Clean Monday

Yesterday, it was the holiday known as Clean Monday which is the first day of fasting. On that day, you can’t eat or cook with certain food like: dairy, eggs, meat, fish with backbones, or oil. So people eat a lot of veggies, lentils, crustaceans, flat bread, and this cake type thing made of crushed sesame seeds (it has a mild peanut butter taste to it). It's also really popular to fly kites.

In the morning, I went upstairs and helped Markos and Linda make food for lunch. Markos made a bunch of seafood dishes and showed me what to do. We made dishes with squid, octopus, big prawns, mussels, and little fish eggs. Here’s a pic of the octopus:

We brought all this food over to Tony’s grandparent’s and added it to the other food his yia yia made. There were all kinds of veggies, homemade pickles, olives, more octopus and prawns and flat bread. We had wine with it too of course; we usually have 2 main kinds of wine: a white wine and a sweet red wine. We brought over the white wine that we made in Sept (I call it foot wine since we stepped on the grapes to make it!). The food was really interesting, there were things I've never tried before.

Pandelis and his daughter Maria came over too (uncle and cousin of Tony) so there were 7 of us all together. Papoose started playing the tsabouna and yia yia played a little drum made of goat skin. We took turns playing the drum, it was a lot of fun and some of us got up and started doing some Greek dancing too! It was quite hilarious, I have some funny videos. I’m working on getting one of them up on the net but I’m not sure it’ll work. I’ll put a link to it if I figure it out.

Anyways, after hours of eating, drinking wine, dancing, and music, we were so full and ready to have a nap! We went home in the evening and Linda and I watched a movie and had an early night.

M