B r y B l o g - 2 0 0 6
Last updated: Sunday 23rd April 2006
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Sunday April 23rd, 2006 - Greek Easter Sunday
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February 2006 photoblog entries
January 2006 photoblog entries
Happy Easter - Spring is here!!
Well, it is Greek Easter weekend here, and sure enough it has been a case of eat, drink and be Fatty, as pretty much every Easter here! I was working till Thursday, and it was great to get up on Friday morning and know I didn't have to plunge straight into work. That said, I am glad that at a time when the Greek economy, and particularly the local economy in Kilkis, is at a very low ebb I have far more work than I expected, but you do get to the point where you feel like you need some days off, and now, after the holiday weekend (the religious side of the celebrations being totally meaningless to me) I can start to enjoy a little free time since I don't know when!! Christmas turned into a long round of entertaining, and I was quite miffed to find that I was unable to devote some quality time to yours truly, so I am not planning on letting that happen again this holiday period...!
The 11-day-long dustbin men's strike ended finally, and the rubbish was collected up. To be honest, Greece is such a dirty country that several score thousand tonnes of accumulated rubbish doesn't really make much difference. For years I have been amazed how Greeks can feel proud of the beauty of their country and yet just strew it indiscriminately with rubbish. When I used to go cycling it was past yard after yard of rubbish-strewn kerbside in the countryside and it was rare to find a scene where there weren't plastic water bottles, cigarette packets and, this next being worst, plastic bags containing household waste which had just been jettisoned by passing drivers. The Greeks must have felt well at home during the dustbin men's strike, and watching them walk past the overflowing and stinking rubbish containers on the road without a blink just goes to confirm this belief.
Hoofed along to get some new glasses following the optician's visit, and chose some decent specs. It must be about 8 or 9 years since I last got my eyes tested and I am at the age where one's eyesight starts to go downhill, so I suppose it is fair that it will take some time to get used to the new specs, but I have found today that I was much more comfortable with the contact lenses, which had been a worry.
New goggs
More chins than the Peking telephone directory...
So there has been lots of lamb today. We tooled over to Christina's mother's place at about midday, and then paid some neighbours a visit. The woman there decided it might be a good idea to cut a piece of lamb off the beast twirling on the spit and put it in my unexpecting hand boiling hot, with the result that I started an impromptu lamb juggling act while spouting "shit that's hot!!!" in Greek. As a result my freshly pressed shirt and strides got an ample spattering of lamb fat even before we'd ever got started on the face-feeding. Last night I managed to cover my shirt with spots of mayeiritsa (sheep's entrails soup) after the resurrection ceremony, which I attended with Christina and her family. Picture below...
Have you got a light?
And thence, after the above picture from last night, to Christina's mother's to dig into (and spatter self with) mayeiritsa. Very tasty, but I suspect that the ingredients would put most gentle readers off - sheep's entrails are not on everyone's list of favourite foods... Our good friend Varvara (far left, in the picture below) and her daughter Nopi (far right) were there.
Mayeiritsa soup time
And below is another traditional Easter dish in Greece (also eaten at other times of the year, however), called kokoretsi, which is various sheep's offal wrapped in long strings of sheep's stomach and intestine, and roasted. Again, doesn't sound too appetising and looks like something out of the film Alien, but it is in fact very tasty, and much loved by our French friend Laurent in Brussels (salut, mon vieux!!)...!!
Kokoretsi - does this make you jealous, Laurent?
So, after lunch today, Sunday, we got together with Marina and headed off out with Antonis to the Croissanterie, a bar we frequent, for drinkies. This bar is on the main pedestrianised drag in Kilkis, all bars and pizza places, but to see the amount of mopeds and motorbikes - and even cars - that speed by on it you wouldn't think it is a road for exclusive pedestrian use. The Town Council and the police should be there stopping all this traffic, but you may as well ask the cat to do their job.
Ever the entertainer, Marina was good enough to do her excellent moose imitation and then to take a photo of Christina and myself in typical pose...
Not a moose
Typical pose for us
Will we never grow up? LET'S BOLLOCKING WELL HOPE NOT!!!
On a final note, the building contractors have now demolished the building which stood on the plot of land where the apartment block which will house my new flat is to be built, so I will be starting to take shots of that for the archive over coming months. Will be interesting to see the building taking shape, and knowing that huge sums of my future simolians will be disappearing into that. Had to happen some time, I suppose. Picture of my wallet being emptied below...!!
Let me know when you get to China...
Friday April 14th, 2006
Yet another three weeks have gone by, virtually, which is simply a reflection on how busy I have been in recent weeks. I have more work than I ever imagined I would have/be able to do, which is, I suppose, a good thing, but it has really eaten away at my free time to do anything for myself. Easter will soon be upon us (one week after Western Easter), and schools broke up today, so my lessons are changing over from afternoon/evening to morning times, and that will be good because instead of being free to do my own stuff as of eleven at night, as is the case now, I will be doing lessons through till about three in the afternoon and then the rest of the day will be mine, all mine. MUHAHAHAHH!!!!
Greece at the moment is going through a difficult time in terms of cleanliness. For well over a week now the dustbin men have been on strike, and there is masses of rubbish lying in the streets in towns and cities across Greece. On the relevant BBC website report they estimate that there are 40,000 tonnes of rubbish on the streets of Athens, and there are fears for serious outbreaks of disease. All this in a "European" city. There are two piles of festering rubbish in the street in front of the flat where I live, and I don't suppose it will be long before the rats appear. I had to smile when in the BBC report they mentioned that foreign tourists will start arriving soon - if it isn't the rubbish that makes people think Greece is a tosspot of a country there are so many other things to lead them to this conclusion...
Healthy living in Greece
Given that this is the last day before I switch to morning lessons for the next two weeks, I bit the bullet and went and got my eyes tested. This is the latest in a long line of visits to opticians over the past twelve months. A year ago I decided I wanted to try out contact lenses, mainly to be able to get some decent (i.e. trendy) sunglasses for spring/summer/autumn wear. My national insurer is TEBE and they have contractual agreements with certain doctors, while IKA (the other big national insurer) has such agreements with other doctors. So back in February 2005 I tooled along to the optician who "did for" TEBE-insured punters and he examined my eyes and prescribed the contact lenses and said I should go along the next day to get them. So off I went the next day, and put these lenses in and felt extremely dizzy. He said it would settle down, but it didn't and so it was off to see him again. In the meantime I talked to a friend who has an optician's shop and she said that he should at the very least have checked my age, as presbyopia would be setting in at my age. He then prescribed another set of different strength which were rather better, but still not right, and in the end, after about FIVE visits to this chump I gave up. I had, of course, in the meantime bought a nice pair of sunglasses for €200, and they were effectively useless to me...!!! So this time I told the other optician (who doesn't have a contractual agreement with TEBE and therefore whom I had to pay €100 for the eye-test and lenses) all about that so that he knew what problems I had had, so that he could avoid them this time. So now I have got new contact lenses, and will have to get used to them. The last time I went to this last optician, though, was several years back, when I stormed out of the place after waiting one-and-a-half hours for the chap to turn up at his surgery. He was then contracted to TEBE and I went along to get my eyes tested, but after an hour he hadn't come, so I had to leave (things to do) and went back the next day. That day he was one-and-a-half hours late and as I was leaving he turned up and tried to persuade me to return to the surgery, but I told him just how appalling his unpunctuality was and complained to TEBE about him. Subsequent to that, we were reconciled...!! Just another example of what you have to put up with if you live in Greece. When I hear about someone being a Hellenophile, it almost invariably turns out to be somebody who spends precious little time here, has never encountered the realities of life in Greece, and often has some spaced-out view of the country as the fount of spirituality and culture. Load of bollocks! This time around, his secretary called him on his mobile when I turned up, and I only had to wait a mere forty minutes before he deigned to appear...
Sunday March 26th, 2006
Then it was off to the dermatologist to get some foot-cream for hardened skin on the heels and hand-cream for chapped hands.
Talking of feet (and who isn't nowadays?), Christina managed to sprain her ankle a few days back as we were coming home from a meal out at a new restaurant in Kilkis. She stepped off the kerb to cross the road into a pothole in the road and cried out in pain. Since then, it has been a round of icepacks on the ankle and wrapping it in a bandage to keep it steady.
Given that this started out as an almost daily blog, the gentle reader may be wondering why the heck I haven't posted anything since March 9th. Well, it has been a very busy, eventful time as the Kilkis Animal Friendly Society decided to get pro-active regarding the dog problem in Kilkis. For those of you who haven't visited the Society's site and seen the appalling pictures (now removed from the site), there is a small fenced area on the outskirts of town where stray dogs are put, and the state of the area is absolutely appalling - covered in months-old faeces, intermixed with the dogs' food. Greeks have scant regard for animals - let's face it, they have scant regard for each other! - and just don't seem to realise what a bad image they have in other European nations where people are far more civilised, and not just in their approach to our animal friends. Thus it is that in Greece many people simply abandon their pet dogs or cats in the streets, leaving the bewildered animal to fend for itself in what, for a dog or cat, is a particularly cruel country. People leave meat mixed with rat poison around town, they kick or beat dogs and cats, throw lit cigarettes on sleeping dogs (Christina once saw someone do this), and myriad other acts of cruelty. There is no education in schools to alert Greeks to the plight of animals in their country and so it is hardly surprising that the adult population here is so backward in this respect compared with the rest of Europe and the States.
When it transpired that four small dogs had managed to get from one fenced-off area to another and had been attacked and killed by bigger dogs, it was decided that the Animal Friendly Society should put details of conditions up on the Society's site and then the emails started pouring into the Mayor complaining...! Within two days he was on the phone demanding a meeting with the Society to resolve the problem. It just goes to show where his priorities lie - four years of virtual inaction, but once his name got dragged through the mud online, he sat up and started squeaking.
There were two meetings and it was proposed that the dogs should be released - hardly the ideal solution. In effect, the Council is washing its hands of the problem, and the townspeople are hardly going to be overjoyed to find twenty more stray dogs on the streets of the town. This October there are municipal elections, and let's hope a mayor with more sense is voted in this time!
This weekend has been a different weekend in that yesterday was March 25th, the day when Greeks remember the fight for independence from the Ottoman empire, independence which began to be granted 185 years ago. The entire country has a day off and the kids and the army, inter alia, stomp through the streets in every Greek town and large village in what is usually a pretty poor attempt at a parade. The girls tend to try and wear the shortest skirts possible and the boys try to look as cool as they possibly can while dressed up in uniforms, and to affect anything other than a regimented parade march. As far as I am concerned, yesterday was just an opportunity to have a darned good rest, it being a rare occasion that I don't work on a Saturday.
A Greek from 1821 with
an amazing mullet hairdo
Today is an opportunity to fire up the barbecue again - surprise! surprise! - and I have got some nice sausages to slap on the barbie...
Thursday March 9th, 2006
Below, typical scenes from dog pound outside Kilkis
It has been yet another very busy two weeks, with lots happening on a variety of fronts - work, the Kilkis dog pound problem, the car, the mortgage application, the computer and more. Hard to know where to start!!
Well, let's start with the pooch problem. As you may well have read in the January and February editions of this blog, there is a dire problem in Kilkis regarding the number of stray dogs, the awful state of the area that Kilkis Council chooses to call a dog pound, the fact that a number of citizens of Kilkis think nothing of putting out poisoned pieces of meat to kill strays, and so on. Things pretty much came to a head this week when the chap who goes along to the "pound" and feeds the dogs on a voluntary basis decided he could not continue. Understandable, I'd say, as it is extremely depressing to see the state in which the Council forces the dogs to live. Pictures of the "pound" are now on the Kilkis Animal Friendly Society's website, and you can clearly see that it is a source of disgrace both to Kilkis and to Greece and the Greeks that the Town Council keeps dogs in such sordid conditions.
So, the chap who looks after the dogs decided he couldn't continue, and the dogs then went hungry for five days, without food or water, because the Council didn't send anyone to the "pound" to provide food and water for the dogs. Christina and the women who are the active members of the Kilkis Animal Friendly Society asked the mayor of Kilkis to sort out the problem of the dogs being left unfed and were told that the Council would have found a Council employee to look after the dogs by Monday 27th February. Monday came and went, and there was no solution. Then it transpired that the mayor had "forgotten" to sort the problem out as he had gone off on some junket to Kalamata, a town in the Peloponnese. And this is the mayor who hopes to be voted back into power in the Autumn elections. Heaven help the town!!! If he were employed by a company, he would be out on his ear by now for incompetence.
So Christina decided it was time to take action and she called the local newspaper-cum-radio station, which goes by the name of "Mahitis" ("Warrior"), and a meeting was arranged for Wednesday 1st March, when she would give a radio interview as Chairwoman of the Animal Friendly Society. This she duly did, and the interview was also recorded as an mp3 and I put it up on the Animal Friendly Society's site. The following day, Thursday, one of the two newspapers published by "Mahitis" ran an article giving a condensed version of the contents of her radio interview. By ten o'clock she had an irate mayor calling her on the phone!! Yes, Mr Terzidis, it must be painful when incompetence is brought out into the open.
I scanned the newspaper article and put it up on the Animal Friendly Society's site for anyone interested to read - obviously it is in Greek, but already the site has had a visitor from the United States, and it will be interesting to see who else pays it a visit, as the URL was published in the article itself. Later on the second newspaper run by "Mahitis" will be publishing its own article, too.
So, it has been an exciting week on that front. Whether the Council will actually do anything to solve the problem is another matter. For the moment, the employee who has been told to act as dog-catcher is, amazingly enough, stuffing the dogs into sacks and then releasing them in outlying villages, away from the town. His tiny mind must believe that this is a solution to the problem.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday 28th February I received a call from the mortgage advisor at the bank where I have applied for a mortgage. When I applied for the mortgage on Friday 24th, she said she would ring my accountant and ask him to bring her a form that she needed, basically an E3 form which details the income of a small business. The sodding accountant still hadn't given her the form by Tuesday lunchtime, and I ran the risk of not being able to take advantage of a special offer which would save a fair amount of money if my application wasn't submitted that day. So I had to go over to the accountant's in the precious little time I had left before lessons and get the form from him and run over to the bank. I also got the copies of my tax declarations for the past three years, as I have no intention of going to THAT accountant again!
I also discovered while there that my ex-wife had been along to collect a copy of the tax return from last year and hadn't coughed up the €178 she owes me for her own portion of the tax I paid. In previous years she has handed the money over to the accountant and been given a certified copy of the tax return, but this year the twerp handed over the copy without getting any money off her. Apparently, she said that she would be contacting me to give me the money, but no sign of that happening... She is probably miffed that I have formally applied for divorce and this is her petty way of getting back at me.
So since those days, I have been very busy with work and so on, even though Monday was a national holiday. I took the car along to the garage to see why the front windscreen wipers weren't working, which has been a problem since we went to Megala Livadia over a month ago. It transpired that there was no corresponding fuse in the fusebox, and the fusebox was not the sort of place where a fuse could simply drop out and disappear onto the floor, so the mechanic reckoned that somebody had taken it. I still can't understand how that is possible, given that no-one except me has unaccompanied access to the car. Really weird! Then today (Thursday ninth of March) I took the car for a service, the first one it has had in two years as I don't use it much at all, having done under 17,000 kilometres (10,563 miles) in three years. The mechanic pointed out that one of the front tyres has a small bulge in it, so the front set of tyres will need replacing. More expense!
The mortgage approval came through yesterday, so it was off out last night for a slap-up celebratory meal with Christina, her brother and friend Varvara at Varelofrones. It was International Women's Day yesterday and so the majority of punters at the restaurant were women, and of course that meant a lot of noise. Greek women are so loud!!
Who's that?
The other key feature of the past two weeks is my to-ings and fro-ings to/from the computer shop with a scanner. My present scanner has started playing up, slowing down the movement of the scanning strip light at certain points so that anything scanned comes out "stretched". Hardly ideal.
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So I thought I would get a new one, same model. But then came the quandary of whether I should get a more modern, USB2.0 model, which would be faster in its transferral of data to the computer shop. In the end I got the USB2.0 model, but would it install? The heckers it would!! My friend Efthimis at the computer shop was very kind in that he lent me another (new) scanner like my original scanner to try out, but it has been a case of trying to find the time to test both scanners, and the USB2.0 scanner steadfastly refuses to work with the program I like to use for scanning. Sod's Law. Anyway, any time I could have saved by using a slightly faster USB2.0 scanner for the next fifty years has gone on trying to get the scanner to work!
(February 2006)
(January 2006)