Happenings this week

I haven't written much lately b/c ever since we got the pup we haven't gone on any exciting trips so if I write once a week I can pretty much sum up what we did :-).  This past week was fun b/c the two Slovakian players on Brian's team had their girlfriends here visiting so I got to hang out with them.  You see me in the picture with them above.  The one in the middle is Romana (Josef's gf) and she is from Croatia and is so nice and speaks really good english.  She made me really want to go to Croatia, it sounds so beautiful there.  The one on the right is Nika (Michel's gf) and she lives in Slovakia and is much quieter but also very nice.  The boys left on Fri. to go to Athens to play their game so Maria took us to W for dinner.  The food there is sooo good and as you can see so is the dessert!  We definitely enjoyed ourselves and I left Marco home alone for 5hrs (the longest he has been alone!) and he was not happy when I got back.  Oh well, he has to learn.  On Sat. Maria, Romana and I walked around the shops and it started to pour rain so we sat and had a coffee while the boys were in Athens playing Panathanaikos.  They lost, unfortunately, but Brian said there were around 1000 people at the game screaming, banging drums, and basically creating chaos and making it so loud the boys couldn't even hear themselves talk to each other in the water.  He made it sound like it was a big distraction.  Hopefully they will beat them when they play them home!  Our fans aren't as crazy, that I've seen yet, but maybe we will gain more as the season continues.  This Sat. is a home game against Chamia and the boys are due for a win!

We have been trying to find a park for Marco to run around in.  He is small and a few sprints down our hallway tires him out but he still deserves to be outside in the grass.  We are learning that the manicured lawns here are few and far between.  You don't even see any lawns in front of any of the houses.  There is dirt everywhere, or cement.  There is a park right by our house that is fenced in and everything, would be perfect, but we quickly learned that we were not allowed to bring him in there.  There is another nice park by the sea but it is full of creepy refugees and stray dogs.  It is right by NOP's pool so one day Brian and I walked along the boardwalk there and let Marco play a little in the grass on his leash.  It is a beautiful location and they really could make so much more out of it but it seems like the refugees have taken over any locations perfect for relaxing and hanging out, since that is all they do all day, that and chase trucks on to the ferries.  We eventually had to pick him up though b/c we unintentionally made friends with a stray who followed us most of the way.  We let them sniff each other but Marco hasn't finished all of his shots so he isn't supposed to play with the potentially diseased.

On Mon. we decided to just drive up into the hills to see if we could find any open land for him to run.  It was an interesting adventure.  Up in the hills is where the nicer homes are supposed to be but you see a lot of construction, a lot of unfinished construction, so there is trash and dirt and noise everywhere.  We climbed pretty much as high as we could go and found a tilled farm that had some grass and Marco had fun getting muddy in that.  On our way back down the hill we ran into this guy in the top picture shepherding his flock.  It was pretty cool to see.  Just down the middle of the road.  Quite an authentic Greek moment :-).