VOLOS (BOΛOΣ)

Renowned as the place where Jason set sail to find the Golden Fleece with the agile Argonauts, Volos today is the fifth(or sixth) largest municipality in Greece and an important industrial and port city. It is also a lively and lovely place with hundreds of seaside tavernas, tsipouratikos, and cafes where people sit and talk and drink and smoke and eat and smoke and talk (and smoke) at all hours of the day, except for the frequent and regimented times when the whole town shuts down for resting (more on this later).

Although it's a big city by Greek standards (Athens takes that prize with over 6 million of Greece's 11 million smoky souls), the architecture and layout is on a human scale. The roads are narrow, the cars are TINY, and practically everyone lives in apartment buildings no more than about 5 stories high, like ours here:

Our apartment is perhaps tinier than most, consisting of one all-purpose bed/dining/living room

one kitchenlet

one bathroom

and a balcony

which I'm told is a requirement for apartments in all of Greece. It's in a great location, just 4 blocks from the seafront, and for our purposes it will work out famously.

We've settled in very well over these last two weeks, thanks in large part to Dr. George Nanos, our fabulous host at the University of Thessaly, and his graduate student Eleni, who have taken it upon themselves to make sure that we spend plenty of time getting to know Volos and the surrounding areas.

Our personal beach one afternoon in Afisos

Eating sweets in the mountain village of Milies with our parea (Eleni, us, Eleni's brother Nikos; Anna Maria, Nikos' Romanian girlfriend, is taking the picture)

Walking near Milies, to the chagrin of our anti-perambulating Greek friends

Sampling Volos' seaside specialties, like ghavros (shown below), tsipouro (distilled liquour made from wine grape mash and usually flavored with aniseed), and grilled sardines

Be assured, though, that despite what it looks like from the above photos, we are also working at the university postharvest lab and visiting farms and other research sites in the area. I'll fill you in with details of our official VIP purpose here in future posts. Also stay tuned for explorations of exciting culinary and cultural topics such as: spoon sweets, “are people fighting or are they just speaking Greek?”, the origin and importance of Greek's national drink the Nescafé “frappé,” tiny fried fishes, tiny cars, daily farmer's markets, the city-village connection, and much more!

Also, in case any of you were wondering what we've done with our girl,

she's in Idaho at “Kamp Karlson” taking lots of hikes, eating lots of treats and getting plenty of love.