Month: May 2020

Arpi’s Chocolate Tart

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The lockdown gave rise to a new social group: mothers of kids that had to be homeschooled and kept busy within social acceptable norms. A number of tricks where utilised to keep us mothers relatively sane: memes in social media, zoom chats, cooking, alcohol. Birthdays were a challenge. We did the best we could. Our son celebrated his over zoom with his classmates. They sung happy birthday, he blew the candles of his cake.  Then, as the lockdown eased, we repeated the process with his grandfather, his godparents and then his grandmother in separate sessions. I am sure he is aware of the absurdity, but, given the presents, he plays along. As of the cakes, and given that our assembly skills are a little rusty to build the Millennium Falcon or Darth Vader, the two variations we baked was a multi coloured cake so our son could choose the colours (white, brown, red, blue ) and participate in the process, and a chocolate tart. We first had this chocolate tart from Arpi, a good friend …

Quarantine Pathways

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What we are realizing as we are slowly stepping out of the lockdown is that we followed rigid routines: reading, cooking, wandering in the city and in nature, watching the daily announcement of the civil protection and the chief epidemiologist.  In a sense we were walking on pathways that we deepened everyday. The first pathway was through nature, literary on the hill around the corner from where we live, or a little further away before and after the strict lockdown. We discovered new paths and took joy every time we saw wildlife (not the bears and wolves our son anticipated), but birds we had never seen before, swarms of butterflies and the usual turtles. We were walking mainly silently. The second pathway was through the city. We strolled past the Tsoladies (the ceremonial presidential guard), down to Zappeion. Our son had a precise map on his head with the optimal routes for his roller scooter, down to the level of pavement material variations. Of course the stroll was bizarre, passing through sites that were now …