The past few weeks have been cold in Greece. We're lucky, though, that we haven't gotten any snow. Athens had about 8 inches last week but Thessaloniki was one of the few places in the country without snowfall. Even islands like Santorini and Mykonos got snow. Every now and then there's a day warm enough to allow for eating outside, but maybe we've recalibrated what's an acceptable temperature for outdoor dining over the past year or two? And of course the hot mushrooms definitely help (see here for a reminder of this cute Greek nickname).
Today involved a few memorable Greek experiences. First, we went to our attorney's office and picked up our two temporary residence permits. Yay! In all honesty, we aren't quite sure what this paperwork does other than act as a receipt that we paid our permit fee. It looks like it might extend the time we can stay in Greece beyond this September? Fortunately, we're now treated as a dyad rather than two separate applicants. The next step is for Gabe, in early April, to complete the eerie sounding 'biometric' portion of the process; Sam has to wait until early May to do the same. And then it's another month or so to get our official resident permits, assuming we get approved. So let's see....we started this in November and maybe we'll be done in June or July. As we anticipated before this all started, it's a slow process and there's a reason you get a yearlong visa to conduct the many increments required.
After the attorney visit, we decided to go out for lunch since it was a sunny 49 degrees today. We went to a famous restaurant not far from our apartment. We sat down and ordered a handful of vegetarian meze. What we thought the waiter said in Greek was: 'You know, this is a restaurant famous for our meats like gyro meat and sausages. Don't you want to order that?' We said that today, we were happy with the veggies only. So he goes away and comes back after we've munched on the bread left at the table, and asks us what meat we will order. Our confused faces finally prompt him to say in English "I cannot place an order for only vegetable meze, you have to order meat, too." Even though all the vegetables are listed with separate prices, they require a mandatory meat escort to the table! He said it all in a tickled, amused manner and we were pretty amused, too. We'd never heard of a restaurant that would refuse to serve you without ordering meat. Kinda sorta reminds us of a scene in My Big Fat Greek wedding... We really just wanted veggies so we asked if we could pay for the nibbled bread and beat it. In that amazingly generous and kind way that Greeks have, he refused to charge us anything and did us the further favor of recommending a nearby meze place with a glowing hot mushroom to warm us.
Yesterday we had coffee at a lovely waterfront spot with another expat here in Thessaloniki. I took a photograph (shown below) in the men's room (but it's suitable for work viewing). We haven't really covered this topic much, but it's one of the more notable downsides to being in Greece. In general, because the plumbing is substandard, you can't put toilet paper in the toilets and instead must place it in a trash bin next to the toilet. Bad things happen when foreigners come to Greece without being trained in this necessity. To prevent toilet catastrophes, pretty much every toilet in Greece has an interesting sign to explain the drill to foreigners. And this is also where English speakers and Greek speakers get to learn about each other's use of prepositions. It's heartening to see Greeks struggle with some nuances of English since we do this in Greek all day! Sam calculated how many grammatical errors a typical English-speaker can make just saying a 3 word Greek sentence and it's something like 28 errors. Jeez!
One last peculiarity here. Lots of streets have historical markers that give you some history behind the street name. Many places in the US have historical markers, of course. But Greek historical plaques, hmm.. always find a way to emphasize the tragedy whereas US plaques maybe tend to gloss over such and focus on heroism. Oftentimes in the US, you must infer that something bad happened. But Greek signs ensure that there's no such confusion (as you'll see in the bottom photo).
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| The seal on one of our temporary residence permits |
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| Please be nice to the toilet! |
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| Streets named after the martyred, assassinated, hanged, and murdered--yikes! |