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Kitchen Window
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We’ve been cloistered in our new home on the island of Thassos, Greece, for a couple weeks now. It’s so different from Athens we might as well be on the other side of the world. We’re living in the little mountain town of Panagia (pronounced Panayhia – it means Virgin/Madonna), which has a population of maybe 400 right now. There are probably more goats and chickens than people.

The streets are so windy and narrow that cars can’t make it up to our part of the village, making it very peaceful. A series of canals run beside the roads bringing clear water down from a natural spring. Gardens spill into the streets, and all include grape vines that are starting to show signs of bearing fruit. I wonder if everyone will make their own homebrew wine, or if they combine the grapes from every house together. Wine is one of the exports here along with honey, olive oil, and a shiny white marble they pull out of the big quarry peaking over a nearby hill.

Instead of the iconic Greek red tile roofs, the little white houses in our little Panagia stand out by having slate roofs. Whitewashed stucco covers the traditional stone walls beneath, which looks to me like heaps of rocks and the occasional haphazard wooden board. A surprising number of houses that have been abandoned to the passage of time, including the ruined walls of a neighboring house which we overlook from our ample balcony.

As usual we spend our days on the balcony, reclining with our laptops on two single beds at either end. There’s a table between us (the only one in the house), where we eat meals consisting of Greek salad, fresh bread with olive oil & vinegar, and whatever Greek recipe I’ve tried to implement that day.

There’s a bakery and grocery just a few steps down the hill, and trucks come by every morning with loudspeakers announcing fresh vegetables and fish. Further down in the center of town are four restaurant/bars facing eachother, where the men of the town spend their evenings drinking retsina and gossiping. The women sweep homes and putter in their gardens, and have shouted conversations between balconies. The older ladies all wear black blouses and long black skirts. I hear the period of mourning for the death of any family member is 2-5 years, but widows and the especially mournful will wear black for the rest of their lives. It’s so common here it almost seems like a fashion statement. Everyone is friendly, although few of them speak English.

They all say “hello” to which we answer “yia sas”.

Blinded!
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We were warned about staying near Omonia station in the “bad” part of town. Colin was nervous about arriving at midnight and walking through there with all our worldly posessions, so he meticulously planned our route from Syntagma square to the hotel. It took us along two wide roads lined with upscale shops… sort of. Every third or fourth storefront was abandoned, smashed up and/or burnt out. Graffiti covered every available surface. The word that came to my mind was “wounded”, like this part of the city had been beaten up, whether by riots or the economy in general.

Omonia didn’t look much better in the light of day, and the damage stretched all the way to the old town around the Acropolis. It was hard to tell where the modern ruins ended and the ancient ones began. The grafitti was even further spread, mostly short phrases written with fat black markers on the ubiquitous white marble. We’d desciphered the Greek alphabet earlier using an in-flight magazine, but none of the words were familiar.

We strolled over to Lykavittos hill and took the furnicular to the top (not a thrilling ride, but it was a hot day). From the top we could see Athens stretching out in all directions, uniformly beige 4-8 story buildings packed in tightly by the surrounding hills. No skyscrapers or obvious downtown, but there are several big parks and at least a dozen 2500-year old archeological wonders just plopped around the city.

On our second day we met with a couple of local independent game developers from Flipped Horizons to get their perspective of the city and Greece’s local games industry (namely, that there isn’t much of one). Their 20-some person studio produces more games every month than we have made in our entire professional careers. It’s like they’re in a permanent state of game jamming, and it seems to have fostered a strong feeling of camaraderie (not unlike soldiers at war).

We had a late tour of the Parthenon and watched the sun set over a much nicer view of the city bordered by olive groves. We had dinner at an outdoor tapas place (what do they call tapas here?) and ouzo at a very cool little bar called Loop down in Thiseio. One thing we loved about Athens was the amount of outdoor seating. And the Athenians seem like a pretty hip and happy bunch all things considered.

Our flight was delayed until the next evening, but I suspected the posters pasted all over the city with a picture of a fist clenching a wrench and the words “something something MAH 1” were going to put a damper in any plans we tried to make. Sure enough, Athens celebrated May Day with a general strike, closing all the museums, archeological sites and trains to the airport. So instead we wandered towards Syntagma square to see what we could see.

We were immediately caught up in an enormous parade of chanting ralliers which pulled us along for ten or twenty blocks. The side streets were blocked off with hundreds and hundreds of police in riot gear. We’d noticed a huge police presence over the weekend in just about every corner of the city. We saw them in the squares, in the parks, even outside our hotel just hanging out in big groups. I’m not sure if this was normal, or if they came from out of town for this one event.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we did have to head for the airport but are keeping track of the Mayday protests through Twitter. I hope the 30 degree weather will keep tempers down and Athens won’t aquire any more bruises or broken bones tonight.

Kiss
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

After Tokyo we spent two months in the Philippines with our friends Ron and Arlie, and my god did we have a blast. We stayed in a seaside mansion where we had delicious Filipino food prepared for us nightly, and were visited by friends from across the indie–verse and beyond. We took a lot of pictures, and it seems most of them fit into the categories: sailing, snorkeling… and bugs.

Oh and some photos of me shooting an AK-47 and hiking up to a native Mangyan village with our friend Peter. The expats were super friendly and welcoming, centered around the local yacht club where we had dinner on Friday nights and took a few sailing lessons. The older brits and their young Filipino wives seemed a little colonial at times, but some like Peter were active in the community and helping to promote touristic alternatives to seedy Sabang and boring White Beach.

After the Philippines the two of us spent two weeks in Hong Kong. Unfortunately Colin came down with a mysterious illness and was out of commission for much of it. We stayed in Mong Kok on the Chinese side which has the highest population density in the world, as well as many wonderful markets and whole streets dedicated to aquariums, flowers, and songbirds. Our room was a cozy little breadbasket, bright and quiet and just big enough for a bed and the two of us to stand. We met some eccentric housemates and wrote an iPad game for Colin’s mum, which teaches Japanese Katakana using a crossword and photos from our time in Tokyo. We showed it around at an indie game meetup in Hong Kong and people were impressed, so we may release it on the app store eventually.

Christmas with family on Vancouver Island was great as always. It hasn’t snowed yet but there’s still time before we head down to San Francisco. We’ll be there until March or April but haven’t decided where to go after that. Europe? Eastern Canada? We’ll see…

Tomo & Chie
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yesterday we met up with Naoko’s friends Tomo and Chie. Naoko runs a Japanese tea cafe on Vancouver Island we _love_. Whenever we’re in the area we drop by for some great tea and sushi. We’ve become friends and so when she heard we were heading to Tokyo she set us up with Tomo and Chie. We had such a fun day!

Having locals show you around is always the best way to see a place. We started off in Shibuya and we peppered them with questions about fashion and music and how the city works. Shibuya is a centre for fashion conscious kids. Tokyo is very fashion aware and people obviously spend a lot of money on their clothes. We went to the trendiest mall in the trendiest part of Tokyo and it was like a missing puzzle piece. Here was where everyone under 25 in Tokyo was being dressed. The mapping of clothes on the rack to people we’d seen all month on the street was near one-to-one.

From there we headed to Setagaya where Chie had grown up. She knew about this great little bakery. The place was nearly invisible it had some writing on the windowless wall but no distinct bakery feel. Apparently it had been a sushi place previous which I have no problem believing. They only make Japanese style baked goods so we picked up a variety of dumplings with a variety of stuff in them and then headed to the park for a picnic.

On the way we stopped off at a coffee place to pick up something to drink. This place did all their own roasting and I had an amazing espresso.

The park itself was really nice but their kids area was mind-blowing. It was a lot like you’d imagine Peter Pan and the Lost Boys live. It was a wooded area with kind of haphazardly constructed wooden structures with tarps draped over them as slides. Someone had started a camp fire and kids were lighting branches on fire and swinging them around. Other kids were destroying bits of wood with machetes while other kids climbed around on top of an old full-sized steam engine.

It was chaos and heaven! The sort of place that in North America is becoming more and more scarce. It was especially the opposite parenting philosophy of San Francisco. Here it was the law of the jungle and in SF it’s an over coddled padded room. It was refreshing to see.

After that we headed up to a craft bazaar that was happening. Here we found the Moneygami guy! We’d seen his stuff somewhere before but still can’t quite place where. He does origami with money. Often giving famous presidents, prime ministers and scholars wicked hip-hop hats. His stuff is great! He was putting on little courses in moneygami and selling his books. I sat down and turned a 1,000 yen note into an awesome little hip-hop Hideyo Noguchi.

While we were there we made up some Hexatubes and passed them around. They went over very well. SInce paper folding is much more common thing in Japan people seemed to get the Hexatube much more quickly here than in Canada or the US.

After that we perused the crafts on display. I got my portrait burning into wood which was pretty cool.

By then it was time for dinner and we retired to a bitching little Izakaya. The food was _so good_. Hilights for me include the avocado and tuna slices as well as the kimchi tofu. We all chatted about life, Japan, Canada, how things differed and how they were the same. It was a great evening. I even tried out some of the better Japanese whisky. It was very smooth. Possibly to a fault.

Dinner was great and the company was even better! One our best days in Japan for sure!

Maid to Work
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We met Justin Potts at the Tokyo Game Show and agreed to meet up another day. The day we chose happened to be the same day a Typhoon hit Tokyo.

We hadn’t been to Akihabara yet this time around and it’s close enough to walk to so we started the day walking out to Akihabara. It’s about an hour walk and was very pleasant. We picked up some snacks along the way and kind of haphazardly wandered towards Akiba.

Akihabara is nuts. It used to be the centre of Japan’s electric component industry. It’s still a great place to build robots but since the electrical industry has all wandered over to cheaper countries it’s burgeoned as the nerd capital of Tokyo. Giant six story arcades, manga cafes everywhere, and it’s Tokyo so shit gets pretty weird.

One of the famous things about Akihabara are the maid cafes. Cafes where your waitress dresses like a French maid and serves your coffee in a very demure manner. There are cafes where girls dress up in old-timely Japanese clothes, as cats, you name it. One of the duties of the maid is to pound the pavement and flag down potential customers. I bet on a pleasant day in summer flagging down nerds on the corner is a fine occupation. In the middle of a Typhoon it is less pleasant. But there they were! The dampness probably only adding to the moe.

As the typhoon got into full swing the umbrellas started to snap. I wore a BC style rain jacket and was impervious to the rain and the wind. In Japan the umbrella is pretty much the beginning and the end of rain protection though and typhoons eat umbrellas for lunch!

There is a certain joy in watching umbrellas flip inside out and the fabric tear off snapping spokes like twigs. I don’t know what it is. You would think the waste of materials and money and the knowledge that the owner is now going to get well and truly drenched would make it a sad sight. But it’s not. There is something magical about an umbrella being destroyed. Something unfailingly kinetic and dramatic.

Every time we stopped at a corner I’d watch for likely umbrellas and secretly root for the wind to quickly change directions and take their owners from behind. I took such glee in the sudden *poof* of an umbrella exploding followed by the battle weary owner’s accusative stare of betrayal at their once trusty umbrella.

I don’t know why umbrella exploding is so much fun but the local news even dedicated several minutes to umbrella-exploding montages whenever they could get away with it.

Sarah actually went through four umbrellas herself. Every time she lost an umbrella we would pick up a damaged-but-not-wrecked umbrella that had been discarded. She’d truck it along until it exploded and find another one.

So there was definitely some havoc breaking out but we were still keen for dinner with Justin so we decided to head to the train station a little early just in case. Well turns out that wasn’t necessary because the trains were simply not running. The subway was at the moment but there was no guarantee that it would continue to be at the end of the night so it looked like dinner was out.

Too bad! We ended up walking home again which was really fun. The rain and the wind was going like crazy but it was very warm. Neither the rain nor the wind had a chill to it at all so it was a very blustery, wet, but warm walk home. It was fun to watch the city cope with the weather. Clearly typhoons are not an unknown here. There were sandbags outside store’s doors the day before and everyone was pretty much getting where they needed to be. There were even people riding bikes while holding umbrellas. I dunno how they managed that one.