http://www.gogreece.com/learn/oxi.htm
October 28 is a national holiday in Greece, celebrating the day that Greeks gave a resounding "Oxi" (No) to Mussolini's demand that Italian troops be allowed into Greece at the beginning of WW2. The celebration starts in the morning with the school children parading to the town square, wearing white shirts and black pants or skirts, carrying the Greek flag. Their parade is led by drummer and cymbals. However, it is pouring rain again today, so they marched to the church across the street from our house, with church bells ringing and priests chanting and singing. We could hear the mayor's speech via loudspeakers, and the enthusiastic response of the children!! the celebrating by the adults will likely continue into the night with lots of drinking of raki, general partying, and maybe even shooting of guns as part of it all.
It's not just raining here (and has been doing for the past week), there are heavy downpours with hours and hours of thunder and lightening. this is a new experience for me... it rains a lot in the pacific northwest, but damn! it's been years since i saw this much sustained rain. we even had to get the heat turned on in our house, so at least if we venture out, we can come home and get warm and dry. the house seems very empty now (sigh) as C&K&A&Z left monday evening to take the very large overnight ferry to Athens, have an overnight there and fly out early this morning back to WA. and friend Tracy left early tuesday a.m. to fly home. it was delightful to have 2 weeks with them here and we had fun times. and now a week more... and i have hopes that it will include a few more sunny warm days. as many times as we've come to Crete there has never been heavy sustained rains like this! at least we are on the side of a mountain so the water runs down from here to the Aegean Sea.` `.,
one more week and i'll home in the oregon rain again.
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