Stratos - We love Greek men!

We LOVE Greek men!

They were all so friendly. However, as Jen put it earlier, our favorite Athenian jewelry maker, Stratos, deserves his own post.

What a charmer! We both were a little twitterpated by the encounter. He made us feel beautiful and made us laugh. (A winning combination!) He told us that we had good collarbones for the jewelry we picked out and liked. When we ooohed and aaaahhed about how beautiful it was on us he said, "the jewelry doesn't make the woman beautiful, the woman makes the jewelry beautiful." How can you argue with that?

First, he talked to us about the special olive oil soap that was made by the monks. It would soften the skin without irritating the most sensitive skin. "See," he would say, "I use to break out from shaving and now that I use this soap my skin is soft!" About shaving his grandmother would say, "After you get married and have kids, what's the point?".

I think that after his stay in America for college (He had a wrestling scholarship to Michigan State. His English was excellent!) he was more sensitive to body odor. He spoke of disliking when men would not bath and would smell horrible. He said that he was on the metro the other day and a man near him was holding on up high so that his armpit was in Stratos's face. He smelled so bad that Stratos took out some "Axe" (cheap cologne) and sprayed him in the armpit.

He was definitely didn't give us any pressure to buy. He would say things like, "Never buy it if you aren't sure. If your eye keeps coming back to it, and you love it, then it's a good purchase."

He said that there are two kinds of customers...the kind that just left and you. (Meaning that snobby, stuck-up, discount seeker and the customers that were polite and genuinely liked the products) He would tell the first kind of customer who asked how much something was that they couldn't afford it. I guess you can do that when you own the store and make the jewelry. We on the other hand talked to him and asked him questions. We appreciated his artistry. He ended up giving us our jewelry for a steal!

He really was an artist. He and his dad made all of the jewelry. He'd been learning the the family trade from the age of 5. They made glass lamps and painted icons in churches and created beautiful, delicate jewelry. After his mama had worked all her life so that he could go to college, how could he not come back to work in the family business?

Even so, it was hard not to swoon just a bit as he talked about the difficulty in finding a woman to want to marry, work in a family business, and raise a basketball team worth of kids. Traditional, charming, kind, generous, and funny: who can compete with that?

The only question now is...who gets to live in Greece to raise a basketball team - Jen or I?