Olives

Tuesday, March 28

One of the great things about our new everyday life in Athens is the delicious olives that are everywhere. It doesn’t matter whether they are green, brown, black or purple – all the varieties we’ve tried so far simply taste much more intense than we’re used to from Hamburg.

We usually buy our olives here at the fresh food counter of a small supermarket that is close to our apartment. There are buckets full of fresh olives in all different colors and sizes. Over the last few days here in Athens, I noticed two funny things when buying olives:

Firstly: At the counter you can choose between two sizes of plastic trays which are then filled with olives of your choice and then weighed. After buying olives for the first time, we were sure that, due to the language barrier, we had accidentally received the large bowl of olives instead of the small bowl that we had ordered. The second time we bought olives, we saw the stacks of plastic containers and realized: the last time we had really got the small bowl of olives we had ordered. What the XL plastic bowl is in Germany at the fresh food counter in supermarkets is the small size in Greece (at least at the olive counter). So if you order the large bowl of olives in Greece, you can easily feed a large family with them.

Secondly: No matter how many olives you buy at the olive counter, it will never cost more than 3 euros. Since Christoph and I both love olives, we bought a lot of olives very often, but somehow never spent more than a few euros, because the olives are super cheap here in Greece.

Despite language barriers in the supermarket (we don’t speak Greek, the employees in the supermarket don’t speak English), we are slowly becoming regular customers and are already greeted with a smile when we want to buy olives at the fresh food counter again.