Further thoughts on the land of free dessert

It’s a Macedonian (that’s Greek Macedonia – not Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) tradition to have free dessert in restaurants. It’s a tradition that should be exported. My brother and I went out for meals twice – both times enjoying delicious sweets at the end of the meal. One would think that since the dessert is free, the restaurant would skimp. They do not: crepes with ice cream and chocolate sauce one night, chocolate cake after a late lunch.

I spent my last day in Thessaloniki museum-hopping. Fascinating. Whenever I think of Greece I think of ancient Greece, Zeus-worshippers and the like. None of the museums were devoted to that. Thessaloniki wasn’t founded until the Roman times. So I learned of the Macedonian struggle (further proving that while no groups in the region can get along well with each other, they can at least agree on hating the Bulgarians), Byzantine Culture, and the Jewish community (apparently, Thessaloniki was the place to be if you were Jewish between 1500 and World War Two – by 1940, half the city was Jewish.)

When I lived in Cairo, I often spoke to locals who were annoyed that the tourists were only there to see the pyramids and other millennia-old sites. “Don’t these tourists realize that Christianity thrived here in the early BCE, that we have relics of saints on display in the heart of Cairo?” The Copts would say. “Don’t these tourists realize that Cairo was the seat of the Caliphate for a few hundred years, that some of the oldest mosques in the world are here?” The Muslims would say. They hated that no one wanted to see anything that the people living there now felt connected to.

With that in mind, it felt good to investigate other parts of Greek history.