Kali Chronia!

Will 2022 be better than 2021 or 2020? Let's all hope so! On the next to last day of 2021 we got booster shots in hopes of a safer start to 2022 amidst Omicron. This experience revealed yet more quirks to Greek-to-English translation. The Google translation of the Greek government's vaccination website called our third dose a "souvenir dose" and also a "commemorative dose." If only, right? We'd be happy if this commemorates the beginning of the end of pandemic. Getting our boosters was an impressively straightforward process. We easily scheduled and updated appointments online (and managed to get them three weeks earlier than anticipated). It was a fifteen minute walk from our place to a mammoth convention hall set up for vaccinations, and less than an hour later, we were back at home. And now we have EU digital vaccination passes. Until now we've had to show our homemade-looking US paper passes everywhere (even to eat or even drink a coffee outside). A few shops haven't accepted the US pass so we weren't allowed in (even though ours are slightly fancier than normal thanks to the free lamination we got at the Rockland Maine office store). It’s difficult to blame shop owners for skepticism because the US card looks more amateurish than official.

Our friends Haris and Gianni gifted us a vasilopita (king cake) to celebrate New Year's Eve. These cakes are a big tradition here. It's like a New Orleans Mardi Gras cake (also called a king cake) and has a token hidden inside that offers good luck for the recipient. We found the coin in the slice Haris said means good luck for retirement. Yay! We've seen tons of these cakes being toted around town the past few days. How can they possibly eat so many of these cakes? We thought America had a Christmastime sweet tooth but Greece takes such to another level.

After we ate our New Year's Eve dinner we got a surprise video call from a Greek couple we met in Ioannina in March 2020. Takis and Despina are in their 80s and despite speaking almost no English, befriended us at a scary time. Greece had gone into a complete lockdown less than two days after we arrived in Ioannina back in March 2020. They live next door to the apartment we were renting and they became guardian angels for us when we felt alone and scared in a place where we didn't know a soul. They shared food, wine, and much kindness with us. For their New Year's Eve video call they were dressed up in their Sunday best; Takis is king of satin pajama robes so we’d never seen him spiffy in a suit and tie. They won't see their family this weekend, unfortunately, because of the pandemic, so they were dressed up for video calls. We were touched that they thought to call us on an important night for Greek families. We got to see their Christmas decorations, the kotopitas (chicken pies) Despina baked, and had an almost-completely-in-Greek chat with them and shared Kali Chronia (good/happy New Year) greetings.

So many of us have been isolated for vast chunks of the past two years. We fervently hope 2022 is a year of safe and fear-free reconnecting for everyone. Kali Chronia!