Wes’s Life

Over the weekend, we moved into our apartment at Loveton Farms. It is much closer to work, so it makes getting to work much easier. We don’t have internet, until sometime today, hence why I didn’t get a chance to post over the weekend. The apartment is nothing special; it just works for the time being. My room has all the things I need in it, except internet. I have my computers, a bookshelf, a bed, a nightstand, a closet, a TV and a bed. Nothing too complicated. Just enough to live in and work with. My computer faces a window, so I have something to look at when working at my desk.

The cats are adjusting fairly well to there new environment. It never takes them long to find the food, water and litter. Petunia’s pedestal came with us of course and Zinnia found a blanket she liked and managed to make herself a bed out of it. We are planning on putting a screen up on the porch, so the cats can go outside and lounge about, but even with that, they could easily jump on top of the rail and jump out.]

Well, I will try to get some pictures of our absolutely luxurious pad.

I recently began to work at my new job as an IT intern at Benelogic in Timonium, MD. So far the job has been a bit boring as a result of having nothing for me to do and not having a computer to work on. However, my boss tells me that this is simply the lull before the storm. We are getting plenty of desktops in and we are also going to be setting up servers. The people at the job are fun to hang out with, so that certainly makes the time go faster.

I wrote my meals down in a nice Moleskine notebook, the one divided into five parts for travel (Bed, Food, People, Sights, Facilities). On a side note, I don’t recommend this, I would say go with a standard non-divided notebook simply because it allows you more flexibility and reuse. I won’t use this book again simply because I write more about the food than I do about the Sights and I completely ignored Facilities. If you consider yourself creative, I highly recommend the non-lined version as you can draw and write in whatever way makes you happy.

Getting back to my original intent for this post, I want to explain how I will write everything down. I will write it down in a per day format; however, I don’t remember the days so it will be in a numbered day format.

Day 1:
We just arrived in Rome and decided to eat near our hotel/appartment. We all got rather large slices of pizza. I myself picked out a piece covered in sweet tomatoes.

After eating our pizza we wandered around and found a gelati stand and I got lemon gelati.

After getting into our apartment and settling down, we decided to venture out and find a restaurant for dinner. We ended up a little past the Trievi fountain. We sat down for a night of confusion and Eurotrashiness (a constant throughout my trip). Our waiter was speaking only Italian, but we figured out later he spoke English, but even then he would only speak Italian. We ended up eating three pizzas: margharita, sausage and proscuitto. We also go meals for ourselves. I ended up eating lasagna.

Day 2:
We were near the Vatican, I think, and stopped at a nearby restaurant. The food there was good, I ended up getting ravioli and it had spinach inside, which immediately stopped Chris from eating any of the remaining raviolis. The best part of the meal was the strawberries with ice cream that I got.

Once again after wandering around we got some gelati, I ended up getting strawberry this time and it was awesome.

For our last night in Rome we ate at the Opera Cafe. This restaurant had a hard time making very well known Italian dishes. They couldn’t do chicken parmigiana, canolis and Veal Milanese. The food was good enough though. I ended up getting Veal Scalopini.

Day 3:
Having arrived in Athens we went to the hotel and stashed our baggage and went to the Plakka. It is apparently notorious for hawking waiters that try to pull you into the best restaurant in town. We ended up going to one such restaurant, but it was very good. I had pastitico, which is basically a Greek version of lasagna. We also got some fried cheese and an appetizer.

Day 4:
For lunch we got fried cheese again as an appetizer and we had pork gyros. In terms of all the gyros we ate, they were right in the middle, not horrible but not the best.

We went to Piraes and got some seafood. This is basically a Greek version of the Harborplace in Maryland. We sat right on the water and stared at the fish right below us. The water really needed to be cleaned.. Anyways, I ate the Al Tuna pasta which was a pasta with tuna, tomatoes, garlic and basil.

Day 5:
Arriving in Santorini, we wanted to go to somewhere close to our hotel. We ended up at a restaurant three minutes from our room, two of those minutes were spent walking up stairs. I had pork kebob and it was a nice location because it was built into the crater. While waiting for our food we were entertained by a pair of cats, one of which wanted to play and the other didn’t.

Day 6:
We decided to have continental breakfast delivered to our room because the wind was really acting up and there was tons of fog until late in the day. It wasn’t anything special, there was cereal, sweet bread, ham and cheese sandwiches, normal bread, coffee, tea, hot chocolate and an over-sweet orange drink.

For lunch, we ended up in Oia and ate on the roof garden of a nice pizza restaurant. We got the typical Margharita pizza and also tried a Greek pizza. I also managed to get desert, which was a great lemon pie. The only problem with the pie was there wasn’t nearly enough lemon flavor for me, but I like it sour.

We went to Fira for dinner and walked around for a while and ended up at a place called Sokrate’s View. After the usual assortment of appetizers (warm feta, fried cheese, Greek salad) I had something completely original: Pasta Sokrates. Which was a nice light seafood pasta. It was excellent and I will probably end up there again if I return.

Day 7:
My parents, Josh and I went to Fira bright and early and had crepes. My mother and Josh ended up with sweet crepes and I ended up with a sausage, tomato and cheese crepe. My dad got a bacon and cheese omelette.

We drove around the island today and went to Vlachdia beach and ended up eating at the touristy named restaurant, Acropolis. I am glad we ended up eating there anyways because I had the best gyro of the whole trip there. The meat was excellent and the pita was nicely toasted.

For our last night we wandered around Oia in search of a good restaurant and ended up at Strogili (I think that’s the name). Once again we had the usual appetizers, which I am starting to get tired of. I had Beef Fillet Stroganoff, which isn’t the typical Beef Stroganoff. There was no bed of noodles, instead it was prepared with a very similar sauce.

Day 8:
Once we arrived in Mykonos after the high-speed ferry, we ate at the Petino’s restaurant, which is where we were staying. I had a “special” hamburger, which was different. It had feta, bacon and and peppers on the inside of the meat. There was no roll to speak of and it was longer than it was wide.

Since we ended up eating around four, we ate late and sans Cressaty. We went down to a place on the beach and got pizza and desert. I got a warm brownie with two scoops of ice cream and my dad got a very light cheesecake topped with strawberries.

Day 9:
Once again we partook on a no frills, nothing special continental breakfast.

We went to Mykonos town today and once again had gyros, which were middle of the road. However, the cheese pies there were awesome. They were in a phyllo dough and it was very flaky and greasy.

We ventured around Mykonos town some more and ate at a fish tavern along Little Venice, an area known for seafood along the sea. I had a very good Salmon pasta in a great cream sauce.

Day 10:
We went to a place down the beach from our hotel called La Playa. They had the second best gyros that I have had so far. The meat was extremely good. However, I also got a waffle with strawberry ice cream. My dad got “apple pie” which was two crepes with apples and cinnamon in them and topped with two scoops of ice cream.

Then we had the best dinner in Europe. It was at Kalidonios, a tiny little place that you couldn’t find if you were staring right at it. We came across it after my request for lamb. We found a lovely French restaurant, but we agreed that we wanted lamb. So we took a left and there it was. We saw the prices and they were very reasonable and we sat down. Then we gawked at the 9.90 euro cover charge and then settled down after we realized it was only 2.90 euros. I had the best lamb chops that I have ever had there. They were covered in this wonderful sauce and they were extremely tender.

Day 11:
After arriving at our hotel around 9 o’ clock. We needed somewhere to eat that was still open that late. We were directed to a restaurant around the corner and had the cheapest restaurant for three people in Europe ever. We got two pizzas: one Margharita and one with hotdogs. Yeah, you read that right hotdogs, we thought that they meant sausage, but they were not kidding. Oh well, it ended up being only twelve euros. That’s including a 1.5 liter bottle of coke and when were used to paying upwards of two euros for a quarter liter, that was amazing.

So that is what I ate on my trip. I tried to keep it brief. If anyone is interested in the addresses and phone numbers for La Playa or Kalidonios, just leave a comment and I will post them.

I am back from my trip to Greece. Once I get the pictures back from my friend’s laptop. The trip was great.

Italy had some great food and even better gelati, but the apartment we stayed at was quite bad. Cherif and Chris shared the main bed, my father slept on the fold out couch and Josh and I slept on cots in the same room as my father. Noise would resonate off of the Roman walls up to the vaulted ceiling of the apartment and echo around the room even with the windows closed.

We stayed at a Marriott in Athens, Greece, and it was a fairly standard American hotel aside from the bidet. It was the tallest building in the immediate vicinity and had a pool on the top floor. It was fun to sit up on the pool deck at night and look out at the Acropolis.

In Santorini, Greece, we stayed at Pegasus Suites. We had some minor problems because they didn’t have the rooms that we had requested and therefore we had one bed and one bathroom and we requested two beds and two bathrooms. They moved a single bed in for me, but it ended up working very well. Petrosh, one of the guys that worked there, made everything great because of how kind and helpful he was.

For Mykonos, Greece, we stayed at Petinos Beach Hotel and that was the best hotel we had. It had two couches, one of which I slept on, and a bed and one bathroom. It also had two balconies and several places to sit. As you could guess from the name it was right on the beach of the Aegean Sea. The pool deck of the hotel had a row of chairs that sat right over the water of the sea.

I will post tomorrow about all of the food I ate and where to get the best meals.