Thank you for this beautiful culinary travelogue, Koukou'!
Takes me back to our two, three-week vacation tours in Greece, including a week on Crete. They were conducted by a college professor of Greek extraction who spoke it like a native, and had been doing these groups for years. He had a roster of places to visit, lodge, and eat - many wonderful small mom-and-pop tavernas where we ate inexpensively but very well: no steam tables. We acquired a love of Greek food and ever since that first trip, we have bought our olive oil - usually Kalamata - by the gallon.
One of the funniest aspects, repeated over and over, happened when our group entered any museum or tourist attraction. Our professor would just start showing and explaining the place when a resident guide would rush up and tell him to stop - only government-licensed guides were allowed to show the place (and earn the customary fee.) The prof would then unsnap a leather pouch on his belt and slowly unfold a huge piece of parchment, larger and more impressive than my college diploma, which was his official guide's license. We saw a lot of disappointed guides on both trips.
We were told back then that during the summer season, there were more tourists than Greeks in Greece. Is this still true? This was, of course, before the colonels or the fiscal problems. Also that the word Greek does not exist in the Greek language - where English uses "Greek" it is "Hellene." to the natives; not Greece but Hellas.
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