Our Greek Life

Hello! Amy here, I guess its my turn to write one of these, this post is brought to you from a cute cafe in the village where Meg and I are enjoying a coffee and our day off.


We have been at the farm for two weeks now and I have acclimated to being either cold, dirty, wet or muddy and usually all of them at the same time; and since the Athens incident the only person or thing I have wanted to kill are some roosters, so I would say we are winning. We had a couple cold wet windy days so when we weren't mucking out and feeding we spent a lot of time in the castle (our room), but when it's nice enough we can be found oustide in front of the castle

We also have some grooming tools that we can take out into the fields and spend some time getting to know the ponies

Or we take walks, the beach is only about a 15 minute walk from the farm and there is a really nice walk up to a church on the top of a hill, we will do a post about those when we have more pictures. Sometime we take ponies on our walks

 Kleo and I on a walk

Do not take horse walking advice from me because apparently, according to proper horse etiquette, I should be in front of Kleo or at least right next to her to show her that I am in charge, but the ponies must think I am weak because they usually in charge on our walks, I'm working on that.

When Amanda has time she has been teaching us about how to work with the ponies. The other afternoon she started by having Meg and I role play as the trainer and the horse, unfortunately for you and lucky for us there is no picture evidence of this. It may or may not have involved us galloping while wearing lead ropes and harnesses, but you'll never know.We are learning how to do ground work and lunging with the ponies, lunging is when you have the horse on a lead rope and you have them walk, trot, and cantor in a circle using voice commands and body language. So Meg and I took turns being the horse so we could see what it felt like and what we thought was effective and to role play what to do in scenarios when the horse doesn't cooperate. It was pretty hilarious but we learned a lot and it was really nice to get comfortable with the commands using each other before having an actually pony on the rope. This is Amanda with Victor the stallion

Being warm is one of my top priorities and the only way to get heat in the castle is from the wood burning stove, so I have become the fire master and spend a lot time like this:

Attempting to start or keep the fire going. We've only smoked ourselves out of the house 2 times so far, so all in all I'd say I'm a pro.  Meg likes to pretend she is a lumberjack and chop the wood but I think she makes Stathis and Dimos nervous because one or both of them happen to appear shortly after she gets the axe in her hand and offer to do it for her. 

one of the 19 cats that also live on the farm

I think I'll close with an "adio" from Julietta, more to come on this girl, she is a joy to be around, always entertaining, and great Greek teacher. love and miss you all!!