In Which We Leave Ioannina to go to Metsovo

So, after our first day in Ioannina, Catharine and I decided to make a trip to Metsovo, a town in the Pindos mountains that is pretty and known for its cheeses and its interesting festivals, which take place during the summer and therefore went unseen by us. I could say that we went because we had heard that it was nice, or because we had fallen in love with the KTEL system and wanted to spend another three hours with it, or because we had grown tired of watching "The Young and the Restless" with Greek subtitles on the tv. (It was for one evening, ok? Such things happen.)

But the real reason, I have to say, was our general lingustic nerdiness. Metsovo is the capital of Vlach culture in Greece. The Vlachs are a linguistic minority (they mostly see themselves as ethnically Greek) who speak a language called Aromanian (also known as Vlach), which is a close relative of Latin. Cool, isn't it? To be fair, Metsovo is also really pretty, and since the Vlach speaking population is quite small, we knew that the chances of us hearing any spoken Vlach were small. It's in the Pindos mountains, which are very nice mountains, and when we were there the leaves were turning colors.

Fog rolling over the Pindos mountains!

The village of Metsovo. It's a lovely place in part because it had some benefactors who donated a lot of money there- specifically George Averoff.

It was Halloween when we were in Metsovo, but they don't do Halloween here at all. They were having some sort of celebration that involved footraces, though Catharine and I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. This was ok, we watched it while eating a pleasant lunch at a nice restaurant that my guidebook reccomended and then later while we were waiting for the bus.