Yes indeedy, today's blog entry has its very own title! The past few days have thrown up a few examples of the sort of pinhead you often have to deal with in Greece, and what's worse that these people have actually got a position which, to their tiny minds, allows them to live some sort of power-trip. I suppose this probably happens all around the world, but when you run up against these tinpot despots you have to wonder what sort of a country it is that allows them to reach their positions.

On the outskirts of Kilkis there is an MOT testing centre behind which leads a dirt track to what used to be an army firing range, close by the town's landfill site. There you will find some concrete bunker buildings, surrounded by rusting wire fencing (picture to follow). This is Kilkis Council's laughable excuse for a dog pound. Along with most Greek towns, Kilkis has a problem with stray dogs. Or rather, for it is best to be honest about this, along with most Greek towns, Kilkis has a problem with people who throw their dogs out into the street when they no longer want to look after them. I have always considered friendliness towards animals to be a keystone of culture (not whether some of your ancestors knocked out a few statues and stuck some stone columns up two thousand years back), and this is one area where the Greeks are absolutely disgraceful. Not only do dogs get thrown out of the once loving home, but they are then subjected to the sort of deranged subhuman who goes about leaving meat with poison on it in the street, to utterly callous drivers who quite happily drive off after hitting a dog or cat, leaving it writhing in agony in the street, and to a Town Council which thinks that locking stray dogs up in a mangy flea-ridden compound and letting them rot there and die in despondency is a feasible solution to the problem.

Kilkis Town Council receives from the Agricultural Development Ministry funds to look after strays, neuter them, inoculate them and feed them. If those in power could see how that money is being spent, they would scream the house down.

Christina is the chairwoman of the Kilkis Animal Friendly Society, which has for many a year been fighting the Council's half-witted policies on stray animals in town. In theory, a Council-employed member of staff should be looking after the dogs at the "pound" (for want of a better word), but of course that is too much to hope for from the Council, despite the money they get. So on Monday we received a call from a chap who goes along to the "pound" out of his love for animals and gives them food and water. Were it not for him, the dogs would be dead or eating each other. He called to say his car had broken down on the way and that he couldn't get out to the "pound". Christina then tried to get the problem sorted out, firstly by calling the deputy mayor of Kilkis. His reply to her phone call? An offensive "Go away, I am talking to the media" and then he hung up. Congratulations on top grades at Finishing School, I can see that you got into office on the charm ticket...! So then she called the mayor and told him about the problem, and suggested that the least the Council could do was to repair or pay for the repairs to this chap's car, considering that he was doing their job for them for nothing. The mayor, like some spoilt child, piped up "That's the chap who shouted at me in the street recently about the stray dog problem, so why should we repair his car?" And that is the sort of top brain that gets to be mayor in Greece, a William Brown character. It is a wonder he isn't still in short pants and sporting a snotty nose and catapult. So the dogs are probably still without food and water, three days into the coldest weather Greece has had for years. Just because a self-important public official who can't solve a simple problem holds petty grievances against those who point the fact out to him in front of others. If you can't do your job and sort the problem out, hang up your gold chain and let someone else who can do it take over, you dozy twonk...

Then today we finally got fed up of waiting for the plumbers that the landlady wanted to come and fix the problem in the bathroom, which is leaking down to the flat below. Since we were told about it on Sunday we have been unable to have a bath or put the washing machine on, for fear that it might flood water down to the flat below. We informed the landlady about it on Sunday, as soon as we were told of the problem, and she rang the Kilkis Plumbers' Union people to come and fix it, as she has dealt with them in the past. They said that they would come at the beginning of the week, if they were in Kilkis - they appear to be based in a village outside of Kilkis. It then snowed, and she was informed that they wouldn't be able to work if the weather is cold. One supposes they don't want to get chapped hands or a slight sniffle, or some such, the poor mites. Meanwhile, the chap downstairs is still getting water coming through, as it is impossible not to use the washbasin to shave in and so on. In the end, we called in a chap who we know does this sort of work and he came right round, when he said he would, and had a look at it and told us that it seemed that water is seeping from a pipe beneath the bath. He told us there were two ways to tackle this problem and we called the landlady to check what to do, as it is her property and she will be paying for it. She said she would call the Plumbers' Union people again to see what the heck they were playing at, which she did.

Next thing we know, we get a call from someone who barks down the phone: "President of the Kilkis Plumbers' Union here, you have a plumber there, put me onto him", which left Christina at a loss for words. It transpired that this upstart on the phone had asked our landlady for our number and wanted to know who the plumber was and why he was doing work, as he wasn't a member of the Union. What a humongous cheek!! If the lazy sods had come round when they said, instead of sitting at home by a cozy fire warming their toes, we wouldn't have been obliged to go to someone else who would actually bother to turn out and do some work. The good thing is, the Union plumbers have now said they will come round in the morning and el Presidente is coming with them, and Christina plans giving him a darned good piece of her mind. This should be quite entertaining, to put it mildly. And I will be mp3-recording it for posterity!! These twerps think they can stonk around like heavies ringing the unsuspecting public up threateningly demanding to know why you are employing a non-Union chap and yet when you actually want them to do any work they take days to turn up. This is the same bunch of goons who took a week to come when both toilets blocked shortly after we moved in back in July. Thankfully the bogs unblocked themselves about four days after they initially blocked, or else we would have gone down with cholera before the sodding Plumbers' Union berks turned up. When they did arrive to sort out a peripheral problem, they left the bathroom floor and separate lavatory room floor covered in muck. I bet they are proud to be part of that Union. If that is the way they work, they really have got a lot to worry about from independent plumbers, and especially from Russian immigrant plumbers who turn up and do the work when you want. And too bloody right too!!!

Sunday January 22nd, 2006

Last week was a usual working week, which meant that nothing much to report happened! There again, we did go out a couple of times, once on Tuesday, which was Christina's brother's nameday and he organised a party meal at Varelofrones, and then on Wednesday evening to Shitty Café for a beer.

At Antonis' nameday meal they all got started at nine-thirty in the evening but I couldn't get there till 10.45pm as I was working till half past ten as per usual. Midway through the meal an African student came in selling the trinkets and baubles they do. This is very common in Greece and it is almost impossible to have a meal without somebody sticking a Made in Taiwan doll/watch/pair of sunglasses under your nose and refusing to go away. This time around the African chap was trying to sell a different sort of tawdry rubbish - stuff bordering on the pornographic. One case in point was a seven-inch high plastic model of a fat bloke in a raincoat and dark glasses with a weird leer on his face. Click the switch under the base and the arms threw open the grubby raincoat to reveal a plastic willy flicking up and down underneath. Needless to say, this amused the Greeks no end and at least one of the things was sold. Pitiful! In the interests of decency, I won't be including a photo of the cheeky chappy in the blog, but below is the departing vendor, laughing all the way to the bank!

You wouldn't get this happening at the Savoy Grill...

These African students also waltz around cafés and restaurants selling pirated music CDs, mostly of Greek music. Now, it is my contention that any CD of Greek music should be made illegal for the common good, but the police occasionally pick up these students and prosecute them, events which get published in the newspapers in the hope of persuading the public that the police are actually doing their job. Given that the local newspaper publishes an arrest about once every two months and the fact that you get pestered by these pirated CD vendors during two meals out of five, one can only assume that the police wouldn't recognise a pirated CD if they were whacked repeatedly across the head with one...

On the way back home we passed another example of how hard Kilkis Council works to make sure we live in a pretty, sanitary town, one to be proud of. NOT!!! Picture below...

Are we living in the Middle Ages or what???

As you might guess, rats are a common sight in town...

On Wednesday evening it was off out for a beer at Shitty Café, the place where a pint of beer costs €6.50 (£4.42)... Almost invariably if you order a drink which should be drunk straight, for example port, you get a glass of port filled with ice cubes, and there can be nothing worse than watered down cold port. Hence the name, Shitty Café...

The other days last week were plain old working days, not much to report there.

At last the weekend arrived...! I had to work from nine on Saturday morning till four in the afternoon, while Christina made preparations for the evening social events - her mother and six of her mother's girlfriends were coming round for the evening. Christina whipped up some chicken and carrot pie, carrot cake, ham and cheese crepes and a soufflé, which actually rose quite nicely.

Mount Soufflé

So, all in all, Saturday was quite a long day, but the good thing was that Sunday morning would be a lie-in morning, as my usual Sunday morning lesson was to be no more. This is a good thing as I have long wanted to have Sundays entirely free to myself, and have usually found it impossible not to have lessons on Sunday morning. Now that that lesson is being reduced from twice to once a week, I can now free my Sundays up again and refuse to do Sunday lessons again! So, I was looking forward to a nice lie-in on Sunday and sure enough at twenty to ten there was somebody ringing at the front door. At first I thought I was dreaming and ignored it, but about twenty seconds later there was another more insistent ringing, so I had to get up and see who it was. It turned out to be the chap from the flat downstairs who had come to report that water was leaking down from our bathroom and could we let the owner know so as to send someone to repair the problem... Great. The only good thing about renting a place is that this sort of thing is just something you can pass on to the owner, who has to put it right and pay for it.

Christina went over to her mother's place to see her dog and then we met up again at Shitty Café at twenty past two with her brother for a drink. While we were there a group of girls dressed in a weird combination of green and orange, and blue and pink walked by, accompanied by a heavy. Yes, it was the peddlers of death, trolling from café to café promoting cigarettes and handing out free packets of lung cancer to people, accompanied by postcards showing the name of the particular brand of cigarettes and a silly question supposedly designed to make smoking attractive. Here are a few examples:

1) Question: What is the sound of the imagination? My answer: The death rattle.

2) Question: What is the smell of dancing? My answer: The stink of cigarette ash.

3) Question: What is the taste of red (the cigarette packets are red or blue)? My answer: The taste of tar.

Can I offer you a free packet of lung cancer?

Now, it strikes me that cigarette advertising in Europe is illegal, and this seems to put what these girls were doing on something of a rocky legal standing, doesn't it? Wandering around to where people congregate to enjoy some free time and handing out cigarettes and free postcards showing the name of the cigarette brand and, on one postcard, a stylised design of the packet of cigarettes with the Government warning cut away... The three of us pretended to be smokers so that the girl would give us a packet each when she came to our table. My intention was to crumple it in front of her and give her a piece of my mind, but I suppose she was only doing her job in the final analysis. At least we deprived the company of sixty of their lethal product. Christina in the end gave the packets to her mother to pass around her smoking friends. DUH!!! I won't say which company it is, but wherever their products are smoked there is always a pall of smoke, especially in the mall.

Caption reads: SMOKING CAN KILL

Later Christina had to go out for a couple of events to do with the Girl Guides, one of which involved listening to the local bishop rattling on. I think I have made my views on priests clear earlier on in this blog, so I really commiserated with her having to sit there listening to some bearded loony prattle on. After chatting to my parents, and earlier to my sister, on Skype (which, for the uninitiated, is Voice over Internet Protocol telephony), I set to firing up the barbecue - an easy process which involves plugging it into the mains supply - and cooking a beef steak, a beefburger and a couple of dodgy sausages I had found lurking in the freezer. Oh, and the essential chilli pepper, of course. Once that was all ready, I sat in the lounge eating it and watching a Carry On film on DVD, Carry On at Your Convenience, replete of course with toilet puns and references.

Cook, damn you, cook!

And so ended another week!

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Monday January 16th, 2006

Today I had to get the Michigan Proficiency examination entries paid for and sent off, so the first job was to write the accompanying letter on the computer and fill out the registration forms and scan them onto the computer for my records. Nowadays I scan almost every piece of paper that comes in or goes out concerning my work and lessons, and then chuck the paperwork I don't need. The idea is not to have loads of paper floating around, but to have it all in digitised form on the hard drive and on DVD backup. Good, eh?

Then it was off to the bank to deposit the monies for the two students who are taking the Michigan exam. Typically for Greece, enrolling students for exams almost invariably involves trudging along to banks to pay the money into an account, getting the bank receipt and then sending it off by post together with the registration slip. It would be unthinkable for the examination organising bodies, like Anatolia College and the British Council, to drag themselves into the 21st century and actually allow people to do this online with a credit card. Perish the thought!

While at the bank waiting in the queue, I noticed a gnome-like priest a couple of positions ahead of me who was having a good grumble because one of the women customers being served at one of the three counters operating was taking longer than the others. He was really having a moan, which seemed pretty uncharitable, given that the whole idea of being a priest should be that you show love and generosity unto thy fellow man (and woman). All this horrible little man was doing was embarrassing the poor woman who was trying to finish her transaction at the bank. Of course, it has been said the major reason why anyone would become a priest in Greece is that you only work on Sundays, get a cosy lifestyle, a nice car, the opportunity to prance around town in a silly hat and a skirt without getting arrested, and people will come up to you and kiss your hand in public and give you money for spouting twaddle in Church Greek. Also, you can say hello to anyone in the street and get a similar response rather than an annoyed "Bog off you old fart, I don't know you from Adam!" reply. I have often in the past been in a bank queue only to see a priest waltz to the front of the queue and push in - and the others in the queue actually look grateful that he has done so. If it were up to me, he'd have a well-aimed Doc Martin rammed firmly up his cassock.

A priest - does his bum look big in that?

After that it was back home to scan the bank receipts and then off to the post office to send the exam registrations off. Interestingly, at the post office there was a new sign stuck on the postbox to the effect that they now have some new high-falutin' service designed to make sure mail arrives at its destination in something approaching a reasonable time. According to the sign (picture below), if you post off your letter before 12 midday there is an 85% chance of it arriving the next day, and a 99% chance of it arriving within 3 days. This all seems a bit of a laugh given firstly that there is only one collection anyway in Kilkis, at 3pm, and secondly that I usually get my credit card statement, which has a date stamp on the envelope saying when it was handed over to the post office, anything up to two weeks after it started its journey from Athens (you could walk it in half the time), and much of the mail I get has been sent about eight or nine days before. The worst of the joke is that a stamp for a normal bogstandard-delivery letter within Greece is 45 eurocents, equivalent to 31 UK pence, and this new super-duper-fast service (ahem!) is 49 eurocents (33p) so it is hardly as if the diabolical service were a lot cheaper than in the UK, where first class post offers a faster service for 31p, with about 95% next day delivery, not a measly Greek 85%. On a final note on the subject, I once sent a letter express delivery to Athens which really needed to be there the next day, paying a few euros extra to be sure it did. Eight days later, it arrived. Congratulations to the Greek Post Office on another job well-botched!

Pull the other one, it's got knobs on!!

So then it was off home again, via the supermarket, and just enough time for a quick cheese and Branston pickle sarnie, and into lessons for nine hours, through till eleven p.m. Hey-ho!

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Sunday January 15th, 2006

After the morning lesson and hoofing out to set up a couple of computers and have a drink with Christina and her brother at City Café in town (known to me as Shitty Café, which is probably unfair as it is not too bad), there was another opportunity to get the barbecue fired up - well, connected to the mains - as Christina discovered a pack of wild boar sausages lurking in the fridge, and joy of joys!! a humongous green chilli pepper...!

Is that chilli pepper wriggling, or what...?!

So that was good - an opportunity to get out on the balcony again and enjoy one of my favourite activities - slaving over a hot sausage (oooeerr, missus!). Meanwhile Christina was busy making a meat and veg soup in the kitchen, so I gave her a few cooking tips about that and we transformed what was initially turning into a watery soup into a sumptuous winter soup with the judicious addition of some concentrated beef and vegetable stock, sliced garlic and puréed tomato. Christina had to go out to a Girl Guides' do, where they cut the vassilopita, a sort of New Year's Cake, and then they had a good nosh-up at Old Smiler's Place (yes, Varelofrones). After filling my face with wild boar sausage, I decided to have a kip and then read the book I am churning my way through at the moment, a longish novel by Christopher Paolini called Eragon. I am undecided about the book still, as it seems to owe too much to The Lord of the Rings, and I feel I can see too many elements which seem to be drawn from the storyline and/or names/characters in Tolkien's masterpiece. That said, wee Paolini was only fifteen when he rattled his novel off, so hat's off to him on that score. I will have to report in more detail on the book when I have got more than 60 pages into it.

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Saturday January 14th, 2006

Back into the weekend routine again now after the Yule/New Year break - I have lessons on a Saturday from nine in the morning through to four in the afternoon, but today, due to a cancellation, was a slightly shorter day, finishing at 2.30pm. I once vowed never to do weekend lessons again, a vow which lasted all of a year. Weekend lessons are so restricting if you want to do anything social, such as go on a weekend trip with the Mountaineering Club or even just go down to Thessaloniki for lunch as a couple (or anywhere else for that matter). I also have a Sunday morning lesson. But demand for work is such that I have to work weekends at the moment, and just try to make the most of what time is left in the afternoons. Today after lessons I set to doing a barbecue on the electric barbecue on the balcony, while listening to Top of the Pods on my iRiver, another great show from the lads, entitled "Top Ten Things That Come Out Of, Fall From, Or Grow In The Sky Or Trees". Click on it to have a listen and a good laugh! For over six months now my listening has switched almost completely from conventional radio, principally BBC Radio 7 and BBC Radio 4 (over the Net, of course), to podcasts, and I suspect the same is true for a lot of people. It will be very interesting to see where podcasting goes over the next couple of years, and clearly the big broadcasters have recognised the importance of the new medium, with many (including the BBC) offering podcast shows as well as the on-demand shows available on the Net, and of course their free-to-air programming. Greek free-to-air radio, I hardly need add, has never been up to much - a dire mix of wannabe crooners walloping out tired old bouzouki songs in voices gravelly from years of tobacco abuse and frumpy women pumping out trite lyrics about unrequited love, or empty-headed commercial pop of the Spice Girls variety, the lowest common denominator in the international world of music. I would rather saw my ears off with the edge of a sheet of A4 than listen to that twaddle.

Crack open another tinnie, Sheila...!

Yesterday Christina returned to Thessaloniki and got her ring back, perfectly repaired I am pleased to report, and got me a few more shirts...! I drove out to the station to collect her, in the hope of catching a photo of the decrepit old train she rattled back on, a pre-war style train apparently, but she (and it) arrived a few minutes before I got to the station - so much for the picture! Then it was into lessons... Last night after finishing work at 10.30pm, I nipped out to the Varelofrones taverna to catch the end of a nameday celebration for one of our friends, Ioanna, and had a glass of wine there - the only chap among eight women. Needless to say, I didn't get a word in edgewise! The Varelofrones taverna is a strange place - hugely popular because the food is good, but the owner is the sort of chap who constantly looks as if his whole family has just died in a car crash. I don't think I have ever seen him laugh, and a smile is a rare gift. On the occasions that we have been the last customers to leave in the evening, the sense of "Come on, leave, why don't you?" is so palpable you could cut it with a knife. If the food were not so good, the place would be empty, and that's not just my thoughts but what others say too.

Kilkis is bereft of good places to eat at, and the best of a bad bunch are on a residential street which local knucklehead kids use to do wheelies on their pathetic 50cc mopeds and clapped-out Endura-style motorbikes - the racket is unbelievable, as on both sides of the street there are five-storey apartment blocks all the way along, so the roar from the motorbikes just bounces back and forth between the two sides of the street... Nightmare...! The police, of course, are nowhere to be scene - useless bunch of twats to a man! So sitting outside in summer at these places is like trying to have a quiet meal in the middle of a motocross course. I read towards the end of 2005 in the local paper that the police were having a special clampdown on motorbike riders in town, and that they had managed in a week to charge fourteen motorbike riders with failure to wear a helmet. Anyone who has been to Greece will know that anyone standing on a street corner could count fourteen motorbikers without helmets within five minutes, so it is indicative of the sort of police they have here that it took the lazy oafs a week to catch fourteen helmet-less riders. Are they blind, or what?

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Thursday January 12th, 2006

A fairly nondescript day (sorry!) involving going out to get a couple of new ink cartridges for my printer and then going straight into lessons, from 2pm through till 10.30pm.

I read in the local paper that arrived today about the latest local scandal, which is that in a recent health check on conditions at Kilkis General Hospital the kitchens were not only found to be in an appalling state, with rusty equipment, but also to contain chickens which had gone bad yet were going to be cooked and served up to patients in the hospital. It doesn't surprise me, to be honest, but rather just reinforces my view of the sanitary conditions in Greek healthcare facilities, based on personal experience. When I was in Kilkis General Hospital suffering from mononucleosis (Eppstein-Barr's virus) back in August 1990, the toilet walls were absolutely caked in faeces. Nuff said.

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Tuesday January 10th, 2006

I needed, and had, a good lie-in this morning, before emerging to listen to the rest of the latest Top of the Pods podcast, which came through last night shortly after three in the morning and most of which I listened to then. It has been over a month since the lads in Peterborough did their last podcast, so it was good to hear their dulcet tones again and have a few good laughs at their banter and repartee!

I went out to the post office to get my car insurance paid - €408 (£277.55) for six months for comprehensive cover... At the moment I am hardly using the car at all - if we go to Thessaloniki we go by train, leaving the car at the station, which (hardly conveniently) is about three miles out of Kilkis, and I don't actually remember the last time I put any petrol in it, despite the fact that I keep a full written record of dates and amounts when I put petrol in. So the car is sitting under cover unused most of the time. I have had it three years and yet it has done less than 17,500 kilometres (10,875 miles).

After that I trundled along to the supermarket to pick up a few things and then went to LIDL to get some bottled mineral water, which is what I drink in lessons. There was a kitten sitting outside shivering in the 2°C air, so I also got a little foil container of cat food while in there and on coming out opened it for the kitten, which was immediately joined by a sibling and they wrestled each other over the food. Had I known there were two I would have bought a second container! There are so many stray animals around in Greece, and they get treated so appallingly by the Greeks, and if you actually help the animals the Greeks think you are some sort of oddball or that you are encouraging the stray animal situation. Christina is the Chairwoman of the Kilkis Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and some of the horrific stories she has to tell have to be heard to be believed. Stories of people leaving rat poison on pieces of chicken in the street, dogs and cats being abandoned in agony after being hit by passing cars, people abandoning animals miles from town in the misguided belief that a domesticated animal will suddenly just fend for itself, people putting their cigarettes out on sleeping dogs in the street... I have seen the state of the dog pound run by Kilkis Town Council, and it makes you ashamed to be human. Once last autumn someone from the Council itself even threw a little abandoned Pekinese in there amongst the larger dogs (alsatians etc), despite its own signs saying it is forbidden to do so, and the tiny dog was torn to shreds by the bigger dogs. This all deserves its own website, and one day it will get one.

Once back home I prepared for lessons and Christina tried to use my juicer to make mandarin juice, as she managed to burn out my electric orange squeezer about ten days back, so I showed her how to use it. Then, just before lessons started for me at half past two, she couldn't dismantle the juicer, so I took over and as I was removing the top, which was full of the remains of mandarins, it suddenly came free and showered my clothes with squeezed mandarin and juice... So an urgent change of clothes was required with barely more than a few minutes before the girl arrived for her lesson. Christina, of course, was helpless with laughter. Thanks a bunch hehe

Mucky pup!

Therefore it was nice to receive a text message from her about an hour and a half later to the effect that, at her language school, she had spilt her coffee all over her books. There is justice in this world after all!

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Monday January 9th, 2006

Christina went down to Thessaloniki this morning to change the shirt and to sort the problem with the ring out. The jeweller's said they would mend it, as they don't have any others of the same design, so let's hope they do mend it so that it looks perfect. She told them that they also hadn't given her a certificate of authenticity, which surprised the manageress (and me, in retrospect), and she will now have to go back on Friday to collect it. This is the problem with buying things in Thessaloniki, as if they do go wrong or need changing you have to waste at least half a day travelling back to sort if out. It is the sort of place where parking is a big problem, so you either have to park away from the centre and bus yourself in, or go by train and again use the bus. Anyway, let's hope the ring is like new on Friday...!

I spent the morning tidying up the office ready for lessons after making some changes to the layout in here, and also tidying the smaller Yuletide trinkets into a box, a job which has gone unfinished. As of two o'clock it was back into lessons after the break, and today was a nine-hour day, non-stop lessons, so it is in at the deep end again!

Incidentally, I saw the following on the BBC News website today and thought "Just what the bloke deserves!" It is a constant source of amazement to me how people can be so gratuitously cruel to animals...

A US man threw a mouse he had found in his home onto a pile of burning leaves - only to see it run away and burn his house down. Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, found a mouse in his home and wanted to get rid of it.

"I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house," he was quoted as saying by AP [Associated Press].

Though no-one was injured, the house and everything in it was destroyed. "I've seen numerous house fires, but nothing as unique as this one," Fire Department Captain Jim Lyssy said.

To my mind, it's just a pity the old fart didn't get burnt in the house fire so that he would have to experience what the poor mouse went through.

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Sunday January 8th, 2006

Last day before it is back to work for both of us! What with Christina's brother being away in Volos for a long weekend, Christina has had to go over to her mother's early each morning this weekend to let the dogs out for a piddle and romp around. On getting up I set to assembling a bedside cabinet we had bought from IKEA - we originally got one for Christina's side of the bed and it was in the same wood as the wardrobe in the bedroom, while mine was in white. This goes back a few years to when I was originally furnishing my first flat. I bought the wardrobe from IKEA and assembled it, but they didn't have the corresponding bedside cabinet in the same wood, so I kept checking for it on subsequent visits until they did have one. Unfortunately, when I got the cabinet back to Kilkis I discovered it was in white formica-covered wood, not plain wood like the wardrobe. At the time I was so hacked-off that I just said "Sod it" and assembled the thing. But now that we had found the matching bedside cabinet for the one side of the bed, I thought we may as well get a pair, and now I can use the other, white one in my office for keeping receipts etc in.

After that I took the Yuletide tree down, always a depressing time! It makes you wonder about all the effort that goes into Yuletide, dressing the flat up, only to take it all down again shortly afterwards. So now it is into the run-up to Easter, which falls on the weekend of 22-24th April in Greece this year. January and February are particularly gloomy months, usually the coldest and beset by snow and freezing rain here.

The yuletree - in the background, not the one on the table...

Part of the problem with taking down the Yule decorations is that you keep on finding pieces of decoration that got overlooked, even into February, ever-reminding you of the holiday season, just when you thought you had managed to forget it! That said, this Yule has been a lot of fun, if somewhat tiring, and in many ways I am looking forward to getting back into the work routine. I must be mad!

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Saturday January 7th, 2006

Today has been a frantic attempt to do some of the jobs I had planned to do when the holidays started back in the last week of Deecmber! All the socialising really put my plans on the backburner, but I suppose it is important to socialise. At the same time, I must get things more organised in 2006, and make sure a few jobs get done each morning before lessons!

This afternoon I whipped up a stonking chilli con carne with 2kg of minced meat and four sachets of Schwartz's hot chilli con carne mix, which my good friend John Nesbitt brought over for me on his last visit back in June when we went to the Kraftwerk concert in Thessaloniki. One of the two pots of chilli was a supercharged version, as I added a sprinkling of boukouvo, a mixture of dried red and yellow chilli pepper seeds guaranteed to add some oomph to a soup of meat dish.

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Friday January 6th, 2006

Well, we discovered today that both of our Yuletide presents have to go back - my shirt turned out to be too big and have no shirt sleeve buttons - yes, it was a cufflink model... Why on earth they don't put an indication on the packaging is beyond me. More importantly, Christina's ring turned out to have a major flaw in it - what we had taken to be a join in the outer ring turned out to be a break in the metal. The ring is, in effect, a double ring - the part which actually goes around the finger is an open-ended spiral in yellow gold with a second, thinner ring in white gold embedded with brilliants set like a satellite at about 20 degrees to the other ring, which is fused with the yellow gold ring at the point behind the finger. We did see the break when in Thessaloniki after buying it, but took it to be a join. In retrospect, a ring costing €600 (£408) should not have a visible join in it anyway! Christina discovered today that the two sides of the break moved independently, so back it goes. We called the jeweller's and they said to bring it back, so she is off to Thessaloniki again on Monday to get that sorted - and return the sodding shirt! As regards the shirt, well... the shirt I did want in M&S was one they only had in my size as a display model which was so dirty it looked like they had mopped the floor with it - typical! M&S maybe a British company but once you plonk a store in Thessaloniki the old Greek substandards kick in.

Christina cooked a new dish today - chicken breasts on the bone in a mustard sauce, which was delicious, and we watched the Louis de Funès film Sur un arbre perché (Perched on a tree), which is a hilarious film with the late great de Funès as a dishonest industrialist who drives off a cliff with two hitchhikers (one of whom is de Funès' real-life son) who have managed to hitch a ride - giving the rest of the plot would be unfair, as it is great comedy, so if you can, see it!

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Thursday January 5th, 2006

Today we went down to Thessaloniki for a spot of shopping and to enjoy the rest of our holidays. The coming Monday, January 9th, it's back to work for both Christina and me, and it seems that we have been so busy cooking and organising evening parties and going out ever since schools broke up on December 23rd. So here was a chance to spend some time on our own and also to get each other our Yuletide presents!

The 10.32 morning train to Thessaloniki - at last they have started using trains approaching decent quality!

There were no free seats on the train, and it was typical of young Greeks that when an old man limped onto the train with a stick, none of the kids stood up - it probably never ever crossed their minds! Christina said that it was illegal for the Greek Railways Organisation to transport standing passengers, but that doesn't seem to stop them selling tickets from networked computers for seats that don't exist! The journey put me in a bad mood - I was quite pissed off at the way the poor old chap had to stand for the half-hour journey while the lazy teenagers sat gazing dumbly out of the window.

Once we arrived, we caught the bus across town and had a coffee/Murphy's Irish Stout at the Olympion café in Aristotelous Square. I enjoy having a pint of Murphy's there, even though the price is a complete rip-off at €6.50 (£4.40) a 500ml can, when the same can costs €1.80 (£1.22) in a Thessaloniki supermarket. This works out at €7.38 (£5.02) a pint - compare that with UK pub prices! The table we sat at was the token no-smoking table, which is a bit of a laugh given that people were smoking at almost every other table. I suppose the no-smoking sign on our table ensured no smoke wafted our way...

From there we went through the rain to a few shops to have a look at shirts and trousers for me, and came away from Marks and Spencers in Tsimiski Street with a shirt which later turned out to be totally unsuitable for me - too big and also designed for cufflinks, not shirt sleeve buttons. So that will have to go back. Then it was time to get Christina's Yuletide gift, and she said she wanted some jewellery, so we ended up at the Michail jewellery store, where she eventually chose a lovely gold ring. It was twice what I had budgeted, but she liked it so I got it for her!

Then we went for lunch at To Roptro, a little place near Athonos Square which we often frequent when in Thessaloniki and whose owner Yiannis is very friendly. Various tomato, courgette and cheese croquettes, salad, grilled mackerel, mussels sahanaki and grilled giant prawns, washed down by tsipouro (a strong ouzo variant) came to €50 (£34). Yiannis took our photo:

Over lunch at Yiannis' Roptro taverna

From there we went on for coffee in the Assos Odeon shopping mall, which for some strange reason does not have a roof of any sort, so the pouring rain was coming in a few feet from where we sat under awnings outside the City Café coffeeshop. The Yuletide lights were nice as the light faded:

An interesting lighting display - it looks like the lights are raining down along with the real rain


The Yuletide tree at the Assos Odeon shopping mall

Finally, we took the bus back across town to the train station to cacth the six-thirty p.m. train up to Kilkis - if we missed that the next one was at twenty to midnight, a touch surprising considering that it is only a thirty-minute journey!

The ticket offices at Thessaloniki railway station

On the train I spotted yet another example of dire translation on a sign - "Abolition of door blocking"??? This sign should have been translated into English to mean that you pulled the lever to open the doors in an emergency...!

Who on earth translates this rubbish?

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Wednesday January 4th, 2006

Today we had arranged to go to the spa centre at Pozar, up near the border with the neighbouring country of Macedonia, with Laurent and Chryssoula and their son Alexandre, who were over from Brussels, where they live.

So at 10.30 a.m. they picked us up from our flat and we set off through the pouring rain towards Edessa, following the main roads. Although a lot of construction work has taken place on roads in Northern Greece, the Thessaloniki to Edessa road is for a large part a dangerous, badly-designed bottleneck. This is not aided by people loading cars and lorries irresponsibly:

Imagine this chap trying to stop quickly and safely in the rain

Once we got to Pozar and had parked, Laurent, Chryssoula got busy changing into their swimgear, despite the cold air. The water temperature is a steady 37°C, body temperature, so once they were in the water it would have been quite pleasant!

Laurent at the entrance to the Pozar spa water swimming pool


The fashion-conscious Frenchman about town...!


Laurent and young Alexandre make for the pool

Christina and I didn't fancy a dip, so we had a coffee and a beer, and I took a few shots of the flowing waters, experimenting with the shutter speeed and aperture settings on my new Olympus mju 800 8-megapixel digital camera to capture the sense of the moving water. Below is a shot of the cold water coming down from the mountain, whereas nearby hot water shot out of a spring.

Cold mountain river waterfall

Meanwhile, back at the pool...

Family Plard having a soak

From there we went down to the nearby village of Loutraki and parked at the Kalofagas (= Gourmet) taverna, where we had lunch of roast goat, amongst other things. It was nice sitting by the fire with the Yuletide tree beside us, and the food was quite good.

Say cheese!

After lunch we drove back to Kilkis, taking a different route which I knew, which went up around the Paiko mountain, so it was quite a winding route and the girls felt a bit queasy with all the sharp bends and so we stopped for a coffee at Skra, the first village inside the Prefecture of Kilkis after we left the Prefecture of Pella. It was still pouring with rain and was also fairly foggy in parts...

Stopping for coffee at Skra village

Eventually we got back to Kilkis towards 6 p.m. and said goodbye to Laurent, Chryssoula and Alexandre, as they were flying back to Brussels on Friday 6th January.

In the evening we were invited to a New Year's party in the village of Mikrokampos, some ten miles from Kilkis, so we were picked up by our friend Ritsa at just after eight. Antonis and Roula and their three children had been busy making lots of lovely food, and Antonis also did some sausages on the fire...

Sizzling sausages - yum yum!

There was a nice surprise when a friend of Roula's turned up dressed as Santa Claus and did a whole routine with prepared speeches and funny presents for everyone, which was great fun.

Yo Ho Ho!!

Roula did a fine spread and there was lots of wine...

Loadsa nosh!

And then there was dancing, with napkins - although to look at this picture you would get the impression that it was a women's knickers comparison exercise...

Does my bum look big in this?

So anyway, a great time was had by all, and we got back to Kilkis at about one in the morning, time for a well-deserved kip after a long day!

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Sunday January 1st, 2006
New Year's Day lunch at Christina's mother's

Lunch on New Year's Day was pork with celeriac roots, a dish traditionally made by Nitsa on New Year's Day. Below are some pictures of the lunch...

Digging into the New Year's Day lunch with Nitsa, Antonis and Christina


Me looking sated


Christina: 'Who cooked this???'

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Saturday December 31st, 2005 / Sunday January 1st, 2006
New Year's Eve party at home

We had invited seven people to the New Year's Eve party - Christina's mother and brother Antonis, Marina and her mother Rita, Laurent, Chryssoula and Alexandre, and they started arriving at about 8.30 p.m. Christina had been cooking pork with plum and apple and I did two roast ducks with orange sauce, and then there was the various salads and so on. Below are a few photos from the party, which I think speak for themselves...!

Christina a-cooking in the kitchen


Around the table


Around the table - 2


Cutting the New Year's cake


Laurent: 'Should I wear one of these in my hair all the time?'


Guests have gone home - now to clean up...

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Written by Bryan Hollamby, January 2006