that made our next stop at the San Gerasimos church and convent pretty interesting. We headed inside a tiny but intricately decorated church where a miniature nun welcomed us. In the back of the church was a trapdoor with a rusty ladder leading down to a cave. From there you could crawl through a hole in the wall to another cave where apparently Saint Gerasimos lived for the last part of his life. It was certainly a calm and eerie place to be. We stopped at a couple towns, swam at a beach covered with bright white golf-ball sized rocks, and then dove up and around and dropped down a winding road to the village of Assos. Assos is built on an isthmus connecting the island to a tiny peninsula. On the peninsula is an old fortress and prison. Once again we were the only people in sight (not even locals were hanging out there!). The group dispersed and a few of us headed up toward the fortress. We ended up on a tiny path cut into the cliff that wound around to an arched entrance to the complex. We then cut our own path up a terraced slope towards the highest part of the wall. Along the way we passed honey bees the size of a quarter and thyme so strong it made your mouth numb. The view from the top was ridiculous (as most views from any point on the Island). We overstayed our allotted time and ran back down to the bus to meet the rest of the group. We stopped briefly at Myrtos beach - by far the most famous on the Island- and then headed back. It was kind of a whirlwind trip with much too large a group but it was nice to get a sense of what is where and see some place that deserve a little more time in the coming weeks.
School is picking up. We started a new class on thursday with a greek professor. It is sustainable tourism and economic development and a project finance class. The professor is really good and I am finally getting excited about the educational side of this. Oh yeah, and we went to the village of Farsa - the place the program is centered around. It is really beautiful with caved in rock-walled houses with no roofs and grass floors. I can't wait to spend more time up there. On the way down, we stopped at our dance teacher's mother's cafe for a homemade lunch of greek salad with a huge chunk of feta, bread and olive oil and tiropita (cheese pie). It was delicious (obviously).Last night was our first real "weekend" night so we headed to the other side of the peninsula and had a fire on the beach (we found out this morning that it's actually illegal - oops). Some Albanian kids followed some of us there and hung out the whole time. They were rambunctious to say the least and actually became pretty annoying by the end :) hehe, it was interesting to see what some of the "locals" are like though and one spoke english ok so we could hear their point of view on the island. Today we hit up the Farmer's market where a bunch of old farmers hang out and sell pretty much the exact same thing as everyone else! hehe, they all had local potatoes, artichokes, olives, wine, beets, and a few other things. We got some beets and raisins and giant beans and something that looked like asparagus. We tried to find out how to cook it but the only thing we could really understand was that you can drink the water you cook it in and that it makes your pee smell.
