Your house can be any color, so long as it’s white

It is a blowing to beat the band for the last 7 or 8 days.  We are in Naxos, in the main town, named Naxos waiting until the winds die down.  We woke up to 30 knot winds in the harbor.  Aethan and I got off the boat while Graeme and Code were still asleep and took a walk to what was once a temple to Apollo where it must have been 40+ knots.  The temple is a very cool huge archway for a door with a building foundation on a lone small spit of land.  The town itself is a warren of alleyways between brilliant white buildings with blue shutters and doors.  We found the coolest store on the island, if not all of Greece.   I doubt it has changed much in a hundred years – they sold spices, dried fruits, herbs, and teas in open sacks; capers and olives of all sorts were in old open barrels, local wines were sold in old water bottles (I have tried it, it isn’t to my liking, and I like about ANY wine), local sheeps milk cheese handmade whisks made from broom, honey and olive oil soaps, straw baskets piled to the ceiling, which had to be 10’.  Nothing was new or remotely new and I will simply have to post a picture of it.  I came home with bags of dried lavender, some spices that have been hard to find (like cumin seed, of all things), almonds in the shell, peanuts coated with seasalt.  It it the kind of place my mom and my sisters and I could spend the day.  I sure wish I could share it with them.

Kids have been doing a little more culture and history this week in school.  I realized when we sent off their monthly update to their online school that we have been hammering away at reading and math, which is good, but haven’t put any emphasis on structured learning in other subjects.  Aethan is working on learning the Lat/Long system.  We are having him try to figure out directions and units of measure on a ball from scratch so that he can figure out why someone out there in the world developed a coordinate system.  Graeme is working on arithmetic, but also learning currency as a way to learn to add and subtract.  I use my hands as a balance and he puts things on the scale to compare how much the coins are relative to each other.  I have to do a lot of quick math myself.

We walked all over town this morning looking for a place to do laundry.  No laundrymats here, but there are small launderettes that will wash for you.  One little old lady wanted 70 euros ($100).  Um, no thanks.  We went back to the first place that charged a more reasonable, but still expensive, 30 euros.  Paying $50 for 5 loads of laundry may seem outrageous, unless you haven’t had real laundry done in at least a month.  The only thing that I have been more desperate for was a real shower with as much hot water as I needed.  We did find a place, and I showered, but I would only use it again if I were ever to be that desperate.  It wouldn’t take a PhD in psychology to explain why every place I go I am obsessed with buying soap.  Unless we are in port, water is something not to be wasted on showers, so birdbaths have to do.

Code bought a passarelle for the boat, finally. A passarelle is a fancy term for a gangplank.  Boats almost always dock ‘Med’ style, meaning they are pulled in stern or bow to the dock or quay.  There are no finger like extensions from the main dock, and it is too crowded to pull in side-to in most places.  Without a gangplank we have to pull in stern-to and walk-off the transom, with an anchor off the bow in the harbor (which is often at great risk for getting tangled in everyone else’s anchor lines).  That is great unless there dock is much higher than the boat, which it sometimes is, and we have to very unglamorously climb onto the dock from our boat below.  Sometimes we need to pull the boat away from the dock because winds can push us into the dock too hard or there is junk (like  hunks of jagged metal/rebar) sticking out of the docks.  The kids are thrilled to have our own passarelle and have decorated ours with pictures and designs in crayon.  In the world of dreary and/or seamanly looking passarelles, ours certainly is neither, but you cant miss it!

We hope that this wind will calm down by Monday or Tuesday when we will take off for Amorgos and then 2 tiny islands between here and the Dodecanese (the last group of Greek Islands before Turkey).