So if you were thinking of robbing our house, wait for the next holiday.

In Athens, a city with a population just slightly less than that of New Zealand, we managed to bump into someone we met last year on holiday. We played rebetiko with the members of Giouf and stayed in one apartment with a view of the Acropolis, and another with a pair of delightful kittens.

In Katerini, Olga’s mother fed me as implacably as always. We swam in the sea, three times. (Greeks seemed to think we were slightly mad, but the water, although not at summer temperatures, was perfectly pleasant to stay in for a half hour or so.)

We drove to Thessaloniki to play rebetiko, and got home again at six in the morning.

For the first of May we joined some dear friends for a massive barbecue. To my great regret I failed to get a photograph of Stathis, four years old, with a wooden dagger in one hand and a souvlaki in the other, alternating between angelic stares at the goings on and enthusiastic gnawing on the souvlaki. I did, on the other hand, get a video of a beautiful oud performance by a friend-of-a-friend, but I managed to take it in portrait. Coming once I figure out how to turn it upright.

We spent another night close to Thessaloniki, entertained by Karagiosi (shadow puppet theater) performed by an eight-year-old, and then by the same story in abbreviated form courtesy of his four-year-old brother. The day after we added another member to our family:

Jasmine, or Γιασεμή, the lafta or lavta

Her name is Γιασεμή, or Jasmine (pronounced something like Ya-se-mi), from this beautiful song. She is a lafta (or lavta), a Turkish instrument sometimes called the “politiko laouto” in Greece (“the lute of Istanbul”). My plan is to use her frets and simpler tuning system to learn to hear the intervals of makam theory (much more nuanced and beautiful than the simple semitones I grew up with), so that I can start playing them also on the (fretless) oud.

It seems like wherever we went I got job offers. Some of these were late-night wine-assisted affairs of the “I know some guys who do web programming from home, surely you can help them out?” kind, but there seem to be some real possibilities for the end of this year or beginning of 2013. Fingers most decidedly crossed on that count…

Finally we played one last rebetiko session with the Katerini crowd, and left (reluctantly) at two in the morning, just as the party was getting started, to drive to the airport for the flight home. Olga is now ensconced in front of the laptop watching the election results come in, and we’re already planning the summer holiday.