The cost of summer living
After previously commenting in the vegan side of this blog about the price differences in the same restaurant from May to July I’ve now decided to comment (moan) about the price differences in the food in general. Yes, I know we live on an island and therefore the cost of transportation means that food will have a higher price than it would on the mainland but surely it doesn’t suddenly become more expensive in the summer. An example; we buy most of our bread fresh from one of the local bakeries and whilst they have put their prices up they still continue to charge us exactly what we’ve always been charged – fair enough, they can make more money whilst the tourists are here but still want to keep their ‘regular’ customers on side. I see nothing wrong with that. The tourist season gets shorter and shorter so if they can get a bit more money for a few weeks’ then okay. However we also buy some bread from one of the supermarkets which in January was costing us just under 80 cent a loaf. We went to buy the same loaf last week and it was €1.33! Needless to say we didn’t buy it. The fresh bread from the bakery costs less and tastes a damn sight better.
I believe that food prices are currently rising around the globe and if we were still in England then we’d probably be noticing the price changes there as well, but the difference is there is a lot more competition over there and we were earning substantially more than we are doing here. We probably wouldn’t have noticed an extra few pounds added on to the weekly shop but we notice it over here. In fact I don’t think we’ve been so obsessed about counting the pennies since the last time we didn’t have much money (which wasn’t that long ago). Hopefully the prices will return to semi normal once the hordes have retreated. Not that we’ve seen much of the hordes as we’ve not been out that much. We went over to Skiathos to have a meal with Sean’s sister and her family before they left and my sister and her children are coming out on Friday for a week so we’ll probably be going out a wee bit more although I do need to knuckle down and get some work done. Not that I’ve been slacking, far from it, but there is a particular big project which I need to complete.
Out little kitten wasn’t very well the other week being all listless and unkitten like. After trying to get him to eat and syringing water into his mouth over the weekend, we phoned the vet in Volos who comes over every few months’ to do a clinic. The vet, George Michael (but not that George Michael), is obviously very used to diagnosing animal ailments over the phone as he went through a checklist of things with Sean and then told us exactly what he thought the problem was, what to get from the chemist and how much to administer. Buying medicine over the counter is a lot cheaper here than in England and a lot easier, but I digress, we gave kitty his medicine and within the day he was back to his normal kitty self i.e. annoyingly playful and slightly mad as the picture below of him relaxing in junior’s toy pushchair shows.
Weather been decidedly windy the past couple of days meaning no boats into the harbour which is a bit strange as we’re so used to seeing and hearing them from where we live. We walked into town earlier and the waves were coming up over the pavement. Very exhilarating, and quite wet as well though I do enjoy a bit of extreme weather. Good job I live on an island then isn’t it?
