Hello!! 

The heat here is absolutely crazy. By 11am you are dying sweating and that means that everyone is at the beach, or at least all the smart people are. Tori and I haven’t been able to visit the beach as much this week because we have been doing a good amount of work…

Today, we visited the excavation of the Xanemos ancient neighborhood. Demetra set up an interview for us with Alexandros Mazarakis. He is the mastermind behind this whole project and is the head of the Department on Archaeology IAKA. The Xanemos excavation is occurring near Xanemos beach towards the northeastern side of the island by the airport. About 50 students from the University of Thessaly, in addition to other volunteers were digging up land because they believe that there was an "Old Skiathos" under the huge hill. This project has being going on for 3 years, but this is the first year of excavation. I definitely want to keep updated on their progress to see how far they get!  Here are a couple of photos… 

The sign with the excavation grounds behind it.

Tori and I with a couple of the students and Alexandros Mazarakis.

Part of the area the students are working on.

The view from the top of the hill and Xanemos beach in the left hand corner.

The other day we visited some of the art galleries on the island that were absolutely amazing. One of them featured Costis Hatzioannou. We weren’t aloud to take pictures in this gallery, but his paintings almost look like an actual photographed picture. It was crazy how real the paintings looked. Customers who want to purchase a painting definitely have to pay a price for them. The other gallery featured Richard Buchanan Dunlop, who had taken up painting and poetry as a hobby when he moved here to Skiathos. He combined both of his hobbies and painted representations of his poetry. Going into the gallery and looking at how he came up with this method was mind blowing.

One of Richard's paintings that represents his poetry.

Various paintings of Richard.

On a side note, over the past couple of weeks we have met a lot of different people and one of them is Christos. Tori and I were at a family birthday party the other night with Roula and Panos (one of the families that has helped us since we’ve been here) and we were introduced to him. He came up with an app for the apple store that is called Skiathos Guide. Christos said that he was trying to figure out how to promote the island for people all around the globe and he thought of this. It includes anything and everything that you can think about when coming to the island including its history. It took him 6 months to complete the app and after 6 days, it was number 20 in the travel section of the app store. Pretty impressive, huh?! 

Stephanie 

P.S. Skiathos is hosting the world’s first gay festival this week… We’ll definitely keep you posted on that!