Porphy's incredibly realistic sceneries

The guys at the AnimeSuki forums are really cool. Remember that tiny little problem I mentioned about Aegisub refusing to cooperate with video on my interim replacement laptop? Well, apparently the Aegisub developer tends to hang out in that forum and was cool enough to provide almost instant help and advice for my problem. I got to finally feel like a normal human being again, with my Aegisub back to being all nice and shiny and functional. So, I spent a good few hours wrapping up the Greek translation of Porfy's episode 5 today, including the final scene-timing and fine-timing adjustments. Only about 200 already-finely-timed lines left to translate back into English, wheee! Although, with the amount of studying for the 2kyuu I've been doing lately, I have gotten into this nasty habit of finding the Japanese version of what is being said the most natural thing in the world, and the other two languages merely cumbersome wannabes... Ugh, like I said, disturbing. And I'm not even going for the 2kyuu until next year. Japanese lessons start next week though and I wanted to impress our new teacher. Yeah, I know, my classmates probably hate me. :P

Anyway, like I was saying, I spent a good part of today working on Porfy. And it came to me that I've never really commented before on how realistic this anime series is in its depiction of Greece. Every single scenery take bears an uncannily exact likeliness to the real Greece, the one tourists almost never get to meet since it's hidden miles away from the nearest hotel. And I'm not merely talking about the big stuff, such as landscapes or flora and fauna. It's the little things that take my breath away and take me years back to when my parents would leave my sister and me spend our summers in our grandparents' house in Sparta. Like the way the fireplace is built and what kind of pots people used back then. The way the goat and chicken pens were built. The roads and the plants that grow on their side. The colors of the house walls and roof tiles. My grandmother's sister's house was exactly like the house Porphy and Mina live in, with a wooden staircase to the attic, which was actually a bedroom. Another aunt's house was just like Zaimis' place, with the tiled roof terrace. I could go on and on for hours, but the point is that the extraordinary part of this series is the serious attention that has gone into these little details. When I first watched it, I could have sworn there must have been a Greek person in the developing team, who then proceeded to invite them to some obscure little mountain village that still looks the same today. There was no other explanation to it. It really does take my breath away with every new scenery that is being introduced.

Then again, I decided later on there was probably no Greek person on board the production team due to some glaring mistakes in the Greek text in Mina's book (which read something like "Apollo is the god of medic scinc and musi, as we as protctr of potry, mathematis and prophsy" *giggles*). But that made me respect them even more. Whatever the case, every time I watch Porfy, I get transported back to my childhood summers, which makes me feel incredibly nostalgic. So I thought I'd share with you guys. ^_^