Harisa

Me and Harisa

The family of the Lord is the best! My first week in Thessaloniki I had the pleasure of staying with a wonderful, fun, godly woman, named Harisa. She lives near the city center by herself on the top floor of her apartment building. She learned English through watching and reading the subtitles of American movies and spoke it very well. Transitioning from London to Greece was very smooth because of the love and hospitality she showed me. Her apartment was warmly decorated (mostly by IKEA) and I felt like a princess while staying there. 99% of the meals we had, she prepared- the Greek way – from scratch. This is one huge difference I noticed food wise, from London. In London I get the feeling that meals are more often made using some shortcuts to help them out rather than from scratch. Not saying one is better than the other, I have to admit that on a few occasions I used premade yorkshire puddings & chicken kiev from the freezer and gravy and parsley sauce from a kind of granule form. My chef at school would have had a fit! But what can I say when you are hungry and tired you just got to get’er done! Actually, part of it too was my curiosity of what they (these shortcuts) tasted like.

Harisa's House

Anyways, Harisa and I went to the farmer’s market together and got the fresh produce, fish and fresh baked bread. This surprised me about Greeks, they eat a lot of bread, we often got fresh bread loafs (not sliced) from the bakery just down the street. There are tons of these little bread shops all over Thessaloniki. I was in heaven walking through the markets looking at the fruits and vegetables, in shapes and colors I’ve never seen before. 

Produce Market

For instance, eggplant with purple and white stripes, light green striped zucchini, ruby red tomatoes, football shaped melon and so many different varieties of olives. At one point walking through the market I thought of my Grandma Huden (home with the Lord 4/2010) and how she would have loved these markets, sharing the same passion for good wholesome flavorful food- which starts with ripe, in season produce. Just a little tug on my heart in wanting to share my travels and experiences with her :)

Fried fish, Greek salad and bread

 In many ways being the Harisa it was like being with a younger hip grandma (her oldest grandchild is 5) and one of the best times I had with her was every morning we had breakfast outside on her deck with the beautiful bright blue sky and breakfast would last for over two hours. We talked about all sorts of things- okay mostly relationships and at the end of our time Harisa would say, “these are the words for today.” So cute. Harisa was born and raised in Greece but is the most anti- Greek person I’ve met. Not completely in a bad sense but since she lived in Germany (very mechanically savvy) for some years and is a born again Christian (amen!), she was able to touch on where Greece may have wrong. I learned about the not so perfect government, orthodox church and typical/traditional family dynamics “my son, my son.” Laziness and gossip may have been mentioned too :) All to say I got my Greek culture lessons (spoken in love) in the first week I was in Greece. I also got some cooking lessons too. That is one of things I absolutely love about food, sharing recipes, cooking together and making memories that appeal to all your senses. Cooking with Harisa was so much fun, we listened to and sang along with some of Barry’s songs in the kitchen while we rinsed, snapped off he heads and pulled out the intestines of these little fishes we got fresh from the market! Hahaha. They were very good by the way, with a little flour and salt then fried in oil. Yummy.

Jayson, me, Sydnee, Kaylee & Rylee

Staying with Harisa presented another opportunity, playing with her grandchildren. It had been over 3 weeks since I’ve spent time with my nieces and nephew and I was really starting to miss them. So I got my auntie time in! Maria(5) and Demetri(4) have got to be the most beautiful Greek kids I’ve seen. The language barrier did concern me a little bit, if they would warm up to me and want to play etc. But forget about it! Maria and I played with her baby doll, brushing the fake hair, feeding it a bottle, undressing and changing the dirty diaper. That was funny – I pretended it was smelly and make a icccckky sound and she laughed and copied me.  Later she had some Disney books (in Greek) and sat next to me wanting me to read them. Well I just talked about the pictures and that seemed to work. We colored together, went to the park, skipped down the sidewalk, helped her on the monkey bars, swung on sings and of course laughed the whole time. With Demetri, those chubby cheeks and spiky hair was so adorable. We bonded by me playing along with his little handheld video game. He had it on a mode where the camera is running and you fling objects at real time people. So I was “dodging” and being “hit” by different things on his screen, all of which made him crack up. Oh man it was the best! The Lord supplies what you need or in this case what my heart needed in amazing and beautiful ways.  

Maria and me

It turns out both Harisa and I had been praying about the each other because after being with Jess in London for 3 weeks I prayed God would give me another Jess. We hit it off so well, and Harisa didn’t know what to expect with an American girl staying with her. We connected right away and I thank you Lord for putting such sweet, humble women in my path as I travel, you are an awesome God!

God Bless,