Home is where Sven is

For the hard-working people we are, we've praised laziness and vacations and easy money quite a lot through this bblogg. That’s because we can appreciate them fully!

What’s the alternative? Do nothing else but praise work? I love work! I can sit and watch people work for hours!

We are back from our lovely vacation, dear readers. As some of you know, we’ve been back for a week already. But Frog Ted needed some time to sort out the photos. We still need some time to bond with Sven properly, so we’ll now give the mike to our Frog Ted, who can’t wait to tell you all about his adventures down in Greece.

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Hey friends! It’s me, Frog Ted!

I followed Roufa and Mimi to Athens and Ancient Olympia! I have some fun pictures to show you from our trip! I have to warn you though that I didn’t take any pictures in archaeological sites, because 1) I had to buy a ticket to enter, but 2) I could not because I am not human, so 3) I was hiding in Mimi’s bag.

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Here I am, on my way to the airport! The sun is shining already!



We've just landed in Athens and Metaxa is already beckoning!



Here I am at the noisy KTEL station, from where coach buses leave to the farthest corners of Greece! And that includes a couple of islands! Don't ask me how they do that, perhaps they are amphibian buses?





In five hours Roufa will be lighting a cigarette in Ancient Olympia! No, silly, not with sunlight!



Peloponnesos, here I come!

The sea is so blue! You think it's bad for my fur?



Ghost Frog!



The best thing to fight the morning heat, and the high-noon heat, and the afternoon heat, is not Metaxa, but cold coffee, with plenty of ice: espresso freddo (left), or nescafe frappe (right), which is a half-century-old Greek invention. You can even have them without milk! That's great because cream and milk can weigh you down in the heat! You can find these things everywhere you go for 2-4 euros!



You can even find miniature ice-cream cones at the local pastry shop. Perfect for my size, Mimi told me. (What am I punished for, again, Mimi?)



I gave this new friend of mine Sven's email address.



Back in Athens, more fans of Sven!



These gals were organizing a Sven's bride competition!!



Tentacles the Wise (but Reclusive) Octopus is very highly regarded here. Take a closer look...



See?



We spent many days in Athens. Here I pose in Plaka, the old neighborhood at the foot of Acropolis! We had delicious food at the square behind me!



And here I am in Glyfada, a seaside suburb a few km south! You can see the St Constantine church on the right and behind me you can see the FNAC! Where Mimi and Roufa browsed books and DVDs, as usual. I think they are composing a world map of book and CD stores. Mimi was very happy to find the CD-single of Nickelback's Rockstar here at a bargain price! She says it's the “best, most feel-good song ever”. They've posted the lyrics on Banana's Appendix. They're nuts. (They'll give me miniature ice-cream if they read this.)


Now all this has made me very very hungry! Some baklava with kaimaki ice-cream on the side sounds perfect!

Before I go, here's a nice video we shot in the center of Athens, as the city bus was approaching the National Garden! There's some antiquity for you!

Espionage, shaken and stirred

Our vacation was lovely, Dear Friends! Life can be kind -- almost as kind as you and your sweet messages! The sun was bright and the air was warm. The waffles were delicious, vanilla ice-cream on the side. Scottie was crazy, as usual. All she cared for was her tennis ball. She uses it to communicate. Play with tennis ball = Love. Scottie is a black Labrador that belongs to relatives. She bounces her ball like a basketball player, and balances it on the tip of her muzzle like a seal! And she is very patient, just like Frog. She'd lay there waiting outside the bathroom for Mimi to finish showering (and hair styling and the works) and come out and play with her. And her ball.

What else did we do? We watched U2 live in Latin America in 3D – four cities in one afternoon. We put on our magic glasses and were just beamed there, rendered invisible intruders on the stage! We took off the glasses and found ourselves back inside an empty theater. We walked out into the afternoon heat. We had coffee.

The next day we visited a science museum together with [other] kids. Mimi lay on a bed of nails; Roufa powered a TV by pedaling. And then we played in the spy section, where we saw real mikes hidden in fake olives, antennas in toothpicks. We crawled our way through booby-trapped corridors, trying not to intersect the laser beams.

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And then something funny happened. Roufa was studying the Enigma code and Mimi was fiddling with some wires. Roufa had just deciphered an eight-lettered word – Istanbul! -- when Mimi urged him to come and listen, for she had intercepted a telephone conversation! Well, she assumed it was a recorded conversation waiting for kids to discover it. Interestingly enough, it was being conducted in Terrible English – the official language of international dealings. It sounded so real! But, curiously, not very spy-related. What we could hear was a no-nonsense manager, representing a major European electricity supplier, and some counterpart from a small country, discussing the possibility to install a nuclear plant in that country. For peaceful purposes. Big deal!

It turns out though that we've spied for real! This was a real conversation, believe it or not – and what a scoop! You see we did a little further research and discovered that in that little lignite-devouring country nuclear energy is fiercely opposed and nobody seems to be remotely aware of any plans to introduce it! So: was the manager being misled, or are the little country's citizens being fooled to believe that Russian natural gas is the future?

Where are the real journalists when you need them? Recycling each other's garbage.

Dear journalists, here's the deal: The beautiful little country is Greece, home of the beautiful little Greeks. Now, if you want us to name more names, you will have to pay: Full immunity in writing and an all-inclusive three-week holiday in Santorini for two adults and a dog should do! No, wait, make that a house downtown Fira with a volcano view plus a generous budget so that we can decorate it ourselves. We have a very exquisite taste.

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As far as we know, we will not be traveling for a while. Not before August. Finally, we can start looking for a French Bulldog! Preferably black with white spots! Like this cuty here! Oh, we've waited too long.