B r y B l o g - 2 0 0 6
Last updated: Friday 17th November 2006
B r y B l o g - 2 0 0 6
Last updated: Friday 17th November 2006
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PREVIOUS ENTRIES
Friday November 17th 2006 -
Too little time...
Monday June 19th 2006 -
A day-out in Thessaloniki
Yesterday we took the train down to Thessaloniki for the day - a handy way of doing things, as you can leave your car at the station, which is a couple of miles outside Kilkis, and then pick it up when you return in the evening, avoiding all the maniacs and death-wish freaks on the road down to the Big Smoke. What with it being a Sunday, Thessaloniki was fairly quiet, which makes a change from the usual noise and choking fumes that characterise the place. In fact, the city was almost pleasant, and coming from me that is quite a compliment for any Greek city.
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March and April 2006 photoblog entries
February 2006 photoblog entries
January 2006 photoblog entries
Sad to say that, due to pressure of work and consequent lack of free time, BryBlog will cease to be updated until further notice. Thanks to all those who have visited or still visit...!!
We had arranged to visit some friends, Alexandra and Margaritis. Alexandra hand-makes jewellery and was having an exhibition of her handicraft, so we took the bus over from the station to Analipsi, noticing a Book Festival on the seafront as we passed, and found their flat. Alexandra makes a wide range of very attractive jewellery and it was interesting to see. After that, we caught the bus back into the city, planning to visit the Book Festival on the seafront, but once we had got off the bus and walked down to the seafront we discovered that it had closed an hour before, and would remain so until 6.30 in the evening, which was when our train back to Kilkis left, so the plan of perusing the Book Festival went out of the window. Mind you, it was a good opportunity to take a walk along the seafront, and I took a few photos, of the statue of Alexander the Gay er... Great, the docks, of the line of stalls housing various publishing houses' wares, and of the White Tower (more information on the White Tower here), which is the symbol of Thessaloniki. The number of stalls was quite surprising, and extended for a good five or six hundred metres along the seafront. Just a pity they were all closed!
From there we decided to go for a light meal and a pint at Zythos Doré, a restaurant just a stone's throw from the White Tower. I quite like the two Zythos restaurants in Thessaloniki - Zythos ( Ζύθος ) means "beer" in Katharevousa Greek - but must admit to preferring the one in Ladadika, on the other side of the city centre, partly because it is in an entirely pedestrianised area.
Mythos - £2.70
As far as the food goes, a beefburger with marinated onions will set you back £4.43, a thin slice of feta cheese £1.71, a thin slice of kefalotyri cheese £2.66. A Greek salad (pictured below) costs £4.00 and an assortment of croquettes, four paltry under-grilled potato chips, a third of a sausage, two rashers of bacon and a dollop of dill and feta sauce costs £8.80, again pictured below. A Greek cheese platter also costs £8.80. Food prices are probably more similar to UK prices for such things, although still rather steeper than in a quality English pub serving food, but I would certainly like to hear the justification for the prices of beer...! We later had a 500 ml can of Murphy's Irish Stout at the Olympion café in Aristotelous Square, in the centre of Thessaloniki, a can which costs £1.16 at the Vassilopoulos supermarket a few miles down the road, yet at the Olympion café it costs £4.09, a 250% markup. Some markup is understandable. But 250%??
OK, it is rant time! Here's where I tackle the subject of the cost of certain items in Greece, compared with the UK. I am considering doing a separate webpage on this, but for the time being I will put a list of prices of a few items at Zythos Doré, starting with their entire list of bottled beers. What has to be remembered here, is that the average wage in Greece is £128 a week (£512 a month), and the British pound sterling prices (converted from euros) you see below are representative of medium-quality eateries in Greece. We are not talking about some rich Scandinavian country here... These prices will have you weeping into your pint...!!
All prices below for beer are quoted for the pint equivalent in UK pound sterling equivalent, calculated from the bottle content price at Zythos Doré in Thessaloniki. £1 = EUR1.4661 (as at 19th June 2006)
Carlsberg - £3.17
Fosters - £3.52
Kilkenny - £4.49
Heineken - £3.05
Amstel - £2.82
Alpha - £3.05
Amstel Gold - £3.41
Stella Artois - £4.70
Budweiser - £5.75
Kaiser - £3.17
Fischer - £7.09
Pilsener - £5.05
Krombacher - £5.28
Warsteiner - £5.64
Corona - £5.75
Duvel - £10.28 (yes, £10.28 a pint!!)
Lucifer - £7.63
Vondel - £7.63
Now I don't want to go giving the impression that I am some sort of skinflint, tightwad or whatever, but what I do object to is that when you are paying this sort of price for food and/or beer, you should get a chance to enjoy it. During the first hour that we were sitting at our pavement table outside the Zythos Doré in Thessaloniki, we were accosted by three drug addicts demanding money and/or cigarettes who refused to go away and banged repeatedly on people's tables, seven Africans selling pirated CDs and/or DVDs, one kid torturing an accordion for money and another kid who seemed to think we were prepared to give him money for a piece of paper with a Greek religious icon and some meaningless religious twaddle printed on it. Two of the drug addicts actually grabbed food off the plates at adjoining tables, and one of them, when he returned later with a carton of ice-cream, tried to feed some of the ice-cream he was eating into the mouth of a young lady of about 23 or 24 years old at a table adjacent to ours...!!!! At the end of the meal I mentioned all this to the waiter (who, incidentally, took an absolute age to notice us waving to him to bring us the bill), and he just blamed the State and the police, even though it was the waiter himself who had joked to the drug addict with the ice-cream "You have arrived late today". No attempt whatsoever on the part of the establishment to deter all the oddballs from pestering their clientele, stealing food from the plates or force-feeding them saliva-ridden ice-cream...
Sunday June 4th 2006
It is really is no great surprise that you rarely see foreign tourists eating at such places in Greek cities. They would just be too horrified by the experience...!! Drug addicts snatching food from your plate... All part of the Greek cultural experience...!!!
Exams are over!! It has been a tiring period, as always with the exam period, but now all my students have finished with their English language exams and are concentrating on their State school examinations, good luck to them all on those! I have been trying to have something of a rest, but of course whenever your routine changes it can just cause more tiredness!! None of this was helped by my plans to do some serious archiving work on my computer (i.e. burning important files to DVD) being thwarted by my 250GB back-up drive suddenly becoming invisible to the computer. I could see the drive in Computer Management but nowhere else, and it showed up as Unallocated Space, so the only option seemed to be to reformat it. This wasn't a problem as it was a back-up drive, but soon after formatting it I discovered that I couldn't find my collection of digital photos going back seven years, and thought the files must have got transferred to the back-up drive as a temporary space-freeing-up measure...! I searched all my DVDs, and the photo collection was nowhere to be found. I resigned myself to the fact that I had lost all my digital photos for the past seven years - a fairly significant period of my life, considering events - and attempted to be stoical about the loss. Then I found the DVD containing the photos. Reliefarama!!
A friend with a computer shop said he'd rescue the drive (in case I had anything else needing saving on the drive), and although the drive had been formatted, everything was saved. The program that was used was Quetek's File Scavenger 3.0 and I have nothing but praise for that program, which I too will be buying soon. I'd say that having a program like this (which, amazingly, costs just US$49) is an absolute must if you run a business where you have valuable data, or even just if you want to ensure that any data you have on your computer can be retrieved when disaster strikes.
Other news is that I am off to the UK in a few weeks to attend the University of Birmingham French Department "20 years on" Reunion, organised by Hazel Hall, who has clearly put a great deal of hard work into it all, and that is something I am looking forward to a lot. An opportunity too to see my parents and wider family and some old friends. I have to get a rental car sorted so I can do some travelling around - last time I did any independent travelling in the UK of any real sort must be about 13 years ago, I suppose. Sadly, Christina won't be able to go over with me.
And then there is the arrival of the DVDs from Amazon containing the first two series of the Dukes of Hazzard series (not the pathetic remake film, I hasten to add), giving me the opportunity to hone my imitation of Rosco P Coltrane's giggle after nigh on 30 years. Excellent.
On a more serious note, Wednesday morning next sees me in court, for my divorce hearing. It is amazing to think that four years have passed since the horrible days of my utterly miserable marriage breaking up, four years of rebuilding my life, four years of waiting till a divorce becomes automatic, given that my ex-wife stubbornly refused to agree to one. That said, it has also been very much a character-building four years, confirming my ability not just to survive but to prosper all on my tod here in Greece, after years of constantly being put down by a woman who turned the phrase "control freak" into an art form. It has been a difficult time, but I have certainly come out of it all much stronger, confident of myself, my work and my abilities, earning far more than I could ever have expected to, purchasing initially my own furniture, then a new car and now a large brand-new flat in a very desirable part of town. And I am hugely lucky to be living with Christina, who is a total joy! (Removes onion from pocket...)
On Sunday May 21st I took time out to do a spot of photography and then put together a new webpage with photographs of Greece in the spring, mainly flowers, but also a good close-up of a tortoise. The page is at:
Spring in Greece photography webpage
and, even though I say it myself, some of the photos are very nice - all are available in original 8-megapixel glory if you want to download any to use. Feel free!
Other events? Well, there has been a lot of eating out - not unusual in Greece, as you may have realised! At one meal Christina was rattling on about the sort of clothes priests' wives wear and how they ought to be more conservatively attired, and she then piped up "I mean, what I am wearing now would be OK for a priest's wife, wouldn't it?" Her t-shirt had Carnaby Street emblazoned across it, but the unfortunate positioning of her cardigan meant it actually read as something that any priest's wife would blush to be seen wearing. Photo below:
The other night the Kilkis Girl Guides committee had their end-of-year meal and I went along as token male! This picture actually makes it look as if I have taken up smoking, which I haven't, just to reassure...!
Being Spring, swallows have returned to their nest, as they do every year, and I managed to get a fairly good close-up shot of them as they were rebuilding their nest in the corner under the balcony roof.
Last weekend we drove out to the Rantso (Ranch) horse-riding centre a couple of miles outside Kilkis and had a few drinks before looking at the assorted dobbins and other animals there. This place is fairly recent and seems quite popular, especially with the kids, who can go for riding lessons. It serves drinks and does a mean souvlaki, done on a barbecue. They clearly look after their horses very well, which is good to see. Here are a few photos of the Rantso:
And finally a couple of pictures not associated with horses - one from the top of the hill over a beer a few days back and then one from today, when Christina's mother treated us to a meal out in Efkarpia, a village 6 miles from Kilkis which is noted for its souvlakia... Now, where did I put that toothpick?
Tuesday May 16th 2006
Tuesday May 9th 2006
Just a short entry today to point my gentle readers to a new photojournal page I have just finished about my walk across the border on Sunday 14th May to the village of Star Dojran in Macedonia. Star Dojran, which means Old Dojran (pronounced Doy-RAN), is a couple of kilometres inside Macedonia (or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as the Greeks call it), and it makes for a very pleasant walk in Spring, when the countryside is in bloom. Have a look at the photos, each accompanied by a short comment, on my Star Dojran photojournal page! Clicking on any of the pictures will bring up an enlarged version in a separate browser window. You can also listen to the rivet-rivet of the frogs on the page. "My cup runneth over!" I hear you cry!! :-)
Back to work last week after a short break over Easter, during which, predictably enough, I got far less done than I had hoped. I am constantly investing in my work by churning out new teaching/testing material, especially so now that the demands of my students are changing with the increased range of exams they are taking. I have found, though, that holiday periods tend to get consumed with going out for drinks, meals or visits to friends and Christina's family, and therefore I was less surprised this time around (compared to Christmas) when my long list of things to do for my work remained fairly long by the time the Easter holiday was over.
A number of things happened over Easter which are worth reporting, the funniest being when Christina found herself being attacked by my IKEA clothes hanger, which is a large metal frame standing about 1m70 tall and about 1m50 wide and which is on trolley wheels so you can move it around the room, or from room to room, with ease. She was busy hanging her winter coats and so on up on the frame when it toppled over under the sheer weight of garments, with her underneath. I was working on the computer at the time, heard a loud squeak from Christina and then a bang and a slam as the offending frame hit the bedroom door and slammed it shut. I rushed along and managed to prise the door open and rescue her, but unfortunately didn't think to take a photo of her prone under the thing. Missed a good funny photocall there!!
We went up to the top of the hill a few times for a pint or coffee, and the service and the attitude of the waiters up there will never fail to amaze me. The hill above Kilkis offers outstanding views over the surrounding countryside (which is, admittedly, fairly bland) and is a big attraction in Kilkis, which it has to be admitted is hardly the sort of place to draw in the visitor keen to um and ah at the beauty of the place. In short, the town of Kilkis and the immediate surrounding countryside is something of a dump. However, the LOFOS café bar at the top of the hill would have a great deal going for it, if only the service wasn't so diabolically shoddy. Until fairly recently, it was "run" (for want of a better word) by Kilkis Municipal Council, who couldn't run a sackrace if they tried. The service then was god-awful, and it was hoped that if the place were put out to tender and taken over by a private entrepreneur, it would improve dramatically. Well, this is what happened, but the improvement, by common consensus, has been superficial and on a material level only: new chairs, new outside raised platforms allowing more seating, a prettier interior, wireless ordering devices for the waiters, suchlike. The problem is that the mentality hasn't changed. Where you used to go up to the place when it was municipally-run and the plastic seats and tables were dirty and you had to ask the waiter to clean them off for you, which they did only grudgingly, now they have the same problem and worse. The seats may be new and better than the old red cheapo plastic affairs they used to have, but when left out in the rain they absorb the water and take an age to dry. You cannot see that they are wet, as the water settles in the plastic weave of the chairs, and so as you sit down you immediately force the rainwater out of the weave and into your pants or skirt. They have also introduced settee-style seating with thick removable cushions, and of course these hold even more water when it rains. Three times we have been up and sat on these, only to find that we suddenly look as if we are suffering from incontinence. Last time I complained to one of the waiters about this and the conversation went as follows:
Bryan: Excuse me, but the cushions we have just sat down on are wet.
Waiter: Yes, it rained last night.
Bryan: Well it is April, what do you expect? Why didn't someone take them in?
Waiter: There wasn't anybody here last night to take them in.
Bryan: Well, doesn't it seem reasonable to take them in before you close?
Waiter: No.
Bryan: [Incredulous silence at this reply]
Waiter: Where would we put them?
Bryan: How about inside the building?
Waiter: [No answer]
What can you say? When a place employs waiters with this level of intelligence, brain donors, it has no chance of operating properly. Virtually every time we have been there there has been a problem, ranging from warm beer, cold beer in a hot glass fresh from the dishwasher, soaked pants from the cushions, a blatant attempt to overcharge us by 10 euros to food poisoning from some dicey salted fish, which had Christina in bed for almost two days. On one occasion as I was going to the upstairs level inside because the music was deafening on the ground floor, I was told by the waiter that I couldn't as there was going to be a special function, and when I replied that the music downstairs was far too loud, he chirped up "Well, the downstairs area is for young people." We complained about this rude reply to the owner, who tried to laugh it off.
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(March and April 2006)
(February 2006)
(January 2006)
