Boat bits
Yesterday, Wednesday, was a bit wiped out for me thanks to another bout of vertigo. It’s Thursday now and first thing in the morning. I’m out of the habit of posting things this early and my brain is not quite in gear, so it will be brief. I did take some photo yesterday, from up here as I wasn’t feeling up to going out, so sorry if you’ve seen it all before. I love watching the boats coming in and out, and yesterday we had two at once.

This sometimes happens on a Wednesday, or Friday, if the Blue Star is late. There’s often a chance of it being late as it has several other ports of call to make before reaching us and Symi is at the end of the rout, bar Rhodes, so there’s plenty of sea time for things to go awry. It only takes one short hold up at each of the several ports on the way down for the delay to accrue. So, sometimes, as happened yesterday, it is in the harbour while the Dodekanisos is waiting to come in on its more punctual morning route.

The Blue Star comes back in the afternoon and you can more or less set your watch by it on a Wednesday, when the weather is good. It leaves Rhodes dead on three and calls in here, its first port of call, punctually at four-forty – at least, I hear it doing things down there at that time.

So there you are, a little bit about boats and only a little as I have things to catch up on that I wasn’t able to do yesterday. (Apologies for any typos, things haven’t quite settled down yet.)

This shot will give you an idea of the size of the Blue Star Diagoras

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What quay are you in?
Another quiet day up here in the village. I took a quick walk down to get some food for the Alarm Cat, who is a vociferous as ever, and then came straight back up via the western, steep steps and the slope. This is more direct but harder work as there are few flat areas to recover yourself on – as there are on the winding Kali Strata. I didn’t really see anyone, a few chickens on the path, a couple of cats, and some local folk out and about in the harbour. Also in the harbour yesterday was this:

I had to get the long lens out to see what it was and it looks like some kind of floating concrete-pouring device, perhaps for the new jetty that is being built on the south side of the harbour. This work is still going on, and will be for some time I guess. I’m still not sure how large trucks will get around the hairpin bend at Petalo but have heard that once the jetty is complete, funding can be sought for a road to link it with the main road to the village. This may have to turn out to sea and curve upwards, which should be an interesting building project to keep an eye on.

It should make a big difference though. We saw last week, when the wind was up and the sea was rough, that boats like the Blue Star Diagoras were only able to dock at some ports, namely Kos, which has a dock directly onto open sea. At Symi, and other places, the boats need to manoeuvre into a tight harbour, albeit a deep one, and this is sometimes not possible. The new jetty, or landing stage, or whatever it’s called, would mean the larger boats could back in, in the same way as they do at Kos, without having to negotiate the confines of a harbour. In theory, this would mean boats could dock here in rougher weather than they currently are able to dock in.

It will also mean that most supplies come in on the south side of the harbour, and this will mean fewer trucks grinding around the narrow quayside, something which can be tricky. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen shop owners rush out to pull their awnings back in, or seen groups of day-trippers have to part like the Red Sea to let a lorry through. And then there’s the noise and fumes from the vehicles, and the congestion that a landing boat causes. Hopefully all that, or at least most of it, will go once the dock is ready and connected to the road. Meanwhile, Symi will carry on as normal and we’ll all put up with the disruption of large lorries and visiting cars as they are bringing in supplies, building materials and things needed for folk to make a living, tourists included. (It doesn’t last for long and it’s quite entertaining to watch.) But for now, if arriving at Symi, you’ll most likely still arrive on the north side near the clock tower, both on the Blue Star and the Dodekanisos Seaways boats. The ‘Sea Dreams’ is pulling in on the south side near the bus stop, when it comes in.

And all that talk of boats reminds me I need to arrange tickets for our trip to Rhodes. If you are a regular Dodekanisos Seaways or Blue Star user, you can pick up loyalty cards and receive bonus points and benefits from regular sailing. I’ve had one for ages, but I keep forgetting to take it with me when I go to book tickets. This is mainly because I don’t use a wallet. I’d rather leave one or two things here and there than lose a wallet with everything together all in one place. So, I’ll leave myself a quick reminder to self to take my loyalty card when I go to book the boat. You can probably find details of the loyalty schemes on the websites for both the Dodekanisos Seaways and Blue Star Ferries. Both sites have English language options too.

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Of musicals and fresh produce
It looks like this cold north wind is set to stay with us through the week, though it’s calming down. A bit like us after the birthday weekend. Sunday descended into a great afternoon at the Rainbow Bar with one too many glasses of something – Yiannis eventually left us to get on with it and went home for his lunch. That was followed by an evening at home watching musicals.

I had recently ordered a copy of Chess in concert at the Albert Hall and, though I’d seen it on YouTube before, this was the first viewing in high quality. It’s still a great show with some good numbers in it and some great performances from this concert cast. The cast included Marti Pellow from Wet Wet Wet, and David Bedella who I had seen before in ‘Jerry Springer, The Opera.’ (Much parental guidance advised.) This treat was followed by the arena performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. Well, it was Easter in many countries, though it’s not Easter here until May 1^st.

I actually felt surprisingly alive on Monday morning, thanks to the many bottles of water consumed during the day. We usually get through up to three litres each day each as a matter of course, even in the winter. There’s always a plastic beaker (courtesy of Jumbo) on the desk or by the sofa, and I am always topping that up with water and sipping away. It’s helping with the dreaded post-Christmas diet (five kilos down since February) and is also good for you, of course. We have four packs at a time delivered from the supermarket and that lot lasts us less than a week. Luckily bottled water is much cheaper here in Greece than I’ve found it elsewhere. I remember being on a strange detox-yourself diet years ago in the UK and mineral water was a big part of that too, three litres a day. But it was so expensive.

So, the lesson from this morning’s ramble from Symi is that you should always drink lots of water and it’s not expensive to do so when you are here. The other thing that is easy to do is buy fresh produce and eat well. Mind you, when the boats are messed up by the weather, as they were last week, fresh can mean frozen, but that’s okay. You also can’t help but eat organic, if you want to, with a lot of produce coming from local farms and nearby islands. We regularly have fresh eggs with bright yellow yokes courtesy of Sotiris’ farm. Michaelis’ supermarket, and many others, also sell their own produce. In fact, apart from the (very) odd Pot Noodle, it’s quite hard to buy convenience food. There are tins of Greek specialities, dolmathes and meatballs spring invitingly to mind, but it’s so much healthier and cheaper to buy your own ingredients and cook. It’s fun too.

This reminds me of an incident of 2008. I remember this as it was the year Neil was laid up with his broken foot. He was on both feet by then and we were celebrating something at the Jean & Tonic bar, chatting to Miss DJ about stuff when we started trying to remember lyrics from the musical Chicago, specifically ‘The cell block tango’ where six ‘merry murderesses’ each tell their story. They have a specific word each, Pop!, Squish, Uh-uh, Cicero, Lipschitz and… But we couldn’t remember the sixth one. Naturally this meant we had to race home, put on the DVD and watch the show, just what you do at two in the morning in winter. While Miss DJ and I sang our way through various numbers, Neil disappeared into the kitchen to, we thought, make himself a sandwich. But no. Such is the way of things here that, twenty minutes later, he reappeared with a plate of homemade kolokithokeftethes. Try saying that when you’ve had a few. We did, it was fab. So were they. (You may also know them as courgette fritters or balls.) That was all lovely and they went down well. The next morning, it might have been more like afternoon actually, I went to the kitchen to discover the aftermath of an explosion in a kolokithokeftethes factory with courgette dripping from the cupboards, blocking up the sink and just about every pan in the house in need of washing up. But still, they were fresh and tasted great.

Oh, and the sixth word from the lyrics that we could not remember? The word was, naturally, ‘Six.’

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Monday ramble
And a lovely weekend was had by all. I was celebrating a birthday so the weekend included a special dinner and time with the Godboys and friends. Luckily the vertigo faded out throughout Saturday and the world righted itself.

The Friday boat schedule was a bit disrupted because, I assume, of the bad weather earlier in the week, and the Blue Star didn’t come in until about five hours after its usual time, making it very late/early Friday/Saturday coming back from Rhodes. The weather stayed sunny but cold as a chill wind blew in and the Dodecanese boat came and went according to its schedule, so it can’t have been that windy.

As for me, I stayed in on Saturday and read a new book Neil had given me about a conspiracy theory to do with 9/11 – interesting and rather scientific, well researched but doesn’t actually explain why the US Government would want to blow up the buildings and stage the event, it leaves us to make up our own mind about that. In fact, the book doesn’t ask the question, Why? It’s about ‘How.’ So, that was an interesting read and while I was reading it I was able to listen to music from my tablet sent through the airwaves to my new CD machine via Bluetooth and not even have to get up to change the CDs, as the music was coming from Spotify online.

Which suddenly made me think of LPs (remember them?) and how you had to change the record over, half way through. This probably won’t make any sense to my younger readers, but I still feel myself about to stand up and cross the room to turn the record over after certain songs from albums which I now have on CD. Unfortunately, I left all my LPs back in Brighton, thinking I would collect them from the old house one day, and never did and our friends, to whom we sold the property, later sold it on, and oops, there goes my collection. There was nothing valuable in it though, apart from a rare copy of Victor Victoria on vinyl; apparently only so many were made and then they were withdrawn. I bought mine from Dress Circle in London for a small fortune in those days. But hey ho! There, it’s gone and I have no idea why I am rambling on about this now or here.

So, back to the week ahead. I hope you put your clocks forward on Saturday night/Sunday morning – put them forward to the front of the shelf I mean, so you can see them better. I forgot all about that and had that thing on Sunday morning where I wasn’t sure if the computer was making things up, or if the kitchen clock had stopped. Ah well, off into Monday we go.

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It’s Saturday, and so here is a small collection of photos for you. I took these while out on a walk on Thursday in the valley. There are several more, and I will put those ones up over time. Yesterday was Independence Day in Greece, a bank holiday, and that came after the name day of Evangalismos where lanterns are lit around the harbour and up the slope towards the church at Harani; it all looked very pretty from up here on the hill. I only had my underwater camera to hand and so the image here is pretty ‘skata’ but you can make out the lanterns along the quayside and up the slope towards the church, and also around the clock tower in Yialos.

Friday, for me, started with a wonderful attack of vertigo which had me bouncing around the house from wall to wall, holding on to whatever was to hand when needed, and basically putting paid to any thoughts I had of getting anything constructive done for a while. But still, here are some images of flowers and things seen on my walk. I am no plant expert and so cannot give you the names of what I saw, but hopefully you will get some idea of the kinds of wildlife we have here on Symi at this time of year. For more information and a reliable guide, you need to consult the experts, and I once again direct you to the useful blog and catalogue that you can find on Symi Flora and Fauna here.

Enjoy the wildlife photos (click one and a viewing box should open so you can click through them all one at a time) and have a good weekend:

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