Friday, July 11, 2008

The smells of Greece

There are so many smells to appreciate (and one or two to avoid, but I try to wash my shirt everyday...)

My first memory or olfactory memories was when we visited the Mr. And Mrs. Danias, family friends and the parents of my very good childhood friends, John and Christo. Mrs. Danias offered me some "tea of the mountain". She gave me a way out; "you don't have to drink it if you don't like it". Well, it smelled like the Greek hillsides that I fondly remember from my childhood, what a wonderful blend of very Greek mountain herb smells.

Later, on our first day of cycling, I cycled past a tree and didn't even notice what it was until I had already passed it and my brain finished processing the smell, looked it up in its data bank of fond odour-memories and screamed "FIGS!!!" at me. They're not ripe yet but we pass enough fig trees on the road for us to always keep tabs. When they're ready, we'll be ready too. Oh, we'll be ready.

Earlier this week we stayed a couple of nights in Karthamilli (one of our favourite spots so far... More about that in a later blog posting). There, in this little town were quite a few organic type offerings. I walked into a lovely store run by a very nice Romanian woman, and the various smells of all the dried mountain herbs was incredible. I can identify sage and oregano, but there were many more, enough to make one dizzy from sniffing so much

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