I know it's been an obscene amount of time since I've written any update email whatsoever, so this one will just skim over the time lapsed between the last one up until now.

Potty trained twin boys, taught the seven-year-old to read in English, improved my French... and I think that might be it.

The thing that has impressed me about Greece is how crazy this country and it's people are. The people always seem to be yelling at each other, angrily or friendly. There are stray dogs and cats alllllll over the place, including in restaurants roaming in and out looking for fallen scraps. There are kids walking around all day playing music or trying to sell you things when they should probably be in school. They park wherever they feel like it, including in the MIDDLE of traffic at a roundabout. They love their Christianity. The so-called "Bible Belt" has nothing on this country. They LOVE to smoke anytime, anywhere: indoors, outdoors, in restaurants. The guy serving you or cooking is probably smoking, with cats running around on the floor. And they LOVE coffee at anytime of the day.

As for now, I'm in Greece with my friend Jose on vacation for a few weeks before returning to the good ole US of A. Our original plan was to run the Athens Classic Marathon, but injured Jose bailed and I ran it solo. It was surprisingly fun, and went by pretty quickly, just like everything in my life. I didn't train for this race whatsoever, and astonishingly, I only added 9 minutes to my last race time to finish at 5 hours 29 minutes. I was in some severe pain the days after, but it was ok. We ended up staying in Athens for a few days since it took me so long to walk around from monument to museum to archeological site, then went to Delphi for a day trip. That was kind of a joke because we were on a bus 4 hours each way, and only stayed an hour and a half in Delphi. It rained the whole time, except for when we were going up the steps to where they supposedly kept the Oracle. I didn't see anything spectacular until I turned around and looked out over the valley with the lake and the little town. It was really pretty.

I'm going to borrow Jose's wording and talk about when we were accosted by an overly friendly Greek lady who, after learning of our inability to speak Greek, proceeded to spend the next half hour telling us what to order from this bakery, and then telling us where we should go all over town. She took our Lonely Planet and wrote all over the maps underlining the things she approved of and crossing out the things she didn't like. I really liked this lady.

After Delphi we ventured to Nafplio, the ancient capitol of Greece. It's a very quaint town by the water and the place we stayed had some great views of the castle and the bay. The castle is nice, although there were no explainations for anything anywhere except arrows proclaiming "Archeological site", or "Achilles' Bastion". I'm kind of strange and I count things, and I counted up to 300 stairs going up the mountain, and then I lost count and gave up. It was hot. I was tired. It was high up the mountain.

After two nights in Nafplio we took an overnight ferry to Crete. I wondered aloud "do you think they'll give us beds on the ferry?" To which Jose said "Of course. They have to. It's overnight." Of course, they didn't, and we slept on couches in a huge room with a bunch of other people. It was actually very nice. Sleeping there was alright, except for the lights. There was a man that worked on the ferry who walked by us when we were taking up probably too much of a huge bench-couch thing and he was telling us something, but the only indication that he was speaking to us was his very loud proclaimation of "Parakalo! Blah blah blah stuff in Greek." For some reason this was really funny to us because he was not happy, but we had no clue what it was.

After a failed attempt to find a campground that doesn't exist, we wandered around Hania for a while and found a place to stay and made plans to go hike the Samaria gorge the next day. The next day comes around and we go to the bus station to get the bus and there were no more as the only one that goes to Samaria on a Sunday leaves at 7:30am. Oh well. We made our way to Iraklio and found some things to do. We went to see some ruins in Knossos yesterday but as Jose says "I don't get feelings from rocks!"

Now we're in Santorini. It's very nice and the water is reallllly cold. I thought that there was a big concrete slab in the water, but Jose swam further out than I did and said it was still there, and we came to the conclusion that it was one huge rock from the volcano. Very interesting. Somehow we need to make our way back to Athens for me to catch my flight back to Germany to see my brother and the fam for Thanksgiving, then take the train back to Geneva to get my stuff from the house and see the kiddies again, then go to NYC to see some more friends (and find a job and apply to schools).