A Bit of Bothersome Blather

(And some photos today taken recently.)
Wednesday brought with it a strange dream. For some reason, I woke just before six and, blundering about the house, saw the Blue Star leaving Yialos. Perhaps I’d been woken by its arrival. Not quite ready for the day ahead, I thought I’d sit for a minute… And woke up an hour later after a dream in which all the children of the island were being taken away on a ship. Very odd, but no doubt inspired by the Blue Star I’d seen in my half-awake state. Anyway, I got on with Wednesday which started cooler and with that cloud cover again, but with the thermometer in the garden reading 20 degrees by ten.

I’ve also been watching the day boats coming in and out, and each time they arrive, they seem to be bringing more visitors with them. That can only be a good thing. It feels like we’re in that lull between Easter and the start of the season, and I suppose we are, seeing as how Easter was several days ago now. We have already had visitors coming, staying for a holiday and leaving, but have not yet seen the numbers that we expect to see in the summer, and that’s probably because it’s not quite summer season yet. I’m just blathering on here.

Now there’s a thing. Where does the word Blather come from? I know it as a Scottish word, or rather, being more used in Scotland. I just went and had a look and, no surprise, it is. It comes from the Old Norse word, blathra, meaning ‘talk nonsense’ which is based on the Old Norse word blathr, meaning ‘nonsense.’ So, how about getting yourself a copy of ‘Symi, Stuff & Blathr’? (That link leads to the real book, Symi, Stuff & Nonsense.) The word came from Old Norse to Scottish and Northern English via the Vikings, I imagine. As a bonus, you also have this from an etymology site:

1520s, blether, Scottish, probably from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse blaðra “mutter, wag the tongue,” perhaps of imitative origin, or from Proto-Germanic *blodram “something inflated” (the source of bladder). Related: Blathered; blathering. https://www.etymonline.com/word/blather

On which note, I need to go before I bother you with my bothersome blather.

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Spring Springing, Swallows Swallowing

I was sitting at my desk the other day when I looked out of the window and thought, ‘What’s that?’ Then I realised. A little later, I was in the courtyard, and I saw the same thing overhead; a massive flock of swallows. Where had they come from? Well, I guess they are migrating, and we get them here every year about this time, but I’d never seen so many turn up on one day. A few minutes later and they were gone, leaving only the usual few. Then I realised what was going on. The flying ants (or whatever they are) had hatched, and the swallows were up there living up to their name and swallowing them all. We were invaded by little lack bugs for a while, they dropped their wings and crawled off, or were eaten, and then that, too, was over.

That used to happen at the old house where we had a couple of families of them living in the roof. One or two days a year, in April, I would have to leave the saloni where I worked and keep the doors and windows open while the things descended from the ceiling and took over the room. An hour later and they were gone, leaving behind a covering of tiny wings. So, the dots you see in these photos are actually swallows (or martins) on their way to somewhere, stopping off for lunch on or above Symi. There are still some around mixing with our usual neighbours, the sparrows, pigeons, a few seagulls, some ravens from time to time and, again at this time of year, a few hawks.

Monday’s breeze blew into a wind in the evening but calmed during Tuesday morning to once again leave us warm and calm. The sun came out and the sky, although not yet the painted blue of summer, was reasonably cloudless though a bit pale. Spring flowers are out still, even the weeds are attractive at this time of year and our courtyard plants, such as they are, are coming along. The chilli is growing, and now I’ve separated some other plants and thinned them out a bit, they are also doing well, and the vine is growing at the rate of about two inches per day. Spring is still springing here on Symi.

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Meanwhile, On Symi…

Okay, so we’re back to the more usual blog for now. What’s been going on here while we’ve been looking at holiday snaps? Well, the temperature last week reached 28 degrees in our courtyard in the shade, but Monday was slightly cooler, with a breeze and some thin cloud. It’s all still wonderfully spring-like and flowering, warm enough for no jackets, and my legs have had an outing. The startling news there is that my last year’s shorts still fit me. If anything, they were slightly loose. I did drop a belt hole while on holiday, that is, take an inch off the waist, but that was soon back on once we returned.

One of the great dilemmas of Symi living in the summer is to bar or not to bar, that is the question. For my part, I tend to work from early in the morning up until lunchtime, taking a brief walk when I can, or slipping out for an hour for shopping or necessities in Yialos. Then I have an hour off for lunch and then work again usually until half four or five, sometimes I sneak away from the boss (me) at four and say, ‘That’s enough for one day.’ Trouble is, when you know there’s the bar, and Neil is working there, and that’s where our friends gather, and you’re not there, you might be missing out on something, but you really should stay home and avoid temptation… Well, you can get the picture.

I don’t go every day, though it must seem like it to people who pass and see us sitting in the same seats nearly every time. And all that has nothing to do with what’s been going on recently, except that with returning friends offering dinners and drinks and a soiree, it’s hard to say no, especially when you’ve not seen them for months. Meanwhile, other things have been going on. A quick visit to Yialos on Friday to fetch the rent money showed me the Poseidon coming into its morning place for the summer, just about every business open or putting the finishing touches, the day boats (Sea Dreams and The Panagia, plus the Spanos) unloading day-trippers, and more of the tavernas set up ready to welcome guests. It also offered us a drink at Pacho’s, a quick lunch at Meraklis, a taxi home… All the usual summer temptations that are irresistible. They also included an afternoon with people we’d not seen for a while, and before you know it, whoops, there goes the rest of the day.

You, of course, can do all this while on holiday here without the need to stop for work or get involved in any of that kind of thing. Basically, life is the same here now as it was last year, and it’s warming up after the winter and Symi is preparing for another season of sun, sea and siesta. And so am I.

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From Athens to Symi

To ease us back into Symi-mode, here’s the (rather long) story of arriving back to Symi from Athens on the Blue Star ferry, the Patmos.

Athens airport to Piraeus

There are various ways to do this, taxi, train or bus. On our return journey, we took the bus. The Patmos left Piraeus at 3pm, giving us plenty of time to travel across and around the city to the port and, as we were staying at the airport Sofitel, it was easy. The bus stop is outside arrivals on the right (as you come out of the terminal). There’s a booth for tickets and info and the times are up on the electronic boards. We took the 12.15 bus (they were running every half-hour at quarter past and quarter two), and the cost was €6.00 each. The bus takes you down to the coast and along, and the journey took one hour and 45 minutes. It may be quicker at other times of the day and when there are no roadworks causing delays. The roadworks, by the way, had encountered what is a common problem in Greece: start your preparations and before you know it, you’ve hit an ancient monument no-one knew you had, and everything has to slow to a stop while that’s taken care of. So, we saw plenty of buried ruins on our way.

The other neat thing about the bus is that it stops at the correct pier for the Symi ferries. What’s more, it’s the last stop on the route so you can’t miss it. Another electronic board on the bus tells you where you are during the journey. We exchanged our pre-booked tickets at the office, had a leisurely chat with the lady there about Symi and then waddled across the concrete to the boat. You can board about two hours before departure, and there was plenty of time to find our cabin and organise ourselves in it.

Aboard the Blue Star Patmos

There are various kinds of cabins, but we had gone for the cheapest, a two-birth (bunk beds), internal, and the combined cost for us two was €170.00 for the 16.5-hour journey. Now then, had we gone by plane, the cost would have been about the same if not more. Plane tickets (€60.00 each including the tax and luggage etc.), transfer to a hotel in Rhodes (minimum €2.50 each, or a taxi for €25.00), an overnight there, (€25.00 to €90 depending on where you stay) and the boat across to Symi (€16.50 each) – I’m educated guessing at those prices and adding them up at the lowest price, you get to €183.00 – so that’s the money side of things taken care of. What about the boat?

We picked up our door key-cards at reception on the boat and trundled off up a level and along a corridor to the bows. Cabins are numbered by the deck they are on and then a room number, so we were 7220 – deck 7 room 220. There are a lot of cabins. The cabin was small, as you’d expect but it had what we needed. Two beds, a wardrobe, a small desk with phone, mirror, ladder for the upper bunk (once we worked out how to lower it; there’s a button you push), life jackets and a surprisingly roomy shower/bathroom. We did have to negotiate each other a bit and give advanced warning of leaving the bathroom so we didn’t hit the other in the face with the door. The luggage lid under the bunk, giving us more room, and Paddington, having claimed top bunk, was later relegated to the desk for the night, so we had more room.

Cabin sorted, we went to watch the ferry load from one of the stern decks. There are a couple of these, plenty of outside space and a bar. The boat left late due to the amount of loading going on, and we spent an entertaining two hours watching it all. We were in no hurry but, as it turned out, the boat made up the time, and we arrived on Symi on schedule. Well, it is all downhill. A very nice young chap from Rhodes offered to take our photo together, which you can see here among the many others, and it turns out his girlfriend is from Symi, but he was going straight on to Rhodes.

After some sunbathing as we left the mainland, we headed inside for a cup of coffee and investigated the a la carte dining room. No need to book, even though the boat was busy, and I mean, very busy. This was the Thursday sailing before the start of Great Week, and there were many young soldiers and some families aboard travelling, I assume back to their islands for Easter. Here’s a tip. If you don’t have a cabin and are doing an overnight (as you must from Athens to Symi) then grab your floor/deck/seat space early. There are aircraft seats upstairs, plenty of sofas and corners to crash out in later, but I’d recommend the cabins.

We treated ourselves to dinner in the a la carte later that evening; I’d always wanted to try it. The menu isn’t huge, of course, but it was good. The salads are massive, and the prices are no more than you would expect to pay in a classy taverna. Two starters, two mains, water, bread and a bottle of wine came to around €35.00 each, which is way more than we usually pay to eat out, but then we tend to eat at the cheaperies rather than the gastro eateries. We felt very First Class, all dressed up and using real linen napkins. Afterwards, we headed back outside for a post-dinner glass of wine and, without being funny about it, it was like that sequence in Titanic where Jack has dinner in 1^st Class and then takes Rose to a real party in steerage. Some of the army boys struck up music on what looked like a dead goat, and we were treated to an hour or more of traditional Kalymnian folk music and singing.

Actually, the dead goat bagpipe is a dead goat bagpipe. “The Gaida is a bagpipe from the Balkans and Southeast Europe. Southeastern European bagpipes known as gaida include: Bulgarian and Macedonian гайда/гајда (gayda), the Greek γκάιντα, Albanian, Croatian and Serbian gajde and Slovak gajdy.”

Overnight

Sleeping was not as difficult as I thought it would be, not after dinner, dancing and wine, but it did take some getting used to. We had set every alarm we had to make sure we didn’t sleep through our Symi arrival at 7.30 the next day and bunked down at around 11pm. I missed Kalymnos, slept right through it, so wasn’t up to wave farewell to the dead-goat boys, but I did get woken by Kos. It’s not so much the noise, as you become immune to the churn of the engines (which you can only hear when the boat is manoeuvring, not while it’s sailing), it was more the vibration and, when the ship turned, the gentle glide to one end of the bunk. There were also the announcements. I think there’s a way of turning these off, so you don’t get them in your cabin, but I never sussed it out. When we vibrated into Tilos, I was ready to get up and face the day, and I wanted to wave at Tilos as I’ve been there a couple of times.

More passengers got on, and, it seemed, only a few had left at Kalymnos and Kos, and I recognised one of them, making me feel incredibly multi-islander. The only other people we’d met on the boat that we knew were our Mayor, Lefteris, and his family. We bumped into him within an hour of boarding, and it was very kind of him to come all that way just to escort us home.

Which is where, after 16.5 hours and this long rambling blog, we arrived dead on time on the Friday morning. There was no need for the alarm clock. Reception calls you on your cabin phone about half an hour before you’re due to arrive at your destination; very organised.

So, we are home (we’ve been home for over two weeks now), and from tomorrow, the blogs will be back to their usual few lines when I don’t know what to talk about, or longer posts when I think I do, and there will be Symi photos, of course.

 

 

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Final Split Photos

I could go on all month about our wonderful holiday to Croatia, but I know you’re keen to get back to my day-to-day Symi news. So, today, I will just mention a few more highlights and then put up a selection of photos for you to browse over the weekend. Then, come Monday, we should be back to Symi news – as I see it. I must get out and about with the camera, as all my recent photos have been shots from the window. But that’s for Monday…

I promised to tell you the ‘gravedigger’ story, so here it is in a nutshell. We called into an off-license a couple of times and, as with everywhere, found the two staff there young, helpful and friendly. As we didn’t have a corkscrew at our hotel (and didn’t like to disturb the receptionist for one because we are British), we asked the young chap in the wine shop to open the bottle, which he did. On our third visit, he was busy in the back room, and the young lady served us. We asked her if she could open it for us, but she only had one of those ‘impossible to use unless you are a wine waiter’ things that I’ve never got the hang of. Neither could she, so she called to her colleague in the stockroom. You don’t need to understand Croat or any language to get a gist in a situation like this, so when she called, ‘Hej, Grobber, dođite i otvorite ovu bocu!’* we knew what she was saying. Neil, picking up on his name, and because we had all bonded over the days, added jokily, ‘Ella, Grobber! Give us a hand,’ or something.

The poor girl behind the counter practically fell into her Merlot rack and had to grip the counter she was laughing so much. We were slightly mystified but instantly knew we’d said something wrong. The young chap appeared from the stock room and wondered what the laughter was about. She repeated what Neil had said, and we had two hysterical assistants on our hands. When the laughter calmed, we were able to learn that ‘Grobber’ (as we heard it) is a colloquial word used much in the same way as ‘malaka’ in Greek. Fine with your mates, ‘Hello me old *ucker!’ But not so good with people you don’t know, ‘Hey, *ucker, come and open this bottle,’ was fine for her, but they weren’t expecting Neil to use the word so fluently. No-one was offended, we all had a good laugh, and the word ‘Grobber’ has entered our vocabulary. Apparently, it means ‘gravedigger’ or something that comes from the root ‘Grob’, the Croat word for grave.

Our holiday continued with several more treats: a walk up Marjan Hill, a day out for my birthday to the Krka National Park (waterfalls and lakes), a visit to Trogir, walks in the sun, many a good meal, a private guided tour of some Game Of Thrones locations in Split, and generally enjoying the town and doing as little as possible. There was a surprise on my birthday. The hotel, having noted my date of birth when I checked in, and realising it was a special day, made me a surprise birthday cake for breakfast, complete with firework candle. Now, how special was that? I know a few places around here that could do with upping their customer care in this kind of subtle but meaningful way. (And I know several that already do.)

The journey back was an interesting one. Lazy morning, smart taxi to the airport, easy check-in… All a bit overshadowed by the 45 minutes we had to change planes in Munich. The transfer had started off as one hour when I booked, plenty of time as it was all with Lufthansa. Over time, the flight times changed slightly, and we were down to 45 minutes. Still just enough time. Then the plane from Split was 20 minutes late taking off – giving us 20 minutes. ‘Should be long enough, it’s a connecting flight, the planes won’t be far from each other…’ We landed as our next flight was boarding over at terminal K 33, or somewhere we hoped was close. ‘Where’s Gate K 33, please?’ ‘Down there, right to the end, downstairs, get on the train, across the other side, up and right down to the end…’ We were running before he’d finished his description. Along, left, down, onto a train, off a train, up, along and we arrived at our gate two minutes before it was due to close, only to find it was delayed by thirty minutes. Good exercise though.

We made it back to Athens, spent another night in the airport hotel and then, the next day, took the bus to Piraeus. Now that’s a journey you might want to know about – how to get from Athens airport to the Blue Star Patmos and on to Symi, but I will save that for next week. I’ve gone on long enough now, and all that remains is to thank everyone who gave us the gift of a honeymoon and to leave you with some random images from the 900 we took while we are away. Back on Monday with, I hope, blogs about Symi!

*(Btw, for those of you who read Croat, that translation was from Google so may only be 0.5% accurate.)

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