Greek driving license and a curry

UPDATE: Due to bad weather, the open meeting with the Consulate on Rhodes Wednesday, has been changed to Friday. 09.30 to 11.00, at the Chamber of Commerce, Rhodes. Everyone welcome.

Having arrived in Rhodes, we walked from Akandia harbour around the seafront to the Plaza where we took advantage of their €40.00 per night for a double room offer. It was a good job we had booked as, come Saturday night, the hotel was full. They were catering for a tourism convention, the breakfast room was full in the later morning, and it was more like summer than winter regarding numbers of guests.

I had to sort some paperwork for my Greek driving licence, and my solicitor came to visit us at the hotel, signed a couple of documents and brought the translation she had done for me, total cost €50.00 and it took about ten minutes, most of the time spent in a general catch up chat. After that, it was a day for shopping and looking in the various clothes shops where, unless you are slim-fit or skinny-fit, you don’t stand much of a chance finding suitable trousers, at least, not if you’re a man. Our son calls this design ‘leg condoms’ and I, for one, am looking forward to the day regular fit trousers come back into style. I think the polite term, used at Zara’s among other places, is ‘relaxed fit.’ Why not just call them jeans for normal people and have done with it? You see some horrific style errors as even a normal, non-skinny youth can look like a potato on sticks wearing this allegedly stylish fashion. Mind you, these days, the young men of Rhodes, and elsewhere no doubt, all look the same with skinny jeans, hipster hair and beards.

So, fashioned bemoaned and a couple of shirts later (also hard to find ones that are not slim fit), a quick lunch and a walk, and it was back to the hotel for a siesta. That didn’t work out as planned and ended up being an afternoon chat in the bar with various Symi folk over for the day or weekend. We went to the Basmati curry house in the evening. This one has been open a few months now, and I’d never noticed it before. It’s Pakistani rather than Indian, but more or less the same thing except what we had was hot with a capital H and several exclamation marks. I enjoyed it, but Neil found it too spicy, and he’s usually the one who likes his curry hot. I took a couple of photos but hey make the place look empty; it wasn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with the weekend catch-up, but I’ll warn you now, it’s more of the same.

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Symi to Rhodes

Back from Rhodes. Lots done, lots to do and not much time to do them this morning, so not much text here but a few photos. Let’s start with the journey there. On a Friday, the boat comes in at 7.30 and leaves at 7.45, so not too much of an early start. The weekend was probably the first good weather for weeks, no rain, not windy and so the boat was busy with foot passengers and cars. We walked down from the village and along the side of the harbour to the new jetty, queued to pick up our tickets, by which time the boat was in, so walked straight on and went to sit outside on the top deck for the views. The Blue Star Patmos has six cafes that I can think of, plus a restaurant and a self-service which are open at various times. A coffee and a bottle of water saw us across a calm sea, and before you know it, you’re there. More on this trip tomorrow, but for now, I need to catch up on admin and emails and other bits and pieces I didn’t get around to yesterday while I get back into the usual routine following the short holiday.

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Here’s the poster advertising a meeting by British Consulate staff to be held in Rhodes on Wednesday. The team are also planning a visit to Symi in either March or May; what month would be best?

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Happy Month, Kalo Mina!

Kalo mina being the traditional Greek greeting on the first day of a month. I am, hopefully, greeting you from a boat in the Aegean right now, as we’re off to Rhodes on Friday to do some bits and pieces. We’ll have a couple of days holiday and do very little apart from hang out at the Plaza hotel, wander around Rhodes, maybe walk out to Jumbo if the weather’s good and have a mooch, try the new Thai restaurant near the Casino if it’s open, or the Indian restaurant, Saffron, read, see people and so on. The forecast is currently for good weather which makes a change after the past few weeks. The photos today are of the hail that landed on Wednesday. As you can guess, we didn’t leave the house all day.

The other photo is a plot chart for the story I am working on. I wouldn’t look too closely, even I can’t read half of it. The boxed text parts are the main progressions per ‘act’, there are three main lines, two more connected than the first, the main action plot, and the red is another subplot dealing with the main character’s through line and reason for his change in character etc. Thanks to my new work station, I can have this on the wall opposite me as I write, hopefully keeping me in line when the characters take over and wander off into their own stories. You see, writing Mills & Boon for boys is not as straightforward as it appears.

So, as we are away in Rhodes, there will be no Saturday Symi Photos post tomorrow, but all should be back to normal on Monday as long as we’re able to get the boat back on Sunday morning. Hopefully, I will have some outdoor photos for you, probably of Rhodes and our trip, but it will make a change from rain and wind, hail and grey skies. Maybe.

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From Rain to Victorian London

There wasn’t much building work going on anywhere yesterday morning. I woke up to a thunderstorm and heavy rain as another storm passed over. I have no idea what pointless name this one was given, Storm Whatever, I reckon as we’re so used to them now. The hills are going to be as green as a snooker table before long when the herbs and wild plants start to grow back. I reckon that at the moment they are battered down under the rainfall, hiding away and saying, ‘Bro, I’m not going out in this.’

I was meant to nip to Yialos to buy some boat tickets but gave up on that idea. Instead, I’ll buy them online and pick them up either on the way to the boat or tomorrow (Thursday as I write). The joys of online shopping and I can even use our Sea Smiles card for the discount and offers.

The weather aside, I’m working on a book set in Victorian London and finding out all kinds of things I didn’t know. The most interesting thing for me is that there are so many details to check. I want the story to be realistic so, for a start, I have to watch the language and not have characters say things which are out of the period. ‘Yeah, man, whatever,’ for example is a pretty obvious one, not that I’ve used it. But when I want to describe someone taking a cab across town, as another example, I’m then having to look up what kind of cab is appropriate to 1888, a Hansom or a something else. Even the style of clothing comes with many features and words alien to me, and although research is fun and informative, I’d really like one book to have on the desk with sections showing examples of, say, décor or drawers, costume or cutlery so I can be accurate and detailed. A kind of Mrs Beaton that covers the upstairs-downstairs world, the wider world and the language. I’ve ordered a book of Victorian slang and dialect from Forgotten Books – similar to the Kentish dialect one I use for the Saddling series – but if anyone knows of a good ‘guide to Victorian Britain’ that I might be able to order, feel free to let me know.

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