I Love Katalagari

Our first full day in Katalagari was amazing! We had a late start at 1:00, which was enough time to relax in the morning sun and let my hair sun dry. We had a picnic by the pool and set out to a castle ruin that was very pretty with almond trees in bloom all around. We then headed down to the Carnival parade in town with our Greek tour guides, Vasilis and Dimitris. There were tons of people gathered outside the taverns drinking free wine and eating little pies. We joined in while everyone waited for the parade to start. They played a bunch of really bad American music like Ricky Martin and we danced in the street. We pretty much made fools of ourselves because the Greeks weren’t dancing, but watched us instead. The parade was interesting, all I remember were a couple floats of drug-busts, they actually made exaggerated rolls of marijuana and there were police reprimanding them. This scene goes back in Greek history with the Turkish occupation, we saw it about a month ago in a narrative/music performance by a famous Greek folk singer. I don’t understand it, but it was entertaining to watch! Little kids in costumes were running around all over. They look like miniature Greek men and women…but very cute. There were also adults dressed up, at least two large men were dressed as women, one of which was friends with Dimitris and showed us a good time. Everyone in our group had a blast, we were there for at least two hours and we all walked back up to our hotel singing pep band songs. When we got home, the Wintersteens all went swimming, then someone jumped in with their clothes on and it started a trend of people throwing people in the pool. I helped throw Erik in and was thrown in myself by Michele minutes later…and yes, the water was still freezing! I didn’t care though, it was so much fun! We all ran around trying to throw people in for a while until dinner time. After dinner was homework time, not the best ending to an awesome day. Today is the first day of lent for the Greek Orthodox religion. We were served a special breakfast with their special bread they eat only on this day along with some little fried dough pieces, grape syrup, and fish roe salad. The fish roe was okay until someone told me about how they were reminded of dissecting perch, then all I could taste was fish and it was no longer appealing. The bread was amazing though, it was like a flat bread with sesame seeds and some other spices on top, some kind of pepper. After breakfast we hung out for a while until it was time to go down to the other village again and participate in more festival activities. It was about 11:30 when we arrived and they were already passing out free wine. I passed on that, but we were also served the traditional soup of fava beans and tomatoes. It was delicious! With this we had the same bread, pickled vegetables and olives. Kids were running around playing soccer, which is extremely popular here, and the adults were just sitting around visiting and relaxing. We were supposed to make kites, as it is another tradition of today, but returned to the hotel instead where Vasilis brought some handmade kites for us to fly. We went up to a ridge and Vasilis got the kites up for us, because it was not very windy. Eventually the entire line was up in the air, about 100 meters! It seemed so far away, I have never flown a kite like that, I felt like I really needed to hang on or else it would just fly away! We took some pieces of paper and cut holes in the middle and sent them up the line, the wind just carried them right up to the kite! It was very cool. Some girls and I were bored and made a wreath of olive branches…I will put up pictures of all this soon! Tomorrow we have another busy day. We are going to the museum of Nikos Kazantzakis, then to a winery, and then to an olive pressing plant! How exciting, I can’t wait to see how they make olive oil, and hopefully I will get to buy some and bring home to share!