Hob Nobbin in Paradise…

6

Seriously, if you do not know what Hob Nobs are…go to the grocery store and find out. They are, quite simply the best oatmeal cookies on earth.

And we found them here….

Yum!

Some random thoughts and observations that we have forgotten to write about.

Food:

On our first night in Gouvia we stopped at a taverna for dinner. We had a reasonably good meal of souvlakia which came with french fries…swimming in olive oil. Bit different we say…but when in Greece….go with it. They were actually quite good. Everything comes with a healthy dose of olive oil which is fine by us since we use so much of it at home. But oh…the olive oil here is so much better. We buy one of the more expensive bottles when we provision and when we open it we are enthralled with the colour of it…it is the most rich and buttery yellow and positively heaves with a rich smell and taste. Oh if only we could get this home with us.

The eggs we buy are rich in colour and flavour, not the bland pale things North Americans seem to want. Again though, we usually opt for the organic eggs at home, so we are happy to find such nice ones here.

The tomatoes are incredible. Frank, you would be in heavan! The ones at the larger grocery stores look like our North American hothouse tomatoes…all perfectly sized and coloured…so we pass those by and head for the piles of fragrant and misshapen ones in the baskets at the smaller markets. They are full flavoured and taste of the sun.

Meat… almost impossible to find…and horrendously expensive when you do find it.

Bread is fresh and hearty. It has no preservatives or additives…yeast, flour, water, salt, sugar (or honey) is all I imagine that it contains. The crusts are thick and chewy and it makes fantastic french toast!

Town Life:

We love how the children run about in the streets. They play on their bicycles, kick the soccer ball about. Their parents sit at the cafe’s socializing. It reminds us of when we were young, before people got so paranoid and took away their children’s freedoms. One young girl has a pink bike with a bell…oh how she loves that bell. All day Saturday and Sunday she rode up and down the street and around the square ringing that bell!

Wine:

Greek wines can be good…and they can be very bad. We had done some reading on them and recall our last visit. Generally the best wines are the fresh wines. Not the ones in the glass bottles which are often somewhere in the shop in bright light. Many are heavily oxidized and simply don’t stand up well. The good wines are actually the barrel wines, the ones in the plastic bottles. They are recently made and dry and fruity. And very inexpensive. We learned this completely by accident last time when we bought a plastic bottle of very inexpensive wine for a lark…and were shocked that it was better than what we had purchased at an upscale place in Athens. And a thousand times better than the “very good” bottle of (expensive) wine recommended to us in Mykonos…the one we ended up pouring down the sink. So, this time, we knew what we were looking for.

The other day in Gaios we picked up two different bottles of wine, both were completely labeled in Greek, but one had a green label and one had a yellow label. There was also a half a percentage difference in alcohol content. We decided to do a taste test and buy more of the better (assuming either was good). Both cost 2.65 Euros. We poured a glass of each, the yellow label had a much stronger yellow colour…it looked oxidized. The other was a pleasant pale colour and had a nice bouquet. I tasted the yellow label first and wasn’t pleased. It had a musty aftertaste, but I decided to give it another shot. My nose wrinkled, definitely not the best wine I’ve had. The green label was very nice, fruity, fresh, clean tasting. The green label definitely wins. I looked at the yellow labeled bottle and something twigged. The characters were familiar….???????… wait a minute…if P=R, and that backwards E thing…that’s an S isn’t it. We bought retsina didn’t we! No wonder I didn’t like it! So, that answers that question in a blind taste test…I still do not like retsina 20 years after the first time I tried it.

I have heard two stories on the origin of retsina. One was that the Greeks added pine resin to their wine to stop the invaders from other countries stealing it. The other, possibly more believable, explanation is that the Greeks used pine resin to seal their wine amphoras and the flavour seeped into the wine. Over time it was believed that the resin kept the wine from oxidizing rather than the exclusion of oxygen and so resin was added directly to the wine to produce retsina.

The latter is probably the truth.

People:

The travelers here are more friendly than those we met in the Cyclades. Many British, some French, Italians, far fewer Germans. People chat and our Canadian flag seems to draw a lot of conversations. This morning one fellow came by and asked where in Canada we were from. They also don’t assume that we are from Toronto here…as they did in the Cyclades. It most likely stems from the fact that Vancouver is now on everyone’s lips as the Olympics draw near. But the one comment we get a lot is along the lines of “Vancouver….but why did you travel so far to go sailing when you have such good boating in your own waters?” Our usual reply is something along the lines of “True, we do have wonderful boating, but it’s not the Mediterranean and it is nice to see the world beyond our own backyard, and do it at a slow and leisurely pace that is not riddled with frenetic tourist outfits…and it will still be boating season when we get home!”

We can never remember names, so we identify people by characteristics.

We had Kiwi at NAOK on Corfu.

We saw Mr. Big in Sivota Mourto. Complete with cigar and sweater tossed over his shoulders.

There is Captain Glenn who looked shockingly like our friend Glenn.

There is the fellow who paced up and down the waterfront in his polyester track suit for two days. We name him Eugene only because he reminds us of Eugene Levy with his thick short dark hair and strange glasses…and that outfit.

Then there is the Comedy Club, our trio of British bachelors who kept us in stitches.

The French fellow we helped dock the other day changed into an outfit and donned a flipped up hat that made us think of the sidekick on Gunsmoke…but we can’t think of that character’s name! The best we can do is call him Gump.

Wonder who we will meet next.