Final post: How to acquire a Greek grandmother and her Greek pie dough ('pita') recipe

I'm back in the States, and have been for over thirty-six hours now. Aside from suffering exhaustion, jetlag, and a weird adjustment to corn syrup and MSG (both of which I got completely unaccustomed to while in Greece), the trip was fantastic. We spent our final few days in Pefkohori, after leaving Litochoro. I can't even count the number of awesome places, restaurants, people, and foods I've seen, having been here. It'd be too large a list.

Being back in the States (staying for a few days at Adam's parents' house) has been strange. I had gotten so used to largely broken English and saying things in Greek (not much; just the little I did learn), that it's surreal to be back where everyone can understand me. The last few days in Pefkohori, we were too busy for me to take any pictures, since that's where our final assignment was due, but trust me: it's gorgeous. Where we stayed, we were right on the beach at Adrianna Suites and Apartments, which are also rather nice. The apartment itself came with a hotplate, dishes, silverware, and a fridge, so my roommates and I had a racket going with a kick-in of five Euros a meal. It certainly cut off most of the price of food, and we still had leftovers.

But as far as Pefkohori goes, Adrianna, the woman who owns the Apartments and Suites we were occupying, was fantastic. Even after some of my classmates decided that loudly running around like drunken five-year-olds at three in the morning our first night there, she gave us tyropita and saw us off at three in the morning the day we left.

Aside from giving our group tyropita, she gave my roommates and I a box-worth of tyropita to take with us on our flights, and a recipe for the -pita part of tyropita (cheese pie; tyros is cheese, roughly transliterated) which involves no standard measurements. It was a beautiful eleven-o'-clock PM moment, before my groggy-eyed teacher came to the suites to make sure none of my classmates had decided to relive the first night in Pefkohori. Once she got there, we were instructed to take ourselves to bed, as this was, apparently, not the appropriate time for making pita. I intend to email her for the rest of the recipe, since she knows English, and I am fairly certain she'd be willing to give me the recipe in the end.

In any case, once I got through customs and to Birmingham Int'l, I had traveled 20 hours from Greece to the US. All in all, though, I feel the best night of the trip was learning Greek and a recipe from a woman who barely understood English on our last night in the country. Really, it was a fitting end. Thera, Oia, Athens, Sounion, Corinth, Nafplio, Mycenae, Epidauros, Olympia, Naupactus, Delphi, Thermopylae, Meteora, Litochoro, Dion, Vergina, Pefkohori, and then, finally, home, to my cat, and my job, and my normal life.

It's been a good month.