Greek Food, Mustached Women and Flying Balloons

Cold, stale fried calamari; lettuce, swimming in oil, with a fer tomatoes and cucumber scattered here and there; quickly warming in the hot hot heat beer; and the tunes of Sirtaki! If you've ever misses these vital ingredients of your diet, come get them at the annual Las Vegas Greek Festival!

We loved it! There's something about the stupid Greek festival that keeps us going there year after year and paying the $5 to get in, just so we can eat their horrible food and watch their mustached macho man and women dance around half-drunk, half-naked in their retarded Sirtaki dance! As soon as the "twirli-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-twirliwirliwirli-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti" begins, something in my blood says "that's the Greek reggae!" and I forget all my troubles with every new nibble on the chewy soft-fried soggy calamari! Take a sip of the “Mythos” and the day is made!

Sami loved the stage with the musicians and couldn’t take his eyes off them. The little girls, playing around didn’t interest him much, but that music performance captivated him. Well, of course he showed that he’s daddy’s son and captivated the heart of a two-year-old Chinese girl (at the Greek festival? I know!) by waving at her vehemently.

It was the attack of the bees that we didn’t approve of. I mean as parents. It’s just kind of scary – a little bit – when while you’re feeding your baby formula from the bottle, there’s a bee trying to get some for her own benefit. What do you do with those animals? Don’t wanna piss them off, don’t wanna hurt them, you just want them away! I guess the cooked fruit that Al had prepared for Sami wasn’t much of a turn-off for them either. So, fortunately they got attracted by the lemons on my calamari plate and left us alone, while I finished dipping my lettuce around the oil on the plate of the Greek salad (my ass! Never when we were in Greece on our honey-moon did we ever taste Greek salad with lettuce in it! That’s totally un-Greek, but it’s understandable, since those people are famous businessmen that will try to cash in on anything they can, so if lettuce makes the salad look bigger, there you go! $8, please!)

But we totally had fun and as I was thinking how never anywhere else would I enjoy that food, I finished all our plates and thought of how flexible a human mind can be.

We even flexed it a bit further, when in that stinking heat we got backlava and kadaif, which were bleeding sugar syrup all over the place. As we found out after we got home, I should NOT have put the box of desserts in Alex’s purse, but it was too late. Thankfully, at least the camera cleaned up nicely.

So, anal as always, I decided to clean a bit of the house, as we got home. Lovely a surprise as they were, the thirty balloons from my birthday were always a BIT in my way, so I decided their day had come, so we went to the front yard, and set many of them free, watching them wave farewell to us from far far above, getting in the way of the helicopters. With just a few balloons left, I got a new idea: cut one open and breathed in the helium. First time ever. My helium-virgin voice, cracked out from my ever surprised vocal chords, to reach Alex’s and my own impatient ears. It was a blast! I sounded like a little 5-year-old girl and Sami was pretty surprised to find out for the first time in his life, that he was more mature than his dad.

In days like that I have the blissful epiphany that life is FUN and that’s how it should be! The immediate reconnection with Alex was one of the few results that came out of having a little time of childishness of our own. That’s the cool thing that I’m realizing these days: that it’s the BEST to act like a kid when you’re an adult, because you’re old enough that your parents can’t put you on the “naughty” chair, and naïve enough to think you still haven’t grown up!

When I grow up, I wanna be a kid!