A few recent images to see you through the weekend.
All posts by James Collins
A Sad Day For Symi
A Sad Day For Symi
No long blog today, no attempt at humour or book sales, just the sad and tragic news that George Kalodoukas, the ‘father of tourism’ on Symi was killed in a road accident on Wednesday. I know no other details apart from that, but the news is out there on several Greek news websites that may contain more. I am just uploading one photo today, an image of the island that has lost a driving force behind many businesses and ventures. Our thoughts are with his family.
Symi Books for Christmas
Symi Books for Christmas
It’s nearly that time of year again, less than three weeks, but there’s still time to order paperbacks for Christmas presents. Today is an unashamedly brash reminder of some of my titles that you can pick up on Kindle for yourself (and allow a certain amount of sharing), or on Kindle Unlimited for free (if you have that function) and in paperback. The full list of tiles is to the right as usual, but you may want to consider gifts for friends who you may make into Symi converts with some of these Symi books.
If you’ve not read them (and I am sure you have, but other may not have) then the best order to read them in is:
A collection of diary entries, emails and other bits and pieces that start a few days before we arrived to live on Symi and take us through the first five years of living here. 2002 to about 2007. It was also one of the first eBooks to be published under the, then, new self-publishing system.
A collection of articles I wrote for the much-missed The Symi Visitor newspaper. There are also a couple of short stories invented around Symi. This book kind of covers 2008 to 2012. Includes photos.
This is one full year on Symi, 2013, and in made up of blog posts with photos from Neil.
The latest book that covers living on Symi, other travel adventures of my youth and later years, from 1979 to 2017, plus other bits and pieces from this blog.
Proceeds from all of these books are still going to the Symi high school to help buy books and things needed following our recent flood.
Also for your Christmas shopping list, you might like to consider:
A comedy romp/treasure hunt that takes in some (real) Symi history (sponge diving and WWII) and some invented characters on an over-60s holiday set in the present day. ‘Dan Brown meets Whitehall farce,’ as one commentator described it.
This is another stunning calendar from Neil with 12 shots of Symi to keep that Greek sunshine in your house or office through the winter and beyond.
All books can be found via my Amazon author page here, and all reviews are more than welcome.
There. I’ll leave you now to read this and say ‘Yes, we know, we’ve already got these books, what else is going on over there on Symi?’ Well, the temperature has dropped overnight and is floundering around the seven degrees mark in a cold wind – it was 18 degrees yesterday (Tuesday), so it’s a bit of a shock, even though its expected at this time of year. Off to put on my thermals now. Happy Christmas Symi shopping!
A short walk with lots to see
A short walk with lots to see
A mix of photos today. I took some as we walked up our lane and around the back of the Castro. This walk gives you views down over the back of the harbour where I could see the Opera House, still in recovery, and the basketball court, now in need of repair.
You also pass a couple of rubbish collection points on this lane, where the stray cats hang out looking for food. It then takes you around the back, above the kataraktis (the original path from Horio to Yialos) and past several churches, a couple of which is being done up and painted.
You then come into the back of the village and can turn right for the kataraktis, or left to enter the village, then right to head towards Stavros or left to head towards Haritomeni, both village parishes, of which, I believe, there are thirteen. Is that right? I read somewhere there were 13 main churches in the village, not counting the smaller chapels, but I am not sure if each one is a parish as such or just an area known by that name. A bit more research is needed there.
We were on this short walk to go and visit Jenine and the boys for Sunday lunch, where we had a great time and where Neil, being Neil, managed to get himself involved in festive activities. And there I will leave it; that’s quite enough for one day.
Girl Gone Greek – The Movie
Girl Gone Greek – The Movie
Today, I have an interview with Rebecca Hall, author of ‘Girl Gone Greek’ a best-selling novel of one woman’s experience of teaching in Greece and… Well, read the interview to discover the rest.
Armed with a degree in International Relations and Sociology, obtained as a ‘Mature Student’ when she was in her 30’s, Rebecca Hall decided after her course that she wanted to travel, to understand the world beyond her own front door (and her own wet, terribly polite Britishness). It was inherent in her nature to realise that in order to better understand a culture, then the only way, really, was to immerse herself in it. What better way to do that than to learn to teach English?
After a one month, incredibly difficult CELTA course (Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults), she secured a job teaching English in a small Greek village on the mainland.
With such an interesting start to her Greek life in 2008, culminating in the creating of her blog Life Beyond Borders in 2010, she slowly but surely came to fall in love with not a Greek (as many people dismissively assume), but with a whole nation — many Greeks if you like — and she feels blessed to have cultivated a whole new ‘family’ for herself.
To this end, as Greece increasingly started to hit the headlines for its economic crisis and be blamed as the ‘poor man of Europe, pulling the other countries down,’ this was not Rebecca’s reality of Greece. So, she set about trying to put the record straight by showcasing her reality of Greece and the characters/people she experienced. “Girl Gone Greek” – the novel was born.
From start to finish, it was six years in gestation and eventually self-published in June 2015.
Says Rebecca: “It was a difficult process, having never written before. And I didn’t want to get all political or on my high horse… I just wanted people to experience Greece through my eyes: to see it for what it was – see the beauty and quirky characters. Countries are, after all, made up of the individuals within it and in times of crisis, we tend to forget that.”
“It was also an exciting process, but exhausting! I had moved to Athens by this time and would work in the evenings teaching, come home, write some more, then bed in the early hours (having been incorporated into Greek time!)”
“I had to also dig deep and examine my past; give the story some tension and depth. So I looked at the reasons why the character went to Greece (it’s a semi-fictional book) and had to really go through some self-analysis.”
“Self-publishing meant I could choose my graphic designer and book cover – and what a book cover it is! I am so happy with it…and I believe it attracts people to want to read it too.”
After two years of it making steady sales through Amazon, talking at local Literary Festivals and schools in her hometown in the UK plus presenting on a Mediterranean cruise, Rebecca felt it time to take this one step further. BREXIT had become a reality, spreading yet more uncertainty throughout not just Europe, but the globe.
Rebecca saw this as yet another opportunity to prove that we seem to have lost our way in aiming to understand, not criticise other cultures and Greece, once again, seemed to bear the brunt of Europe’s wrath.
Says Rebecca: “I felt the time had come to try to take this one step further. Why not look at a ‘feel good’ film and try to see if it’s possible to make ‘Girl Gone Greek’ into a movie?”
Not knowing anything about the movie industry and, indeed, where to start, she was lucky enough to at least know people – one of them being James Collins.
Together, with James’s extensive know how, they collaborated on working the book into a relatable and realistic screenplay, something Rebecca says she felt nervous about initially because “I really did not want the essence of the film to be lost… To turn into a cheesy ‘girl meets boy and has a foreign fling.’ Luckily James really captured the book’s essence, introducing new elements that are great.”
Rebecca wears many hats, and when not chewing her pen, trying to change the world through her quirky, self-deprecating style of writing, she’s a guidebook writer for Rough Guides and writes for various online publications, as well as still maintaining her site Life Beyond Borders.
You can find Rebecca on:
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