More Misunderstandings

Here are a couple more examples of the way you can get yourself into a spot of bother if you happen to mispronounce a word when trying out your Greek.

The Greek word for 'offer' is 'prosforah,' whereas the word for 'accent,' as in how someone speaks their own language, is 'proforah.' The only difference is the 's.' In both cases the syllable you stress is the last one. Now, think about this a moment. I was talking to a Greek friend the other day and I wanted to say that I know when I speak Greek I have an accent. So I said, "Eho mia prosforah." Effectively I said I have an offer [for her]. Fortunately, she didn't take that the wrong way!

It would be equally as embarrassing the other way around too. If you're talking to someone and you want to say, in a nice way of course, that they have an accent when they speak your language, you don't really want to be saying, "You have an offer?" Especially if you give the impression that it's a question or an invitation. Be prepared to make a run for it.

Slightly less serious a misunderstanding comes if you want to refer to a hammock. Now, you may be thinking, "it's not that often one wants to say 'hammock' when speaking Greek." But here you might just be wrong, because you'd be amazed how many hammocks can be seen hanging from trees in gardens and beach-side bars over here.

A hammock is 'mia ai-ora' whereas an [or one] hour is 'mia ora.' So, if you want to say "you arrived on time," you actually say in Greek 'you arrived on your hour', since you'd say "irthes stin ora sou." I told someone the other day that they'd arrived in their hammock. I had no idea why they looked at me in that strange way.

Ah, well, onward and upward, eh?

Beggars in BMWs

Another hot potato I've been meaning to talk about is the subject of street 'musicians' and beggars, which do appear to be proliferating in Greece these days.

If you walk around either Rhodes new town or go into the medieval town, you can't fail to notice them, they're everywhere. There are tiny kids, sitting cross-legged on the kerb pumping junior accordions, often repeating the same musical phrase over and over again, usually a short, badly played 'clip' from the song "Never on a Sunday". They may be emitting a screech that vaguely resembles an attempt to sing a few words from the song as accompaniment... 

There are teenage (and barely teenage) girls with their faces whited up and a long white silk curtain draped all over their bodies, pretending very poorly to be statues. 

A local "Human Statue" gets her attire sorted before commencing a session...

Now, I've seen some pretty amazing 'human' statues, notably at Honfleur once, in Northern France, where the detail was so amazing as to be well worth a coin or two in the hat on the floor in front of them. This is the kind of thing...

This photo courtesy of https://2id-events.com - in the UAE.

...but it has to be said these kids here are taking the Michael, their getup is that simple. They don't even seem to understand that a statue is supposed to be rigid, so they keep waving at people walking by!

There are some pretty amazing musicians too, busking in the timeworn manner, and these generally are very good, entertaining and worth a listen while one passes. Like this combo I saw in the Street of the Knights a few weeks ago...

There are also the kids that patrol the restaurants in the Old Town, one perhaps playing a tune on a mini bouzouki or accordion, while his younger (often no more than six or seven year-old) assistant passes among the tables with a plastic cup or a baseball cap, trying to make eye contact with the diners for maximum effect.

There are the very pathetic (in the true sense of the word) women sitting on the pavement in the shopping area of the new town, usually with a baby clutched to their breast while they simply groan and extend a hand as people scurry past. These are often right under your feet as you attempt to enter or exit a clothes boutique, for example.

I'm also well familiar with a lady flautist, always dressed in purple and white, who busks in the Old Town...

...a couple of troupes of acrobats, several mature men who play either acoustic or electric guitars, some of whom also move among the restaurant tables with a small plastic cup dangling from the guitar's headstock on a piece of string, and a new age-type girl who sits on a step in the Street of the Knights and taps a beaten metal drum (a bit like an upside-down West Indian steel drum) with a couple of timpani mallets, making a kind of ambient sound that's not unpleasant, but doesn't seem to have much of a melody or tune.

So, to take stock, if you were to drop a coin to every beggar, musician, acrobat or statue that you pass, you'd need probably twice as much spending cash as you probably have with you in order to get through the day.

Before I move on to another aspect of all this, I need to mention the 'African" women who hang around St. Paul's Gate, near the fishing harbour, and 'mug' the people passing by stealth. Before I was told a couple of months back in no uncertain terms by the Proedros of the professional guides association, together with an officer of the tourist police, to stop telling my excursion guests anything at all, apart from the arrangements for our return from town (I alluded to this occasion fleetingly in this post), I used to be able to warn my guests about these women. They are a pest and hang around beneath an arch where passers-by need to walk in very close proximity to them. As you approach them they'll extend a hand and put on a broad smile. Once they make eye contact with you they've almost won the battle already. They'll give you the impression that they're simply being friendly, but in very short order will grab your hand and won't let go until they've put a rather pitiable piece of string around your wrist with a few beads on it, tell you it'll bring you health and prosperity for the rest of your life, and extract an exorbitant sum from you for the privilege. It's an upsetting experience and I'm often asked why the Police don't go and sort them out. I don't have the answer to that.

Of course, moving a little further out from the town centre there are the traffic light junction windscreen cleaners and people selling tissue packs at your car window while you wait for the 'green.' There are the trolley beggars in supermarket car parks too. These will approach you while you're loading the shopping into your car and ask if they can return your trolley/cart to the trolley-park for you, and thus pocket the Euro coin that's released once the thing is re-parked.

Reading back over this, I'm conscious of the possibility of giving a false impression that you're under siege should you visit Rhodes. I don't mean to do that, but it is a fact that these folk are about. I've travelled the Athens subway and they're all over the trains there too. This is born of the fact that the system runs on trust. There are no turnstiles, thus enabling the unfortunates to board the trains and 'work' the passengers between stations.

Now, the whole question of how genuine all these people are is a tough one. Of course, the quality musicians don't pretend to be down and outs, they merely ply a busking trade that has a long tradition and I always like to see and hear such people. They add vibrancy to a leisurely walk around a town centre. Well, they do for me anyway.

These guys were playing slide guitar blues in the centre of Bath when I was there in July. They were awesome.

The ones that trade on your pity are a more difficult case. I myself have witnessed something that certainly aroused doubts in my mind. I was waiting for my wife in the car once during a flying visit to a supermarket on the outskirts of town, when I saw a woman who'd been prowling the parked cars with a rather scruffy-looking, stain-faced urchin on her hip, extending a hand to everyone she could draw a reaction from. She also had a rather battered stroller with her, which had a bunch of well-used shopping bags hanging from it.

As I watched her, a BMW pulled up just across the road from the car park. OK, it wasn't the latest model, but it was certainly a decent car in what looked like fairly good condition. As I watched, a man got out and opened the boot (trunk, guys). The woman I'd been watching stopped her patrol and plonked the child into the stroller, whereupon she marched pretty briskly out of the car park and across the road to the BMW. The driver folded the stroller and placed it in the boot, while the woman and child climbed into the front seat and closed the door. Once the driver had got back inside they were off with a squeal of tyres.

What was I to conclude from this? It's a hard one. I'll tell you why. I've been told that some of these beggars are 'kept' by their 'owners' in much the same manner as prostitutes are 'kept' by pimps. I saw a carbon copy of this scene once when we were on holiday in Naxos. The story is that such people don't have papers and are thus powerless to escape the clutches of their 'benefactors' without falling foul of the authorities.

 The only thing I will say is that the body language of the ones I've seen gave the distinct impression that the women were not in any way distressed or fearful of the car or its driver. If I hadn't actually seen them begging, I'd have simply concluded that they were a nice little family getting into their car and driving away.

I'll be interested to get some feedback from this one. Meanwhile, I'd better see what loose change I've got...

Thrift versus Consumerism

Maybe I ought to have called this post "Thrift versus Needless Consumerism." It seems that 'consumerism' per se isn't quite as negative an expression as I thought. But you'll get the point. Having just finished typing it and having re-read it through, I have to say it's a bit of a treatise rather than simply a blog post this time.

My beloved and I were talking about furniture yesterday and the whole 'cultural differences' thing entered the conversation again. It's broadly true to say that, certainly in the UK these days, people generally change their dining suite at whim, don't they? A lot more people than ever before seem to have as their hobby the continual re-decorating of their home, room-by-room, which often involves, not simply a can of interior emulsion or couple of rolls of wallpaper, but the complete replacing of all the hard furniture in the room that's under transformation. Witness the spate of interior design programmes on UK TV in recent years.

Thus the increase in huge 'sheds', as one tends to call those gigantic furniture stores that pepper all the edge-of-town shopping malls these days. If people in the UK had the same habits as most of the Greeks we know, then lots of those huge chain stores would be out of business. Greeks, in general, own a dining suite for life. Not just for life, but they often use the same suite today that their grandparents handed down to them through their parents along the way.

And it's usually heavy mahogany stuff like this (although often even darker wood)...

That's pretty much par for the course in a lot of Greek households. Plus, quite a few families we know also have custom-made see-thru PVC covers on the chairs. Just what you need on an August day in Rhodes, eh?

Our friend Voula, who I was talking about in the post "Staying Awhile," is a fairly modern woman, yet she too has a lounge/dining room crammed with heavy, darkwood furniture, including a huge glass dresser/sideboard. One wonders whether the standard chipboard floor in a modern UK home would stand the weight for long. No wonder Greek houses have solid floors. My wife's relatives in Athens also have a house crammed with the stuff. Frankly, when one considers the size of the rooms in a lot of 'starter-homes' in the UK nowadays, they'd never even get it in there in the first place.

One of my favourite comedians, "Basile," who I've mentioned before, in the post "Nice Piece of Furniture" for example, did a wickedly funny piece about his ya ya's sideboard and old cabinet-style TV set. I mention it in more detail in that post, which also majors on the whole lace 'doily' thing.

In some ways the Greek way is much better for the environment, if not for the economy. Let's face it, it's a sorry world where 'planned obsolescence' is required to keep a country's, nay the world's, economy going. Nowhere is 'planned obsolescence' more evident than in the computer industry. My iPad, for example, is five years old and already there are loads of apps that I can't download or update because it won't let me update the OS to the latest version because they've made subtle changes to the processor so that it won't cope with the newer system. When you actually stop and think about how this whole planet's financial system depends on industry (and thus mass-employment) rather than small-holding agriculture (as was the case for millennia before our era), you realise that the 'system' is designed to destroy the environment really.

Cultural mores that we abandoned decades ago in more 'developed' countries are still only just making inroads into some aspects of life in rural Greece. Even the house one lives in, when I was a kid, was just about still the family 'base' for generations. Nowadays in the UK even the expression 'starter home' betrays the culture of perpetually moving on to something bigger and better. A house is no longer a home, it's a material asset to be disposed of at a profit as one continually 'moves up the ladder' as it were. Experts in human behaviour and emotional wellbeing, though, ring alarm bells, saying that perpetually moving house tends to sever a human's sense of roots, of belonging, resulting in less balanced people, more emotionally prone to mental distress and other problems as they get older.

Here in Greece, especially in rural Greece, families never sell a house. They'd almost prefer to leave it empty, should a 'set' of forbears die without having anyone to leave it to who'd want to live in it, than sell it on. At most they'll perhaps let it, but it's a home. It was the place to which all the kids and grandkids, even great grandkids could come back to, thus grounding them, giving them a sense of belonging, of having roots.

And I like that. Thus it is with furniture too. Most Greeks I know in the south of Rhodes (OK, so it is changing among apartment-dwelling townies these days) have well-made furniture in every room of the house which is designed to outlive not one, not two, but several generations.

Of course, I'm a hypocrite in some ways because, had I been born into a Greek family and inherited a great big heavy dark wood dining suite that I absolutely hated, I'd probably have to get shot of it and buy something I could live with aesthetically.

But I'm not saying that would necessarily make me any happier for it.

Against The Grain?

Stergos and I were talking while the coach's wheels covered ground on the way back from Rhodes Town the other day. The subject came up of a mutual friend who's only around 30 years of age, yet has some rather alarmingly old-fashioned ideas about women.

The person in question looks modern, with that hairstyle that so many young men seem to think is cool these days, where both sides of the head are shaved to a No.1 (G.I. Joe) shortness on both sides and around the back, but the top still has flowing locks that need keeping in place with copious quantities of gel or the like. At least he doesn't sport one of those ridiculous mega-short pony tails, held in place with an elastic band, on top of his head that always have me longing for a pair of sharp scissors whenever I see them. He wears cool shades and goes to the gym a lot. Yet when you have a conversation with him, he'll often betray a woefully archaic attitude, not to say 'understanding' (misunderstanding?) of women.

For instance, if he sees any driver making an error of judgment on the road, his first words will always be "Woman. It's a woman." 

If he's wrong he'll move swiftly on. If, however, he's right, he'll continue with expressions like: "See, women aren't genetically suited to driving, Yianni. It's not conducive to their emotional makeup. They're better suited to keeping home. They're dangerous, what with all their emotions and stuff. Plus they think mirrors are only fitted so they can touch-up their lipstick."

I could go on, but I sense some real anger issues with some readers already coming to the surface, right?

Stergos, who was with me and sitting behind the wheel during this particular conversation, is probably around sixty, still in fairly good shape, with a good head of mainly white hair swept back from his forehead. He has one of those archetypal Greek male voices. You know, the type that sounds like he's smoked for decades and gargles with loose gravel. I should point out that, while he may well have been a smoker in the past, Stergos doesn't smoke today. Taking into consideration his age, though, you may have expected that he would hold slightly outdated views on women's place in society, but none of it. His first wife died after a long illness and he is proud to point out that he is a 'new man' in the sense that he wasn't embarrassed to have done everything around the house while his wife was ill. 

It is a basic truth that most Greek men are rather stereotypical in their views of what constitutes a woman's work and what is a man's. I know very few Greek men who'll get anywhere near the kitchen sink, or indeed the washing machine. An ironing board I suspect they'd not even recognise. My friend Stergos, however, tells me that, first and foremost, even though he says that once a man gets in through his front door, he ought to recognise that he's now in his wife's domain, what she says goes, as it were, he says this out of respect and awe for a woman's capabilities and not because he feels that a woman's place is in the home.

No, Stergos proudly confesses to believing that what's done in the home should always be a matter of sharing the load by both partners in the relationship. He knows how to load up and programme the washing machine, he knows how to iron a shirt or press some trousers, he knows what a duster is. And thus he, although of an older generation, introduced me to a thought from his old Papou (grandfather).

"Yianni," he said, "My old papou always used to say that all men are like wood. I'll explain. Some woods are very hard, they take skill to work and yet can be transformed into beautiful pieces, perhaps of furniture, for example. A well-carved, inlaid and polished oak table is a piece that you keep for life. It elicits expressions of awe from those who examine it. It has great value. Other woods, like pine, for example, are not so high in quality. These are more suited to rough cabinets or shelving you might put up in your outhouse. Then there are woods of such poor quality that the best you can do with them is to burn them, for heat perhaps. Firewood.

"My papou said that men are like that. Some are intelligent, caring people. These men become loved, highly valued, by those who know them. You want to be around them. They are like high quality oak. Sadly, though, some are so 'rough' in ways and thought that you don't hold them in such high esteem. The firewood, as it were. The type of wood someone becomes has much to do with how educated they are."

I began to see where he was coming from. Returning to the subject of our mutual friend, who is due to get married to his very beautiful fiancée later this year, Stergos said: "Yianni, our friend may look young and modern, but at heart he is a 'horiatis.' Still holds the values he learned from his country village upbringing. He's going to have trouble with his new wife if he doesn't change his tune. He doesn't seem to want to educate himself in this field."

I've met our friend's fiancée. I replied that I thought that perhaps she was aware of her future husband's views and yet nurtured the idea that she'd whip him into shape once they were married. Not that I think that this would necessarily work, mind you. It's often the recipe for a failed marriage in my experience (not my personal experience, of course). Maybe, though, she is strong of character and knows that she won't stand any messing. I do know that she drives, since I asked our friend if she did one time when he was sounding off about how women shouldn't be driving owing to their inherent emotional nature. When he replied that she did, I asked him, "So what are you going to do about that when you're married? Do you think she'll knuckle under and stay at home?"

The awkward smile he gave me by way of a reply indicated that he was finding that one a bit of a quandary. 

The two of us, Stergos and myself, like our young friend as a person, it's not that. But we're both realistic about him too and we shall be watching he and his new wife with interest and concern for quite a while after they tie the knot.

I'd be interested to hear from other ex-pats like myself who've lived here in Greece for any length of time about their experience in this area. What abiding impressions do they have of the stereotypes? Do they feel as I do that your average Greek man, at least in rural areas, is still stuck some time in the past when it comes to male-female equality? 

Staying Awhile?

The Greek culture has a lot to recommend it. Families are still very close, communities are predominantly safe for children to go out and play in with confidence, at least in rural and island areas. Yeah, well, knowing everyone and being known by everyone in a village environment has both its upside and its downside, but it's miles better than not knowing one's next-door neighbour at all and living in a 'community' where one could be dead on one's kitchen floor for a week or two, or even worse, lying injured and helpless there, before anyone even knows.

Where I come from in the South West of England and, more latterly, South Wales, in the UK, things have changed immeasurably since I was a child growing up in the 1950's. Back then we had simple latches on our kitchen doors and I could walk to school across several fields and down a country lane or two alone at the age of 6 or maybe 7. Now it seems, people in villages all work in the city and hardly see their neighbours, leave alone have any meaningful interaction with them. I know, it doesn't do to generalise, but you know where I'm coming from, I'm sure. These days in the UK everyone takes their kids by car to the school gate and waits outside for them to emerge at the end of the day. Yes, OK, I'm generalising again.

I would walk home from the tiny village school in Priston, a distance of some three miles, all on my lonesome, and I'd love it. I well remember the time when I was skirting an electric fence, keeping some cattle to a particular section of a meadow, and I wondered what would happen if I touched the fence. I must have been seven. I picked a bunch of wild flowers (many of which you'd be hard pressed to find in a British meadow nowadays) and gingerly laid them upon the electrified wire. 

Zap! I still remember the electrical 'fizz' that ran up my arm. Needless to say, I treated electric fences with respect from then on. When I finally got to our back door half an hour or so later, I was none the worse for the experience and my mum was there preparing the evening meal. Sounds idyllic. Frankly, it was.

Here in southern Rhodes there are villages where daily life remains just about something akin to that era in the UK. Things are, of course, changing here too. But, the way I look at it, this area is a few decades behind the UK - in a good way. The family culture here is still strong, which regularly produces situations that we both appreciate and - in order to be balanced - occasionally express gratitude for not having to endure.

What am I on about? I'm on about the propensity that the Greeks have to visit their relatives willy nilly, with no invitation, no reference to whether their hosts may have already received other visitors for a week or three, and often not much advance warning. Most of the Greeks we know don't have any concept of the package holiday. Instead, they simply choose which relatives they're going to visit and go and stay there.

I'll cite as an example our friend Voula. She has a husband and four children, ranging in ages from 6 to 20, and they all still live at home in a village not far from us. Voula's hubby had been married before (one evidence of how things are changing here) and has grown-up children from his previous marriage. They live in Thessalonika with their mother. Voula herself has aunts and uncles on the Greek mainland (on her mother's side) and a brother who lives with his wife on the island of Crete.

A few weeks ago, Voula's mum's sister and her hubby, together with two grown-up daughters, came to stay for two weeks. That's in a house with six permanent residents and three bedrooms. As is quite normal for Greeks, they ended up with bodies all over the lounge when it was time to bed down for the night. Privacy is a notion that doesn't compute in such circumstances. Even though Voula is quite a modern woman of around 40 years old, she cooks almost every single day and always from fresh ingredients. I don't know many Greek households where they stock up their freezers with ready meals or pre-packed and processed foods. Here in the south of Rhodes women start with fresh fruit and vegetables and prepare their meals from there, much as my mother used to do when I was a lad. The whole thing is, I believe, a throw-back to patriarchal days of bygone eras.

So, Voula was run ragged cooking for 10 for two weeks. OK, so the visitors helped out here and there, but they also bunged their dirty washing in her machine and she washed and ironed it, not to mention the sheets and bedding. Not two days after the visitors left, we were talking with Voula at her kitchen table when she told us she had to cut short our chat in order to set out for the airport. She had to go and meet her half-sister and hubby who were flying in from Thessalonika that very afternoon.

"How long are they staying for?" My wife asked Voula.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe a week. maybe two." replied Voula, resignation written all over her face.

So the half sibling and partner turned up and stayed about ten days, after which, apart from running them back to the airport, Voula had to again wash a load of extra bedding. 

'Where is her husband in all of this?' You may ask. Well, as you may have guessed anyway, he has a business that's tourist-related and is thus out at work every waking hour, seven days a week for another few weeks yet. Her oldest daughter works in a nearby hotel and her younger three are still at school and thus were on summer break. They've just returned to school this past week.

Back at Voula's the other night, we were enjoying some 'parea' with a small group of friends when she once again got up and declared, "Anyway, everyone, must ask you to clear off now. I'm going out." I must add that Voula, who is usually immaculately turned out, had her hair tied up behind her head and was wearing not one scrap of makeup. She looked somewhat fraught. In fact we remarked that perhaps she needed a holiday.

Of course, we were curious as to where she had to go, since it was around 9.30pm. Guess what, she was off to the airport again to meet and greet yet more relatives, the other half-sibling, plus wife and two kids were arriving to stay a while. 

Now, Voula isn't the type to complain, yet when my better half suggested that she must be just a tad weary of visitors after something like six weeks without much break, her response was a simple half smile, as if to say, "it's par for the course. Not much I can do, so what's the point in griping?"

Thus, my friends, whilst we can envy the Greeks their family and community closeness, there is perhaps a smidgin of relief that in other parts of the world we're not quite so close any more.

An Unexpected Upshot

I don't think either I or my wife have ever been bitten by a dog. Until now that is. Last week we both got bitten at the same time by a neighbour's dog. Now, it's not the purpose of this post to go on about our neighbour and what should and shouldn't have happened. I was prompted to write this one owing to some positive feedback that developed at the local Health Centre in Gennadi as an upshot.

We were bitten in the early evening of Friday 31st August, as we were walking home from an early evening swim. When we got home I broke out the trusty bottle of Dettol and bathed both wounds, then the equally wonderful and comforting smell of Germoline graced our nostrils as I applied a Band Aid dressing with the cream to the legs where we'd sustained the bites. 

Both Dettol and Germolene are always in our first aid kit. They both take me back to my childhood and seem to be two essentials for the home that haven't changed in decades.

It soon became apparent that my 'bite' was barely a bite at all and that it would heal cleanly and quickly. It more resembled a graze than a bite really. I was the lucky one. My wife's, however, when we peeled off the band aid the following morning, was evidently much more serious and a substantial chunk of leg about the size of your average watch-face had been damaged. The toothmarks were clearly visible and the wound quite deep. 

Thus it was that, when she got to work that day, her trusty team of fellow women insisted that she go to the pharmacy for a tetanus jab right away. Notwithstanding her general aversion to all things medical and her fear of needles, she complied, paid out €13 and within minutes of entering the pharmacy was back in the car on her way back to work.

When she got home I was right proud of her, because she'd faced down her fears. I still felt, though, that she ought to go to the doctor and see what he/she thought about the wound. She wasn't too keen and resisted for a few days until it became evident that there was redness and swelling around the wound, even though she'd been dressing it with Betadine every night. Toward the end of the week we finally had the time to visit the surgery at Gennadi and that's when what occurred prompted me to write this up as a post.

The both of us aren't too keen on antibiotics, and it's well documented that, having killed off zillions of strains of bacteria over the past few decades, the ones that are left are the ones that are resistant and thus the antibiotics are beginning to lose their effectiveness. You don't need me to tell you that anyway. The fact still remains though that, since Yvonne-Maria hadn't been prescribed antibiotics for probably nigh on 40 years, they were liable to do the trick in her case.

So we waltzed into the Gennadi Health Centre on Thursday morning last and were delighted to find no one waiting before us to see the doctor. The nurse who works there is a woman of probably about five foot five, maybe in her late forties and with her dark hair always tied back in a severe pony tail, no doubt for hygiene reasons. She was pottering in her consultation room, saw us and bade us go right in to the doctor's office.

Doctor Nikos, who had run this centre for several years, has since moved on to a private practice just along the road. He is though, still supportive of the centre and cites the fact that he has a young family as one of the reasons why he had to make some tough decisions in his life about workload and salary. The new doctor seemed to me to be of similar age, quite a nice looking chap, although somewhat more swarthy than Niko, his predecessor. We soon got down to business and the long and the short of it is that he chided my dearest (mildly I should add) about not having been to see him sooner.

Whilst I stared at the half-consumed frappé, sitting, as expected, on his desk, my wife said that she didn't like the idea of antibiotics because they may have side-effects.

The doctor's reply was, I thought, rather succinct.

"Dog bites have side effects." He replied, adding: "and they may be a good deal more serious than those from antibiotics."

He won the argument and Yvonne-Maria relented. He wrote her a prescription with a flourish and told her to pop into the nurse's room for her to inspect the wound again and spray some anti-bacterial stuff on it. While this was going on, my wife chose the moment to sing my praises, much to my embarrassment, at least at the outset.

As the nurse sprayed this stuff that looked like frost on the wound, my better half said, "Of course, you know that my hubby here is the one that organises 'Help For Health Gennadi' every spring, to raise money for the centre here."

"Of course," replied the nurse, whose name we really ought to know by now. "I recognised you both as soon as you came in."

Now, before I continue with the tale of this conversation, I would like to clarify one or two facts. Rarely is any idea truly original. The idea for staging an event annually to raise cash for the local health centre sprang from the fact that our friend Melanie, who runs the Kalimera Café, also known as Lindos Reception, had already held such an event there to support the Lindos Health Centre. It was while discussing this with another pair of ex-pats who live down the road from here, Peter and Maggie Yates, that Peter remarked, "Be nice if someone did the same for Gennadi." So right there and then I decided that I'd do just that.

Since it began, a few years back now, the team has melded into a few regulars, all of whom are worthy of credit for the event. Stalwart workers include Julia Easy, Viv Colbeck, David and Barbara Lewis, Tony and Sue and a few local Greek ladies too. These days the whole event couldn't happen without Dimitri Koronios, who runs the really lovely and intimate Summer Breeze Hotel in the village. We stage it every Spring, usually to coincide with a local village parade, and my job these days is mainly to maintain the Facebook page.

Over the years we've been running "Help For Health Gennadi" we've raised a couple of thousand Euros. So, here we were in the nurse's consulting room, and my wife was on the subject of the charitable event, so the nurse, bless her, replied:

"You know we are so grateful to you for what you do. This year we bought all these instruments with the money you raised." At this point she opened a stainless steel cabinet, inside of which were several stainless steel drawers. She extracted one and showed us a selection of sterilised instruments that Hannibal Lecter would have been proud of (for all the wrong reasons, of course), before also adding that our money was also going to be financing some re-wiring, plumbing and decorating that needed to be done some time soon.

I chipped in here, to cut off her stream of praise, by saying, "Well, look, we all of us need this place to be here and functioning well. Look at us, who'd have thought we'd be in here today, benefitting from your service to the community? We may not see the inside of this place for years at a time, but we're pretty glad it's here when we need it. So I'd say we're only benefitting ourselves by holding the event."

When we walked out of there and into the pharmacy next-door but one to collect my beloved's prescription for a 6-day course of antibiotics, I have to admit to feeling very happy.

No one wants to be bitten by a dog, but if we hadn't been then we 'd never have had that conversation. To see how our money was working for the good of all the locals, not to mention seeing the look on the nurse's face and hearing her words of appreciation, well it darned well made our week.

Hidden Corners and Alleys

I've been meaning to post this for a while. So many visitors to Rhodes have the impression that the only area of town that has any charm is the Medieval Town or "Old Town" as it's also often called.

But walking around to kill time on my excursions, as I so often do, I frequently wander the area inside the larger of the two yellow circles in the aerial shot shown below...

Image courtesy of Google Earth Pro (of course!)

The above shot is looking due west. So, north would be to the right. The smaller circle, just to help you get your bearings, is the location of the (hate to refer to it here, but...) MacDonalds. The Old Town would be left and down a bit. If you look carefully you can spot the two trees just above the centre of the larger yellow circle. These stand right outside the delightful Koukos bar/restaurant (It also has rooms too, by the way). I highly recommend a visit to the Koukos, it's brilliant. Check out the web site (the link is the name above) for more details, but it's really not to be missed when you visit Rhodes. It's located on Nikiforou Mandilara Street, which runs vertically in the photo above. The street is pedestrianised, by the way, too.

Anyway, if you take the time to walk along Nikiforou Mandilara, you'll soon see little side streets and alleys. This is what awaits you if you go exploring in the area..

Nope, not in the Old Town!

Same arch as above, but from further back.

Of course, as a rule, graffiti isn't a particularly attractive sight, but this caught me eye and led me to thinking. In Greek it rhymes, but it says in essence: "You told me to be careful, the world is bad. But you never told me to be on my guard, sadly against you, yourself." I hope it's not the case, but it led me to wondering, what if some poor young girl wrote this about a male relative, maybe a step father, or an uncle. What may that indicate? It prompts me to mention my fourth novel, "Sometimes You Just Can't Tell,"owing to its underlying theme.

There you go. So, if you're on Rhodes any time soon, maybe go and check out this area, north of the college square. The college is the big building with three aspects that is situated between the two yellow circles in the photo.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who's checked out the area in question.