Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Visit to the Christmas Village in Trikala


I have a lot of catching up to do! I've been swamped since the Christmas fast, and I just now have some time to catch up with photos and the blog. So here goes. This is from back in December, when we took the kids to the Christmas village in Trikala, which is just south of the famous monasteries of Meteora.


We'd heard good things about this annual Christmas village, and I must say we weren't disappointed. Although it was 1.5 hours away, it was worth it. We combined it with a visit to Trikala's small zoo, which was only 5 minutes from the Christmas park. Overall, we were very impressed with the mountain city of Trikala, which is amazingly clean and well-organized, especially in comparison to most Greek cities. The city underwrites the Christmas park, which means that it has lots of free or very reasonably priced activities. Above, the kids did the tea cups.


Here, I took them on the ferris wheel while Pelagia and Damiani took photos from below.


This was one of their favorite parts.


As you can see from their expressions.



Bumper cars.


And, finally, after much talking about it, they got to meet St. Vasilios (who, in Greece, is usually identified with the western figure of St. Nicholas or Santa). They were pretty shocked when they first saw him, but eventually they recovered enough to have a photo with him.


Another highlight was the trampolines, for which we had to wait "in line" for quite a while. I put "in line" in quotes because we were frequently cut off by Greeks, who, generally speaking, think that lines are for suckers.




Face painting: Paul wanted to be Rudolph the Reindeer.



And Phoebe got a wintery snowflake design.


And, finally, the traditional merry-go-round.

The kids had a great time and I'm sure it will be on the list of things to do next winter.

For more photos from the day, click here.

No comments: