Mythos and taxis

Tuesday night: We met up with a friend for dinner in Yialos and decided to try the new Mythos restaurant. This is now on the north side of the harbour, beside Manos’ fish taverna, Stavros is the chef, and there is a good choice on the menu. The boards outside list traditional Greek food, but the classic Mythos menu is also available. Stavros came to greet us, as he does with his guests and told us what he had prepared that day from the Mythos menu. Customers are also able to choose from a printed menu. With the weather suddenly warming up, it was possible to sit at the front tables overlooking the harbour without being cold. The restaurant has kept the design and fittings from before and looks stunning.

The staff are also efficient and friendly, the prices are very reasonable considering the standard of cooking, they make their own bread; you can see it being made. It’s also possible to look into the kitchen, so it’s all very open and ambient. As for the food… Well, there’s a reason we like to go to Mythos. I’m not saying we pigged out, but we did a bit. Garlic pitta, a tuna salad and chilli feta from the oven got us off to a good start, and it came with homemade bread. Neil and I went for our favourite, the chicken breast in blue cheese sauce, and our friend had a pork dish, all were rather wonderful as you would expect. After, full and delighted, we were presented with three desserts and a shot of tsipouro (think raki) on the house, and later, a very reasonable bill.

Being full and lazy, we asked our waiter to phone us a taxi which arrived a few minutes later. Now then, visitors often grumble about not being able to find a taxi in the late evening hours or the early mornings, if you like. Well, we have some new, young taxi drivers. I mentioned one of the guys here the other day. Yiannis picked us up from the restaurant and took us to the village. On the way, he told us that he and his brother (possibly cousin, either way, the same surname) were planning to run a late night service. Kind of: let the older guys drive during the day and the younger guys will take over for the late evenings and early mornings. He said he would still be running at two or three o’clock, but that, in my opinion, might depend on the time of year. The point being, these young entrepreneurs have listened to what people want and are now offering to be around when most needed – most needed by stay-out-laters who don’t want to risk the steps after dark or after one too many free tsipouro. He gave us his card so you can make a note of his number: +30 697 462 3492 – Yiannis and George Petridis. I’ve not yet got the details of the other drivers.

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Sleepless drainage

I had one of those nights last night. Bed at just after nine and off to sleep. Woke at 22.50 thinking it was time to get up. It wasn’t. Same happened at 00.10. Rinse and repeat at 01.34, 01.50 and then at 02.12 and finally gave up on the idea at 02.30, wide awake and looking forward to getting some work done. Peaceful and quiet down below in Yialos, apart from one idiot who thinks it’s macho to remove his/her baffles and roar his 50 cc motorbike in the early hours. Didn’t disturb me as I was awake but glad I wasn’t trying to sleep nearby. Next thing I know it’s dawn and time for lunch. I think a siesta will be in order later as we are dining out tonight. I may be asleep in my kolokithokeftethes otherwise.

While in Yialos tonight, I need to organise some boat tickets. I am off to Rhodes for Saturday and Sunday so there may be no blog next Monday, and then the following Friday, I am off to Tilos for a week, so may take a break then too – from the blog I mean. I am there to write so will probably be working longer hours as there will be fewer disturbances. So, if I ‘go dark’ you will know why. Or, if I am off-and-on for the rest of this month, you will know why.

If you have been following our water issues, you’ll be delighted to know that there was another plumbing emergency on Monday afternoon. This one wasn’t draining the water from our limited tank, so we weren’t directly affected, but water was trickling through a wall downstairs in the unoccupied flat. The strange thing is, on the other side is the ground beneath the road. The soil pipes from our place travel along the kitchen ceiling down there, and there are other large pipes that seem to come and go from nowhere (it’s rather Steampunk), and we, that’s me, the landlord and his plumber, were baffled for a while. I think it might be a large pipe from the landlord’s house opposite that travels beneath the road to meet up with this house’s drainage, but it didn’t smell nasty, and nothing upstairs was being flushed, drained or run, so it’s still a mystery. Another plumber came at seven in the evening, and after a while, everything went quiet down there, so I assume it was, in the end, an easy fix. And now, twelve hours later, I think I might go back to bed.

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Symi books and novels

Today, a few photos showing recent action in the village square. Well, when I say action, I mean… You know, daily life. The bars starting to busy up as summer gets underway, Symi and our mayor on the TV on Sunday night, someone taking their young garlic for a walk in the pushchair… You know how it is.

Let’s have a plug. If this is all new to you and you want to know more about Symi and what it’s like to live here, may I suggest starting with ‘Symi 85600’, my account of moving here and our first five years on the island. More details of that time can be found in ‘Symi, Stuff & Nonsense’ and the other two books about living on the island fit in between. Start with ‘Symi 85600’ move on to ‘Carry on up the Kali Strata’, then to ‘Village View’ (which takes you through a complete year, 2013), and then come up to date with ‘Symi, Stuff & Nonsense.’ I expect most of my regular readers have already seen these books, but if you haven’t, you’ll find quirky tales, thoughts, observations and perhaps even something worth knowing.

The link at the end of this chat takes you to my author page at Amazon where you can find all the novels and books. I was asked on Sunday if any of the novels are Symi-set. ‘Jason and the Sargonauts’ is set on Symi in World War II and ‘present day’ (which was a few years ago now), and as far as possible, the wartime flashbacks are historically accurate with some licence, so don’t use it as a basis for your thesis. ‘The Judas Inheritance’ is also set on Symi although it’s not named and the story (a horror) has nothing to do with the island, that’s just a metaphor for Greece in the days of the economic disaster of a few years back.

Here’s the link to Amazon.com, but you can find the author page and books in all countries. click: James Collins Symi books and novels.

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Easy like Sunday morning

Easy, because it’s Sunday morning and I have a day to do what I want. That’s once I’ve done this, so I don’t have to do it on Monday, leaving me time to do Tuesday’s, and so it rolls on until Saturday when I don’t have to prepare a blog for Sunday. And today’s doing what I want, I hope, will include finishing off the first draft of a book and painting a plastic horror model kit, as you do. The book, a pen name one, is 90k words and I’ve ‘done’ the first three drafts and some editing. Now, I have a long list of things to check and alter, and that means search and find, find and replace and read again. I want to send that off to the printer next week. The printer, btw, being Peter who gives me an A4 printout of each MS so I can read it (again) on paper and mark up the MS for final edits before sending the digital file to the proofreader, and so that process goes around like the writing of this blog only longer.

The model kit was a birthday present from Neil. I used to make the glow-in-the-dark versions of these when they were available in the 70s. They are classic characters from Universal horror films, and at one point I had them all, and most of the Aurora prehistoric animals collection too, which didn’t glow in the dark. I have Dracula waiting to be made (it’s a remake from the original mould/design but not a glower), but I also have four or five others in my cabinet unmade. Two of them are the original deal and still in their boxes, so they will never be made, the others are remakes so not as valuable but still collectable. I was waiting for the paints to arrive from Germany, which they now have, as there’s no local craft shop that I know of that sells them. I am sure it’s going to look terrible when I have finished and, having just remembered that I don’t have any thinners and it’s a Sunday, I may not be able to start until Monday anyway.

Meanwhile… Back on Symi. Saturday, I had an appointment in Yialos for some paperwork which gave me a rare opportunity to be down there as the sun was going down and see the hillside and houses changing colour to that golden yellow as the fading sun hits them. While I was there, a Blue Star ferry came in, and I immediately thought it was Friday, which confused me for a while. Then, a few hours later on Sunday morning, another one arrived. I’ve not looked at that timetable for a while, but clearly, we have more Blue Star ferries than we know what to do with – not knocking it, it’s a great service and the more boats, the better. I also watched the Sebeco heading off to Rhodes, another handy service, delivered by ANES this time. Anyway, that was a brief explanation of my Sunday and today’s photos. Now, I am going to do my editing and then paint Dracula’s face (which isn’t a euphemism), as long as I can clean my brushes with washing up liquid, or find some old turps under the laundry sink. I know I had some somewhere once upon a time.

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And your Sunday bonus, the last of my photos from Wednesday, before, during and after the parade in Yialos.

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