Misty mountain

I recently had the chance to work in a part-time position customer service for the Good Food Show. This event is organized every year and it is hosted every year by the huge and magnificent National Exhibition Center in Birmingham (NEC)from 28th November to 2nd December. Hundreds of thousand of people usually attend this event.

This event gathers more hundred of food and beyond exhibitors showing their products and most of them allowing to customers free samples from their products. In addition to them, there were organized different sections of cooking demonstrations from internationally famous cooks as James Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, James Martin, Rick Stein (don't make illusions, as I am not a serious kitchen adventurer I just recognized some of these names only at the end ...).

The exhibited products presented was on any imaginable kind: meat, cheese, yoghurt, oil, wine, spirits, fair trade coffee, chocolate, ice cream, etc. Further, electric food related appliances were exhibited (what it's been surprising for me was a particular multisurface cleaning type of scoop as many many people were leaving the event with 2-3++ such scoops at hand-maybe credit of efficient demonstrators(?)).

If all this seems fantastic to you as to me, a negative aspect of this story has also been for the normal customers: the ticket price. It's been around (varied a bit day by day probably due to the live demonstrations) 20£ (30 Euros) and I think there were an extra fee for the famous cook demonstrations (2.5£) done in a special theater. Though I liked very much the all show, I would never have paid that money for as food isn't one of the top interesting things for me.

I had the chance to finish 2hrs before the end of show almost every day, so I got the opportunity to go around, taste cheese (), wine, spirit, flapjacks (cereal cookies), yoghurt. Finally In the last day (waiting for the best-last-minute-offers got two boxes of biscuits (flapjack&sultana and honey--Edinburgh Bakery)for 2£ and one bottle of Chilean red wine for 4£. I have been tempted for other things as well but I didn't decide for them. The photos you can see here are taken with my mobile phone during these times.


I hope you like the photos (which unfortunately not all of them are of good quality). You can find more photos in my Food-folder.

The second most famous hill of Athens after the one of Parthenon is the Lykavitos Hill. It is located on the north-east side of Athens. On the top of the hill someone can find the modern theater of Lykavitos and at its highest point there is the church of St. George. The hill hosts a very nice pine forest and huge cacti plants spread around, in various places. The 'normal' way to go on the top is through the funicular, but this time I preferred having a small adventure. I was curious to see this theater as I had never been there in the past. The day was lovely, so I got this opportunity.

The base of the hill is less than 30 min. from the center of Athens. To arrive there someone needs to climb a lot of stairs (some of them really steep). Arriving at the bottom of the hill, I found the forest but unfortunately there weren't any indications. Many paths around . I asked around one-two guys for directions but nobody knew the proper way to the theater. As the place was very isolated and I was afraid to get the wrong direction I was ready to get back to the funicular and leave the 'adventure' for another day. Hopefully, I met a (Russian) kind man with his dog (kind too ) who showed me the way up to the theater.

Well, from the photos you can see that the theater wasn't something special. Just a simple construction. On the other hand, the view over Athens was marvelous from there and above, over the Lykavitos place. As few days ago Athens, large areas in Peloponnese and north of Greece suffered from a kind of terrorist attack with extended fires, I met police and firefighters guards along my way. From that point a paved path was connecting the theater site to the top of Lykavitos hill.

Definitely, the best view was from the St. George church. Full view over all directions. This is the highest hill of Athens and you can easily distinguish Parthenon, Olympian Zeus temple, Panathenean Stadium (ancient stadium) etc.

Next to the church there was a restaurant, open but empty. I didn't check personally, but I can imagine that their prices should be right proportional to the altitude of the place (e.g. paramount!). What someone is going to pay there mostly independently of what he/she chooses from the menu is the VIEW!

I had been few times there in the past. During daytime the view is fantastic and you feel a nice soft or stronger breeze. On the other hand, when the sun is set, the view is still marvelous, looking at an illuminated Athens 'by night'. This time I didn't have this chance. At the end of the day and for the next one I was feeling my feet hurting a bit, but the unique view was worth!

If you 'd like to see more photos you can visit my Lykavitos photo folder.

During my short stay in Piraeus, I have been invited to a well known restaurant near the port of Piraeus in the area of St. Dionisios. This was the Kretas' restaurant. It is a kebab/souvlaki house famous for its generous portions.

The environment was very nice, clean and luminous, with particular nice decoration on the wall.
I decided to order a mixed meat dish containing sheesh kebab and pieces of pork meat (cost 9.50 €).
Additionally to the meat content, in the dish a good portion of chips, tzatziki (mixture of yogurt and cucumber and bit of garlic) and some onion were present.The taste was good and the quantity really enough to satisfy the most hungry person.

This time I was invited by two friends. One of them noticed that the chicken fillet she ordered was not very well cooked. She asked kindly the waitress to have another one more cooked, but the waitress came back telling her that the cook was claiming that this type of meat could not be cooked more. We have been perplexed about this statement. At the end, she has been offered an alternative dish based again on chicken as my friend had initially ordered. This seemed to be alright.

Another similar type of restaurant is present in Piraeus, offering very generous portions. I had tried in the past (Ilias' restaurant found in the Pasalimani area - a small port of yachts) and you can read more details on Kayoko's nice webpage about Ilias' restaurant. Difficult to compare as I visited the last one a year ago. Maybe that one was a bit better in meat quality and slightly cheaper. The food definitely of the same order of excessive quantity.

Neoclassic houses in Piraeus and Athens

In Attica, among the various modern style common houses you can occasionally see around some of the neoclassic type buildings that prove the existence of a significantly nicer architectural era of Athens and Piraeus. Sometimes you cannot notice so easily specially in the case they are badly maintained.

The neoclassic buildings can be single, double or trouble floor buildings, with nice color combinations and when at least a second floor is present, usually a particular balcony with a nice iron fence decoration is shown. You can often see the color of the windows and doors to be greenish or blue as the one used in island constructions.

The roof of most of these neoclassic houses has a nice repetitive motive usually inspired from ancient ceramic greek art and at the same time it is the preferred observatory for pigeons. In many occasions part of the front decoration of the house is the presence of various types of green plants taking significant part of the free space on the balcony or in front of the windows.

Forty or more years ago, the neoclassic style was the dominating one. Unfortunately,
the massive population growth gave rise to the current basic common style buildings, suppressing gradually the traditional one. I have the impression that the art decoration is reduced among most of the newest construction due to the elevated complexity of the higher buildings.


As the time passing, more old houses consumed in time without any maintenance care tending rather to get demolished than restructured. Hopefully, some of them are the exception specially in important historical or central sites, with significant local history or in case of wealthy owners.

I would have been much happier living in a city with many more neoclassic style houses as these are giving a particular tone of old town style similarly to town someone can see in many german or austrian small cities. Such houses are showing a proper character through with both their colors and specific architectural design. In my opinion, these are actually the last signature of a culture already forgotten than we never going to see again growing.

For more photos on neoclassic style houses follow this link.

Today, at the central square of Athens, Constitution Square and other big cities around Greece thousands of people gathered to express silently their disappointment to the way the management of state services with regard to the recent catastrophic fires happened. More than ten thousand people, most of which appeared in dark clothes, replied in this way with the silent request for immediate action to recover at the maximum efficiency the damaged environment.

This happening had no formal structure and it has only be advertized through various no profit and no political organizations, Greepeace and WWF, as well as various blogger associations.


(photo taken from satellite showing the various fires set in the Balcan region).