The challenge of travel, for me, is time. My nostalgia vein runs deep, so I constantly want to return to the places I love, and when I’m there, I wander around narrating what makes each spot meaningful to me. “This is where Papi and Mami got married,” I tell my children each time we pass…
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This Little Piggie Loves a Do-Over
It’s the most wonderful day of the year: Lunar New Year. Although I’m not Asian and don’t follow a lunar calendar, I can’t help but get excited about this holiday because it involves so many of my favorite things. It’s not just the dragons and fireworks and lucky red and gold everything. (Some people walk…
Mamma Mia III—Acropolis Tantrum!
Sorry to disappoint you, but that is not the name of the next sun-splashed singing, dancing delight coming to a cinema near you this summer. It’s a brief summary of the last week of my summer vacation, which saw me romping around Athens’ monuments, restaurants, and open-air cinemas with my kids in tow. Traveling with…
Wild Orchids, Trees of Life, and Voting to Repair the World
“If everybody loved flowers, there would be no war.” That’s what George Psailas, the caretaker of the British cemetery on the Greek island of Corfu told me and the English-speaking visitors I brought to see the rare wild orchids that grow in the graveyard. I just smiled, thinking something had been lost in translation. I…
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Just Call Me J. Lo
When I was single, I always imagined that if I didn’t marry someone Greek, I’d marry someone I could steamroll with my culture. After all, that’s what my dad did. My mom is from Minnesota and was Presbyterian before she met him, converted to Orthodoxy, got married in the Greek church, moved to Greece, learned…
Looking for Luck in All the Right Places
I just now learned the Greek word for Equinox. While “equinox” comes from the Latin words for “equal night,” the Greek term, Ισημερία, means “equal day.” I owe my vocab lesson to a kind soul who follows my author page on Facebook. Every Rosh Hashanah, when Amalia, who attends public school here in New York, has…