By Popular Request...

This may well be termed one of our favourite spots on the island from now on. Why? It's the first (that we are aware of) actual recycling centre on Rhodes. Finally the possibility of recycling plastic bottles, tin cans and glass bottles has come to Rhodes. Not before time. They've chosen an odd place to put it mind you, right outside the Old Town Wall on the Old Harbour. Above you see the beloved getting to grips with her first black bagful of plastic bottles.

...& here's yours truly with a huge sackful of cans which we'd been saving up for our next visit to town. The machine is quite clever actually. You're not supposed to crush the plastic bottles or tin cans first, which I thought was stupid until I realized that the machine does it for you. Plus it records each piece you feed it and spews out a modest credit note at the end which you can use in your local branch of Carrefour when you go shopping. You can also select to donate the cash to the public good if you so wish. It seems a good way of creating a bit on incentive among a people who by and large haven't up until now been very interested in environmental issues like recycling.

Above is the "view" from the recycling centre. Not a bad backdrop in which to be doing your bit for the environment is it? Yes, that's our baby, the white Suzuki Swift!

Above shows the outer terrace of one of the swish new cafes which grace the area right beside the new marina that's taking shape quite quickly now at the north end of the new by-pass on the East coast of town. We had to visit the bank you see to the left, so I snapped this on the way in.

The Old Town on February 28th 2011. I went and parked the car on the edge of town and wandered through the Old Town whilst making my way to meet the missus for that all-important frappe. Yes, it was a frappe day today! See below (not the next one, but further down)

What gives these photos away as taken during winter time is the greenery (oh all right then, weeds!), apart from the lack of people that is! After a wet night, it was a truly glorious day.

Note the Almond blossom on the tree to the left, just beyond the tiny cafeneon. It's quite late this year [see ch. 20 "Gilma's Tears" in the book "A Plethora of Posts"]

Above: Socrates Street, very different from the tourist season eh?

We've decided that our fave cafe is the one right next to the court house on Mandraki, which is where I took this one. It was actually almost too hot in the sun!

The one above should be a lot bigger when you click on it to view in another window. It's two photos fused together, which accounts for the change of hue half-way across. I wanted to show not only the poppies and red anemones growing in the moat area, but how beautiful it is when it's green. In fact I just noticed that it's difficult to make out the flowers, which are in evidence right in front of the wall on the right hand section of the photo. The limitations of my camera I'm afraid folks.

These photographs are posted in response to the many requests I've received for some photos of Rhodes Town during winter. We knew that we'd be in town for most of the day yesterday, Monday 28th February, so I took the camera along and the results are above for you to peruse. As usual, clicking on any of these pics should open them in another window at a larger size.

Hope you like 'em!

Further Mayhem in a Winter to Remember

On Wednesday (Feb 23rd) a tornado came in off the sea and hit the village of Gennadi, completely destroying one of the beach-front tavernas (Klimis) and severely damaging the two on either side. mature trees were lifted out of the ground and a "container" which was sitting in a field was lifted up and carried several hundred metres, where it was dropped on to a house, destroying the roof in the process. We frequently see these twisters out across the bay during the winter months, although they seldom if ever approach the coast. This time it was different.

In a winter that's seen the worst flooding in several South Rhodean villages for decades, several incidences of hail, some of which have left cars with dents all over them from hailstones the size of golf-balls, this is just another worry for the over-stretched finances of the local councils.

Check out a series of videos in this link (which is a local TV station based on Rhodes):
http://www.newskosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56857:-video&catid=31:2009-11-28-16-14-18&Itemid=55

If you're planning to come to Greece this summer, please do come, the local economy needs the tourist's cash more than it ever has before! For all the freakish weather that we've experienced this winter, you can still rely on wall-to-wall sunshine during the high season and very little to interrupt it even during the early and late season too.

I spoke to my friend Philip Gareth Anstee of Lardos just this morning. His house it was that my wife and I helped to clean up after they'd been flooded with filthy silty water on January 28th (see THIS POST), and he told me that, with all the heavy rains that we've had on and off during this past week, he and his family aren't sleeping because every few moments, when they hear the downpour outside, they have to get up and peer out in apprehension. Can't imagine the emotional stress they must be under at the moment. He also told me that he had to buy tyres for his car rather unexpectedly while on a trip to town this week. In fact, at 10 o'clock one night recently, we ourselves hit a huge pothole during the road-works that have been going on for three years now further up the island and burst both our nearside tyres. Tyre retail is the business to be in on Rhodes at the moment. When you couple the fact that many of us have to drive along very rough tracks to get to and from our homes, with the state of the road between Kolumbia and Faliraki, it's hardly surprising.

This country continues to suffer from weekly strikes, including the pharmacists - who currently are striking several days each week - as people seem unable to come to terms with the austerity measures which the government is trying to implement. But frankly, the country has precious little alternative, its finances are in that much of a mess. Don't laugh, if you live in the UK or any one of a clutch of other European countries, you've got all this to come, if it hasn't begun already!!

The great assets which this country will always have are it's warm people (on a grass roots level that is) its superb summer climate and its rich history.

Every Greek we talk to agrees that we need the rain. It's just that we'd like it in slightly smaller doses! ...and without the tornadoes.

28th January Floods - Watch the Horror

Couple of videos of Lardos, Jan 28th...

Feb 2011 Photos

Above is an olive grove in Lardos, just a couple of days after the floods. These yellow flowers proliferate at this time of the year. I'm not sure what they're called in English, but the children love to pick them and suck the stems, as they taste like lemon.

Above is the river-side lane just outside Phil & Vicky's home, which was inundated with muddy floodwater on Friday January 28th. It's hard to imagine from looking at this pastoral scene, that the waters on Jan 28th were a full meter higher than where I'm standing on Tuesday Feb 1st. There's a bit of blurb at the bottom of this post about what happened to Phil [Gareth] and Vicky's home.

"I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK!" Here's my beloved doing what she enjoys most, getting her hands dirty. Whereas many women prefer to sit in cafes with their high-heels on, my other half is much happier getting stuck in. Here she is when we were up in the hills replenishing our wood supplies with the chainsaw recently.

Just after collecting the logs, this is just above Asklipio village, looking up the river valley. 20th January.

These are the scenes the tourists sadly don't see. the citrus groves are so beautiful during winter time.

This is a corner in Asklipio village. In winter time these trees are so beautiful with all their gorgeous orange fruit on them and such a lush green carpet below.

Clicking on any of the images above ought to open it on a new window

February 9th, 2011. Another bright sunny day when it'll reach 21-22ºC in the shade. No clouds to be seen. It's hard to imagine that just a week or two ago it was raining and blowing so much that several villages on this island were declared emergency areas by the island's governing authorities. Lardos, just a few kilometers north us us, had a raging torrent flowing through the middle, which made it impossible to tell exactly where the usual river banks were as homes and businesses were flooded in what resembled a mini-Queensland, some up to a height of two metres.

A couple of friends, Phil (Gareth) Anstee and his wife Vicky, live just metres from the river bank in what is usually a peaceful backwater (another unintentional pun there) on the edge of the village. Their single-story home was inundated with a torrent of muddy river water and Phil actually videoed while the electricity poles came down and their lights went out at dusk a couple of Fridays ago. Then they climbed out through a window and evacuated, leaving their home and all that was in it to its fate.

Here in Kiotari we closed up the windows and brought down the shutter on our front French windows, the ones that afford us a view down the green valley below to the sea about a kilometre and a half away. The log-burner was glowing cozily and we settled in for a night of listening to the buffeting that was going on outside. Next morning dawned bright and with broken cloud. Venturing outside, the worst we suffered was water on our shed floor, which often happens when it rains really hard, which isn't too often if the truth be told. It's just that, when it does, it makes up for lost time! We were blissfully unaware of what had happened just a short distance away from here, in the villages that were set low in valleys, like Lardos, Pilona and Arhangelos.

It was actually the next Monday when Philip called on the phone to tell us what had happened to their house. For some reason or other we'd not heard any local news over the weekend and so we weren't aware of the floods that had wrecked lots of people's homes. Phil was amazed that we hadn't heard, but when he gave us the picture we agreed immediately to go over the next day and spend all day helping with the cleanup operation.

If you want to see just how bad it was in Arhangelos and Lardos villages, check out these links:
http://www.guide2rhodes.com/news/200/Rhodes-was-drowned--by-intense-rainfalls

Phil & Vicky's house is just a couple of hundred metres up from the bridge in this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyOYuddvfc0

A Bit about my wife's heritage

Above: My mother-in-Law Lela, Athens circa 1945, before getting married

In June 1925 Greece was a very politically unstable place. On June 24th there was a coup d'état which saw Major General Theodoros Pangalos come to power. Among the things he did without delay were to prosecute anyone who could possibly challenge his authority, abolish freedom of the press and make it illegal for women's skirts to be more than 30cm above the ground. My mother-in-law Eleni [Lela] was 4 months old.

Pangalou's "reign" was short-lived. Following his disastrous and brief invasion of Bulgaria (sometimes called the "War of the Stray Dog", owing to how it allegedly started) his popularity dipped and he was deposed by former colleagues on August 24th 1926.

Born in February 1925, Lela was the fourth child of five, the preceding three having been sisters Katy and Effoula ("Efi") and brother Theodoraki. There was also a fifth child, another brother, but he was killed during the bloody civil war which wracked the country from 1946 until 1949.

Above: Lela and her "Beau" Kenneth, in an Athens park before they married

Life for the inhabitants of Athens during Lela's childhood was harsh, and became even harsher following the invasions of the country first by the Italians in 1940, then the Germans (assisted by Bulgarian forces) in April 1941. Lela was now just 16 years old. Her teenage years were spent hearing news of one massacre after another of her people by German troops all across the country. I wonder what her adolescent thoughts would have been about whether she'd ever be able to live a "normal" life.

When, in October 1944, the British came to Athens and the Germans left, it may have seemed that things would reach some kind of stability, but then came the civil war. But, now, stationed in Athens among the British Army personnel, was one Kenneth Morton White, from Bath, England. Kenneth was young and handsome, even "dashing" as one would have said in those days.

Quite how they first met I never had enough sense or curiosity to ask my wife's mum. Now, having learned a great deal more about her country's volatile modern history [from among other sources, the books "Captain Correli's Mandolin" and "Eleni"], I would dearly love to have her with us again to ply her with questions about what she remembers from her formative years.

Anyway, however their first meeting came about, Kenneth and Lela were married in Athens somewhere between 1945 and 1948 and were blessed with their first child, my wife's sister Christine, before Lela persuaded her young husband that they'd be better off re-locating to England, which they did between 1950 and 1954, since my wife came into this world after they'd settled in Kenneth's home town of Bath; to be precise: in the village of Bathford just East of the city. By all accounts, Kenneth loved Athens, despite all the political upheaval going on at the time. But to a young Greek girl the UK seemed like paradise. Hang the sunshine, in Britain you didn't need to eat weeds, in Britain there had been a stable kind of democratic government for decades, in Britain there seemed to be the chance of a beautiful life, the kind that she had no idea would ever come to her troubled homeland.

My wife maintains that her mum always loved her husband, even after she found it necessary to flee the family home with her four children circa 1968 and to pursue a divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. Imagine how hard it was for a Greek woman, who'd taught herself to speak and read English, to provide for four children with ages ranging from their mid-teens to toddler level in the 1960's. My mother-in-law used to tell me that Kenneth just didn't know how to be a good husband. I won't go into it all now, but it seems that he lacked certain interpersonal skills, in much the same way as does someone with Asperger's syndrome. There were other factors involved too, but suffice it to say that despite his glaring inadequacy as a family man, he never stopped loving Lela until the day he died. Really, there's a novel in this story somewhere.

When I first saw my mother-in-law, I was sitting in my dad's car outside their house in the early hours of a Sunday morning after a night out with my new girlfriend, still in the process of saying goodnight, when the sound of high-heels could be heard clip-clopping along the pavement behind us. Looking in the rear-view mirror, I caught sight of Lela for the first time. She was just turning into her garden gate outside the house in Ringswell Gardens on the outskirts of Bath and my first thought was, "Surely this woman's too young to be my girlfriend's mum!"

I was nervous about being introduced to her for the first time, but needn't have been. She immediately put me at my ease and I would say that we were firm friends right from the start. She was a vivacious woman in her mid 40s, slim dark-haired and bubbly, with a ready smile. Right from the start her house was completely open to me. At this time my future wife's sister was working in Athens and so I had yet to meet her. Lela's English was excellent, although her accent always used to fascinate and amuse me. To be honest, for a young 18-year old, having a girlfriend with a Greek mother was quite exotic!

Lela succeeded in raising her four children, Christine, Yvonne [Maria], Paul and Philip while working for the most part as a waitress at the Blathwayt Arms pub/restaurant on Bath Racecourse. Nowadays it's just called "The Blathwayt."

Much of what happened from here on in is contained in the opening chapters of my first book, "Feta Compli!"

Photos Appearing in "Tzatziki For You to Say" -2

The above is a view from the top of the Kastro at Asklipio. It looks down the coast towards the village of Gennadi. This photo appears at the end of Chapter 19, "The Things You Have to Do For a Free Coffee."

The photo above was taken in Asklipio village itself and also appears at the end of Chapter 19.

The above is a superb shot of a Rhodean fisherman, taken by Nigel Sparks (who provided me with the front cover photo for "Tzatziki FYTS" too). It appears at the end of Chapter 20, "Kosta's Dilemma."

Above you see the Bay of Pandeli on Leros, where I "dived for jellies" in Chapter 25.
This was taken in 1996 and is a scanned print.

And finally, this is a Symi doorway which rather took my fancy when we stayed there for a vacation in 1995.
It is also a scanned print and graces the page at the end of chapter 27.

If you click on any of the above photos they should open in a larger view.
There are a few other photos in the book, but the originals were black and white, so they're to be found in a post about my mother-in-law's background, which can be viewed HERE. Those black & white pics appear there at a larger scale.

First batch of Tzatziki FYTS photos HERE.

Photos Appearing in "Tzatziki For You to Say" -1

The above pic appears on the inside title page of the book. It was taken during a winter stay we had on Symi a few years back, somewhere near the lower end of the Kali Strata.

 Above is my better half, after she'd thanked "Mad" Mihali at "Hari's Bar" for getting rid of a Symi Spider one evening. It appears at the end of Chapter 2, "Livestock."

You have to look carefully, but at the other end of the fledgling vegetable patch is Hartley the Hare, beating a fast retreat after I'd zapped him with the hosepipe. The black and white version appears at the end of chapter 4, called rather unsurprisingly - "Hares and Hosepipes!"

This rather nice view of Lindos from a rooftop taverna is one of the photos supplied by Nigel Sparks from Somerset, England. I used it at the end of chapter 8, "Plants, Pomegranates & Tantrums."

The above pic dates back to 1977 and it's Kalamos beach, north of Athens, where my wife's family have a summer villa. Left to right are: Dave (my step-father-in-law), Yvonne-Maria, [2nd]-Cousin Effie, Lela (my mother-in-law) and cousin Christina, Effie's mum. The island of Evia is in the background. The pic appears at the end of chapter 14, "The Whining."

Batch 2 of Tzatziki's pics is HERE
Clicking on any of the photos should open it in a larger view. The first one is not very good resolution as it was taken with my rather modest mobile phone. The last one is a scanned print.