Still not the lovely sea urchin ones (have to get those off Peter’s computer), but over on Fotaq, there’s a little indication of what we did all day, every day. (And if you squint at the background, you can kind of get an idea of what a nice place it is.)

The back story to all these goofy pictures is this: Around Day 4 of our sojourn in Skala Eressou, Peter’s dad started getting a little concerned about how much we were eating, and, specifically, how much we were ordering at dinner every night. In the grand scheme of things, half a grilled fish going uneaten is no great crime, but I could certainly empathize with Charlie as Peter would flag down the waiter for the fourth time and say, “Aaaaand we’ll have a plate of the…” (but in Greek).

When there are 17 people around a big long table, and everyone’s saying, “How ’bout some lamb chops? Some macaronia? More tzatziki!” it can get out of hand pretty easily, and it did always fill me with an abstract anxiety. People, we need a PLAN, I felt like saying, but by then it was already too late, and the random ordering had begun. In truth, we rarely ended up with way too much food, but there was a certain haphazardness to the meals that maybe could’ve been averted.

Part of the problem is that you never realize, until you’re in the middle of it, the flaw of ordering a variety of dishes to match the number of people at the table. Because then the dishes come, and really, there’s never going to be enough taramosalata on that plate to feed 20 people, and you realize this just as the taramosalata has started around the table in precisely the opposite direction from you. So, you give it up for lost and keep your eye on the next thing the waiter’s setting down.

And just like that, your dinner is ruined, because you’re having to strategize at the dinner table like the last-born in a Mormon family. “Portion panic,” as I believe Jessika dubbed it, sets in, and before you know it you’re hoarding and reaching, and sneaking the last bites of things, and slipping french fries under your plate for later (actually, I just thought of that now, but it’s kind of a good idea) and so on.

So, anyway, Charlie I guess saw this happening–plus the occasional unfinished fish–and tried to do something about it. But of course that backfired, because if you lean over to Peter and say, “Hey, don’t overorder,” of course Peter’s just going to roll his eyes and keep doing what he’s doing. It’s too late.

The overordering thing reached fever pitch the day of our wedding. After our super-express 40-minute speed-read ceremony, we all traipsed down the hill to the little meze joint we’d talked into opening in the afternoon just to feed us a little snicky-snack and a little ouzo.

But you can’t very well tell a Greek restaurateur, “We’ll be coming from a wedding,” and expect him to undercater, or even sensibly cater. And he didn’t grossly over-cater, but there was an almost comically endless stream of little plates arriving at the table–to the point where Charlie started saying, “Stop! Phot, make him stop!” And he did, briefly, stop the flow of skordalia, beets, deep-fried meatballs, super-funky bastirma, sausage bits, cold white beans, succulent little zucchini wedges…but then we realized, WHY would you want to go and do an idiotic thing like that? (It helped that we’d been drinking the raki, briefly mistaken for water by my mother, for a little bit.)

Yes, there was some tragic food waste that afternoon. You can’t save the soul of every little meatball–you just have to focus on the ones you have been able to help.

So, then, after Charlie went home, Peter and Andrew briefly tried to heed his cautionary words. And that’s how we got these photos.