Our Greek Odyssey

The heat is on……..

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:53:15 +0000

but fortunately we’re having a little respite from the heat at the moment due to a thunderstorm last night which brought the temperature down considerably. It probably won’t last but for the moment I’m just revelling in the fact that I can sit down without sticking to my chair! We’ve been making do with fans dotted all around the house but we finally had to succumb to an air conditioning unit due to the fact that the temperature in the kitchen was pushing 93 degrees! That kind of heat really saps your energy and makes you reluctant to move or do anything really. Junior was also suffering from prickly heat which she hasn’t had before and so we bought a mobile unit to push around the house to wherever the need is greatest!
There has been a lot of talk recently in the Greek press about pushing tourism to help the country pull itself out of recession but I think they need to get that message across to the people who actually work in the service industry. Yesterday we went for a drive out for lunch – mainly because we’d borrowed a friends car which has air-con, unlike the rustbucket we drive! We ended up in Argalatsi further down the Pelion and headed to a central square where there were lots of taverna tables and chairs set out. There were a couple eating and other people having a drink so when the waitress came over we ordered drinks and asked for some food. She wrote down the drinks order but shook her head at the request for food even though she then asked the people at the next table if they were enjoying their meal. After delivering our drinks she collected her bag from inside the taverna and went off home – it appears she didn’t want to take our order because she was about to finish her shift! Needless to say we had the drinks and then headed back up the coast to Kala Nera where we’ve been before and which seems to understand that if you have a bar or restaurant you generally have to serve people We had a very pleasant meal in ‘Nirvana’ along the seafront and from the table junior could just jump down and splash about in the sea.

No-one can sit back and expect people to come to their country without providing something special. It is not enough to think that where you live is unique and that its natural beauty will entice people regardless of prices, difficulty of getting there, threat of strikes or shoddy service. Most people work hard to save for their holidays and they cherish the one or two weeks’ they get away from their normal life. Where are they going to go? To a country where they might find their flight disrupted, the ferries on strike and the welcome less than cordial? The surroundings just aren’t enough, the service has to be there as well. If Greece expects to pull itself out of the current financial crisis using the tourism sector if needs to get it’s act together first.

New name, same blog

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:13:14 +0000

Thought it was time for a name change although Sean could probably still write a blog under “Living in Skopelos” as he seems to spend more time there than he ever did when we had a home there!
Junior and I have been back once and that was for Sean’s birthday in June, we didn’t get to Meteora because a friend was over visiting Skopelos from South Africa, so we had a very enjoyable evening in Englezos restaurant with a table full of people celebrating Sean’s birthday and also the birthday of one of the reps from the local travel office.
Being back in Skopelos didn’t feel strange at all, just familiar. I can’t say I’ve missed it at all and going back didn’t make me regret leaving or make me wish to return. It’s a lovely place and really good for short holidays but living there on a long term basis is not for me and I really think you have to be a certain type of person, or at a certain point in your life for Skopelos to be the ideal place to live.
Whilst Sean was home last week he took Junior to the local beach just down the road. We left it until after 6pm in the hope that the sun wouldn’t be as hot and there wouldn’t be as many people. Well we were right on one count! I suppose the presence of a couple of beach bars and a taverna mean that there will always be more people there than on an unserviced beach. Quite surprisingly the sea was quite rough, although the windsurfers didn’t seem to mind.

Both Junior and Sean braved the waves but for more of a quick dip than a lengthy swim!
We’ve also been to Athens lately, ostensibly for Sean to visit a client, but actually for a family day out and visit to the museum. Junior has a thing about museums (I think it’s something to do with the wide open spaces) and she has been eager to visit the one at the Acropolis for quite a while. After persuading her to hold on until after lunch, we finally went, and found even the outside impressive.

It really was worth a visit and the view from the cafe upstairs was extremely impressive too.

Junior is sulking in the picture because I wouldn’t let her use the camera to take a picture herself. This wasn’t just cruelty on my behalf, there was an extremely good reason behind my meanness! At Sean’s birthday meal, junior had borrowed the camera to take a few pictures of people around the table, unfortunately she didn’t put the wrist strap on and dropped the camera on the floor………lens first………..and now it won’t focus, retract its lens or take any pictures! So, she certainly wasn’t getting her sticky little mitts on the new camera!

Some things change and some don’t

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:20:06 +0000

As you can see I haven’t yet got around to renaming or revamping the blog but that’s because we’re still waiting for OTE to connect us. We naively thought that contacting them a few weeks before we were due to move in would mean that the phone line and internet would be ready and waiting for us once we arrived. Oh you trusting fool. We are still waiting although we were apparently issued with a telephone number 3 weeks’ ago! Not much use having a number and no working phone. So I’m still using the mobile internet stick although it does seem to be behaving a bit better at the moment.
So what is life like on the mainland? Well we’ve not really seen much of it at the moment although we have seen rather a lot of the inside of Ikea! What with buying beds and bookshelves we hardly seem to be out of the place. Junior loves Ikea especially since we bought her bed from there as well as a desk and pink swivel chair for her to use for her homework. She has the biggest room in the house but still manages to fill it with all her belongings – hence the trips to Ikea for storage solutions.
Of course now that we’ve moved over here Sean is in…………..Skopelos. Of the 24 days we’ve been here, Sean has spent nearly half of them in Skopelos. It seems that the minute we left, the whole of Skopelos decided that they needed him! Typical. He says that things will improve once the summer is over but I’m rather hoping he’ll be spending some of the summer with us so we can maybe have a holiday. We all fancy the idea of driving through Europe but obviously Junior and I have got to get Sean to commit to a date.
Junior started school a few days’ after we arrived here and likes the fact that she can walk to and from school again as we used to and also that the school is painted peach! She breaks up for summer on Tuesday morning and if it continues getting hotter we’ll probably be spending most of our time inside in front of a fan. It was 38 degrees today and is set to rise to 40 by the beginning of the week. I’m still not keen on the hot weather although I am obviously more used to it than I was when we first arrived 2 years’ ago. Then I’d probably wilt when it hit the high 20s, now I can walk to get junior for school when it’s mid 30s and not feel too bad. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been doing more walking, to and from school, taking the dogs for a wander. The dogs have been quite surprised – and not pleasantly – by the number of other dogs around. Everyone seems to have 1 or 2 dogs and they all seem to like to bark around 5am. It can get quite noisy although I find that listening to my i-pod when I go to bed finally lulls me to sleep. Another thing the dogs have found surprising are the wild tortoises we have found wandering around. Junior also finds them quite fascinating but, unlike the dogs, she doesn’t feel the need to sniff and butt them with her nose!
It’s Sean’s birthday next weekend and while he fancies a weekend in Cork (!) we’ll probably head for Meteora instead, so hopefully I’ll post some pictures on the next post (he mislaid the camera for a while so that’s why you’re being deprived of tortoise shots!).

We’re here………

Sun, 30 May 2010 20:08:49 +0000

and all is well but the internet connection is so slow I can barely check my email. Good old OTE have yet to get around to connecting us – 5 weeks and counting. Hopefully will be back up and running soon and then will fill in all the details about life on the mainland.

The time has come

Tue, 11 May 2010 18:46:53 +0000

We were in Volos the other week, only for just over a day, and we would normally have stayed at the Hotel Aegli but we seemed to have arrived at the same time as a coach party so instead we carried on down the front and came to the Hotel Kypseli. Very nice it was too even if the air conditioning was a tad underwhelming. The heat led Sean to leave the window open all night allowing a particularly vicious mosquito to gain entry and wreak havoc on Junior and myself. Unfortunately I’m allergic to mozzie bites and so my arm looked like I’d had a couple of golf balls implanted under my skin but this was nothing compared to poor Junior who was bitten 5 times on one side of her face and 3 times on her ear. Poor little mite – I hate mozzies On the plus side the room did have a bath……..bliss. I’ve not had a bath for well over a year (don’t worry, I have been showering), and so lying in a proper sized bath was just wonderful. I couldn’t get junior out of it until she resembled a prune, she was too busy being a mermaid! The view from the room was also pretty good.

The reason we were in Volos was because we have finally found somewhere to live and we’re moving to the mainland in the next couple of weeks! Oh joy of joys, at long last the search is over. I realise I am now going to have to rename the blog, either to ‘Moving from Skopelos’ or ‘Pottering on the Pelion’, I’m sure I’ll be inspired shortly (any suggestions welcome but keep it clean!).
In a very strange twist, and one which makes me think that all things are pre-destined, we are actually moving to an area which Sean and I drove through when we first visited Greece in 2000 and which we commented at the time was a place we wouldn’t mind living in! So there you go, Greece, in spite of all the recently well publicised difficulties, is still the place for us, it’s just Skopelos that doesn’t suit. As the saying goes “it’s alright for a holiday but I couldn’t live there!” We are, apparently, not island people. I like to explore a country, visit different places, see new sites and when you live on an island you’re restricted in both terms of time and money. Time because you have to travel according to the boat timetable and money because getting back and forth to the mainland for 3 people is a not insignificant cost. Put all these factors together with the problems we have had finding somewhere to settle and I’m sure you’ll understand our decision.
Not a great time maybe to add to the menagerie but Sean couldn’t resist this little one as we both wanted a female tabby. As we now have cats in every colour, perhaps it’s time to stop?

Powerless

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:04:46 +0000

Yesterday I was awakened by the high shrill sound of our UPS, indicating that the electricity was not working. As the relevant authorities had cut the power on Friday and Saturday as well this was not much of a surprise. I was surprised however when I checked the time and found it to be only 6.30am! Now I don’t know about you but I like to have a lie in on a Sunday morning to at least 8.30 – if I’m lucky! The thought of getting up and turning the UPS off and not being able to enjoy a cup of tea really didn’t appeal but then Junior got up and I had no choice but to get out of bed.
The power was off over the island whilst ‘essential works’ were being done and of course the promise it would be back on at 1.30pm meant that it came back on 2 hours after that! So we had to spend most of the day out, having lunch at ‘Kimata’ in town and then a drink at Bardon. I eventually got my cup of tea later in the evening and it was much appreciated.
Last Thursday, after taking junior to school, I received a phone call from another one of the mums to tell me that the teacher was on strike and I’d have to come back and collect junior. I duly turned round and went back to find that only some of the teachers were on strike and the other junior class was having lessons. It wasn’t only the lack of notice that annoyed me but the complete lack of organisation. It shouldn’t be up to some of the parents to ring around and inform other parents that their children need collecting from school, the school should have kept the children inside, especially the 6 year olds, until their parents could come and collect them. Junior informed me that if I didn’t come back for her she was going to walk down to the playground on the front and play until I came into town in the afternoon!
Whilst out walking the dogs the other day I came across this seemingly dead moth.

Junior found another one under the house – is it the time of year for them to die off? Answers on a postcard please

Somewhere new

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:05:21 +0000

We went out for Sunday lunch on…………yes you guessed it….Sunday, and visited Nastas on the corner of car hire road before the ring road. I’ve never been here before, I don’t know why, just never got round to it I suppose. Junior was most excited because her new found love of chips means that she’s guaranteed of something to eat wherever we go! She was not disappointed here as their chips were freshly made and utterly delicious. She didn’t just munch on chips however, she dipped them in fava.

We also ordered a cucumber and tomato salad, potatoes in the oven and onion pie. Unfortunately the potatoes came with butter on them and the onion pie had cheese in! Oh well, here’s a picture of the salad.

Customer disservice

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 07:46:35 +0000

In a previous post last October, I mentioned the opening of a Carrefour store on Skopelos, with a wider range of stock and sensible prices. Well, it didn’t take long to fail to live up to expectations! A visit on any day of the week will find the shelves half stocked or completely empty, whether due to lack of deliveries or slowness at refilling the spaces – who knows?
A couple of recent episodes have made my mind up that I won’t bother shopping there again. There are only two checkouts in the store and seldom are they open together. The other day there must have been a queue of at least eight people, all with trolleys or heavily laden baskets but still they only had the small checkout open with hardly any room for trolleys to get through. The other checkout was being used, but only to cash up! Some people gave up altogether and just left the shop and I can’t say I blame them. The second occasion was last week. I’d gone in with junior to get a few essentials (not that I found half of them!) and when I got to the till she scanned the things through, stopping when she got to the tinfoil and telling me as it wouldn’t scan I’d have to get another. I left junior by the till and traipsed off to get another tinfoil. On returning, she scanned it but it also failed to go through, whereupon she shrugged her shoulders, told me the computer wasn’t working and then placed the tinfoil behind her! We left the shop with me vowing never to go in again and heading straight for Supermarket Skopelos where you can always find what you’re looking for and they don’t have to rely on a computer to tell them the prices!
Now I’ve got that off my chest just a quick line to say that things may be looking up but I’m not going in to details until everything is settled

Happy Easter

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:04:21 +0000

Ahhh, a bottle of Peroni, the sun, the sea, the sand – that spells Easter to me. Before I relaxed to enjoy my beer I did assist the Easter Bunny in hiding his stash of mini eggs around the beach for Junior to find and I think she managed to find all of them, I didn’t actually count them before I started burying them. Oh well, if I missed one I’m sure some passing bird will enjoy a chocolate treat.

They were worth the effort it took to get them to Skopelos and even the Easter Bunny enjoyed a nibble.

Not such a trifling dessert

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 17:52:09 +0000

Well after a day at the beach with food, sand, sea and sun, what could be better than getting home and eating trifle? Not much I don’t think.

Just as good as the Christmas trifle and there’s still half left for tomorrow. I love holidays – I don’t feel guilty stuffing my face with sweet treats and eating chocolate for breakfast, roll on my birthday when I’ll be doing exactly the same!