Little words that mean a lot

Just back from a fortnight in (mostly) sunny Greece and with over 1000 photos to sift through it will be awhile before I start posting any indepth entries.

Time enough for now to say that it's true: everybody spoke English. I think travellers will find this to be the case in other small European countries where the native tongue is not commonly spoken outside the home country (it was the same in the Netherlands, for instance).

That's not to say I didn't try, so here's my 2-minute vocabulary lesson in Greek:

PLEASE 'parakalo'
THANK YOU 'efkareesto'
GOOD MORNING 'kalimera'
CHEERS/CIAO 'yassas'
BEER 'beera' (which is easy as pi!)

There are some tricky things to keep in mind if you're heading towards Greece anytime soon.

First, the alphabet features letters that most people will not have seen since geometry class in school. It's hard to decipher signs sometimes because the Latin letters don't always match the Greek pronunciation (for example, their letter P makes our sound for R, while our B is their V and H is a vowel).

Luckily, a vast number of signs use Latin letters as well as the Greek symbols and if you're familiar at all with the American university system it will help you in deciphering all those deltas, lambdas and epsilons.

Also, in Greek 'nay' means YES and 'okee' means NO. This caused a problem once in a bakery where I kept saying 'okay' when the shop assistant was trying to help me pick a loaf. It took awhile for me to twig why he wasn't bagging up the loaf I wanted! In which case a quick 'afto' (THIS ONE) came in handy.

Plenty more photos and tips on the way, click back soon.