January 7, 2015: Merry Christmas Again

It is Christmas for Eastern Orthodoxes today and since we are in Greece, we get to celebrate Christmas again!  Strangely, everything was open today but yesterday, everything was closed.  We are so confused.

Today is one of our first mornings where Dominica and I woke up in the morning on our own.  The more sunlight that we see, the more easily we will combat the jet lag.

Got the kids up around one so that we could go out and try the shopping thing again.

Young Girl on Prines Street
Luciana Walking Down Our Street in Prines, Crete

Today’s shopping was, finally, a success!  We were very excited and very much relieved when we got to Atsipopoulo and discovered that the grocery store on the north side of town was very much open.  We stopped there and did not even attempt to go any further and did all of our grocery shopping.  Easily an hour of shopping.  We got nearly one hundred and fifty Euros worth of food.  We got a lot of stuff.

Ατσιποπουλο Grocery Store with Liesl Lee
Liesl Shopping in Ατσιποπουλο

While shopping in Ατσιποπουλο we were also just amazed that the grocery store actually had many North American to European power adapters!  Just what we needed!  Actually they were universal to European adapters, which are not as ideal because they are bulkier, but they will work just fine and handle three prong plugs really well and are very versatile.  They are probably stocked instead of North American specific ones because they accommodate nearly anyone from anywhere so they only have to stock one thing rather than many to cover whatever need might arise.  We are so happy.  We bought three adapters plus one power strip.  Our lives in Crete are about to change.  Much less hunting for an adapter all day long and I will be able to stay in the upstairs office to work all of the time instead of working from Dominica’s laptop in the dining room most of the time.

We came right back home from our highly successful shopping trip very glad that we ended up not needing to head on into Rethimno to do additional shopping to find the power adapters.  That could easily have been hours of work and easily could have been fruitless.  We are so happy, now.

Once at home it was time to get everything set up.  I got my office upstairs set up with power and got the Amazon Fire TV set up in the living room connected to the television that they have there that we have been playing video games on for the past several days.  With the additional adapters we are able to have this television dedicated to the Fire TV and we can move the video gaming rig into the media room (the third bedroom, the one downstairs.)

I set up the gaming room today.  We are using the downstairs bedroom which has two beds and no one has wanted to sleep in there.  It is a very large room, though, and is also Liesl’s arts and craft room.  Her “Sew Cool” kid’s sewing system is set up in there as well.

Now that we have enough power, we were able to not only set up the laptop but set up the speakers and the projector as well.  We have it set up with the projector on the back wall and the laptop gaming rig sitting on the concrete window sill.  So it isn’t going anywhere.  The project throws a nearly ninety inch image on the plain, white wall.  It is pretty much perfect.  This is a serious gaming setup that looks great and we can now sit on the beds.  We are so excited to have this set up.

Now we can have someone using the Fire TV in the living room and someone playing games in the media room.  This is much better because both of our girls like to be doing things all of the time and Dominica likes to play video games as well.  Even with all of this we do not have nearly the gaming capabilities that we would like but it is a huge step forward.  When I got the Fire TV set up today we found that the Minecraft PE that we had bought for the girls on the Fire Tablets last week had shown up here finally.  I had checked before and it was not there, so apparently it just took time for the database to update.  So we got that downloaded and the girls are very excited to get to play it there now as well.  Since we only had to buy it once to get it in all of these different places it was a great value.

We set up and played games as a family a bit tonight.  Luciana decided to go play Minecraft in the living room for much of the evening.  Dominica and I, with Liesl coming in and out, played the second episode of the Blue Toad Murder Mystery Files which my dad had just completed this week (he completed the whole thing, all six episodes.)  We love this one for family game night.

The girls decided to camp out in our bedroom again tonight.  Luciana started off sleeping in our bed but could not settle down and got in trouble and eventually stormed off and slept alone up in her loft.  Liesl slept in the makeshift bed of blankets on the floor right beneath my side of the bed and loved her little spot.  She slept soundly there all night.

Today was a big success.  The one thing that we have really been struggling with is Luciana’s diet.  We are getting her to eat but only with huge fights.  She is determined to not want to eat with us and not eat what we are eating.  The changes in diet with new locations each presents a new challenge as the things that we rely on in other places just do not exist and we have no choice but to adapt to new food lifestyles.  This move has been more drastic than most.  This is our first time in a new country where we have not gone out to eat even a single time in our first week.  We have yet to have eaten a single meal anywhere but at home and not a single one has been a prepared meal, either.  Good for our health and wallets but we are missing a major component of visiting Greece, as well.