SEFI 2012: It's all Greek (and Swiss) to Me!

So as you may or may not have noticed, I never actually got around to blogging about Alice and my adventures in Istanbul, although they were promised in a previous blog post.  Despite this social media gaffe on my part (oops), photos have been posted from that part of our Turkey trip, and they can be found on my Facebook here.

The reason I'm back to this sporadically-updated blog is that I'm just finishing a 10-day trip to Zurich and Thessaloniki, Greece, and it's time to provide some more updates and (hopefully) pretty photos from my wanderings.

Last Saturday morning, I landed in Zurich at about 10 AM after a not-so-satisfying nap on my Swiss Air flight from Boston.  After freshening up at the airport, I took a train to Zuirch's central train station, which is right at the end of the Bahnhofstrasse, a main tourist/shopping area running through the middle of the city.  After exploring that area (in the rain) for a bit, I snapped a few photos at Lake Zurich, grabbed a delicious lunch (sausage with onions, "Zurich style"), and then headed to the Kunsthaus Museum, which had a great collection (I especially loved the contemporary art).  After a quick hot chocolate at a cafe off of the Bahnhofstrasse (the Swiss sit outside at cafes even if it's cold and pouring), I took a train back to the airport, where I promptly fell asleep on a couch at the Starbucks until it was time to head through security (which, for the record, includes all-automated ticket and ID checking).  Overall, it was a nice mini-trip, although I've learned that (a) Switzerland is VERY expensive and (b) I do not function well on four hours of sleep.  Oh well.

Look, Mom, I really went to Switzerland!  The view of the Bahnhofstrasse.

Of course you have to get hot chocolate.

The first few days after arriving in Greece were a whirlwind of food, conference activities, and living in my first-ever AirBnB home stay, a lovely studio apartment in Kalamaria, to the east of downtown Thessaloniki.  The conference (for the Society of European Engineering Education, or "SEFI") itself was a good experience - my presentation went extremely well, and one audience member came up after to thank me for putting together such a clear and well-explained talk (YES!).  I received lots of good questions, and it seemed like everyone in the room thought what I was doing with SUTD was pretty awesome (I think it is too).  Despite the craziness of the conference schedule, within the first few days here we also found some time to go to the beach, where we ate amazing seafood and drank frappés, the unofficial drink of Thessaloniki.  Although we don't know exactly what they are, it appears to be a blended, chilled coffee drink, whipped until there is foam on top and generally served with milk and copious amounts of sugar.  Yum.

The view from our lunch at the beach - not bad!

The frappé generally comes with free food.  Which is awesome.

After conference activities ended, we had one day in Thessaloniki before taking our side trip to Mount Pelion (more on that below).  This also turned out to be a strike day in Greece, when many of the major unions (including many public workers and, terrifyingly, air traffic controllers) got together to protest EU austerity measures.  Despite the chaos downtown, we managed to take a self-guided walking tour of the older parts of the city in the morning, with one unexpected turn: we saw a few young people graffiti-ing the Old City in broad daylight!  There's tons of graffiti everywhere here, but it was definitely a surprise to see a group just walk up to a wall with some spray paint at 11 o'clock in the morning.  The rest of the day was a bit less exciting, although we ended with an absolutely delicious dinner at a restaurant with a really unique blend of tastes - it was influenced by the Turkish-Greek cuisine that existed in the northeast of the country before the population exchanges.  Highlights included retsina, a special Greek white wine infused with sap, and a feta mousse (yes, this exists, and yes, it is amazing).

Not the graffiti we saw being done, but a good example of what many Thessaloniki walls look like.

Protesters march through the city center.

The next day, Vivek and Megan picked me up in a rental car to begin our drive to Mount Pelion, a mountain situated on a peninsula in the Aegean Sea about halfway between Athens and Thessaloniki and the mythological home of the centaurs (I kid you not).  Portaria, the village in which we stayed, was about a 3-hour drive from Thessaloniki, although we made a bunch of scenic stops along the way (including a few beaches, a castle, a beautiful gorge, and the actual Mount Olympus).  After arriving in Portaria and settling our schedule with the proprietor of our inn, the three of us drove to a neighboring village called Makrinista to watch the sunset and have dinner at a small restaurant off the main square.  This may have been our most incredible meal in Greece so far; we had "small goat," grilled feta with sesame seeds and honey, stuffed zucchini, bean soup, and the customary free dessert that we've received almost everywhere we've eaten.  The view was also fantastic, and it was just a really lovely meal overall.

The sunset view on Mount Pelion.

The next day, Katerina had suggested that we drive to the "back" of the mountain to go to the beach at one of the remote swimming areas along the shore.  What I had no idea was that this entailed an hour and a half of the curviest, smallest, least-guard-railed roads I've ever encountered, as well as the fact that we needed to drive up and over the mountain to reach our destination.  Given my fear of heights this was slightly petrifying, but we eventually made it and the beach was totally worth it!  We spent a few hours there, had a small lunch (or small by this trip's standards, anyway), then drove back to the hotel and worked a bit before another lovely dinner at a small tavern in Makrinista.

The beach!  Not bad for September, eh?

Yesterday, we drove back to Thessaloniki, and it's been a really relaxing last couple of days in the city. Vivek, Megan, and Katerina all left this morning, so I've been spending some time catching up on my work and seeing a few last sights in the city.  Today I climbed the White Tower (as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, the White Tower is to Thessaloniki) and also went to the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which was a lovely (albeit very small) tribute to the historic Jewish population here.  It's an incredibly sad story - the Sephardic Jewish population of Thessaloniki topped 100,000 at points (specifically during the Spanish Inquisition), but all 50,000 that remained here during the 1940s were transported to Auschwitz, where 96% died before the end of the war.  Despite the sad content, it was a well-presented museum and I'd recommended it to anyone happening to visit Thessaloniki in the future!

View from Thessaloniki's White Tower.

Tonight is my last night in town (I'm planning on a delicious last meal at Greek dinner time, which is about 9:00), and I'll be flying back to Boston tomorrow afternoon for 13 days of work before my next conference, the World Engineering Education Forum, in Buenos Aires.  Wish me luck with getting everything done, as well as safe travels back to the good 'ole US of A!

Dara