Never a dull moment

 Sunday 4th December

Photo - Church near beach Kalo Ampeli

I was thinking about the Greek this morning. I have finished listening to the final two chapters of the audiobook and there are two new pesky words, like the ones I mentioned before that sound similar to each other. One means “I am hungry”, the other “I have pain”. The final chapter is another recap, but before that there are words to go with the pain word, parts of the body  like tooth, foot and so on. The stomach word is very similar to ours, thank goodness. My plan is to go over those final two chapters, drumming those new words into my head.  The English language is reputed to have a million words, but the Oxford dictionary, only has a hundred and seventy thousand I think. Greek by comparison has five million. Of course I don’t need to know the five million, I just checked my list and I know about seventy! That’s not counting the different versions of say thello, which means want, the other versions I know are thelette, thelei and so on. ( there are more of these to come ) Counting them might push me to a hundred. A long way to go!

Today I was kindly invited to brunch with my Greek friend who is heading to Athens soon unfortunately. But today, two more friends, who live in Athens, but are Slovenian are now heading back there. I was a bit sad this morning, I understand why now, I have lots of friends on the island, but I have been enjoying the company of all the ones leaving soon. The Greek friend and the cat sitter will be gone by the end of next week. That will spur me on to improve my Greek! This morning, I drove down to Livadi, to see off my Slovenian friends, with a coffee. We had a nice chat, talked about my Greek language efforts, and other things Greek and Slovenian. I know I will stay in touch with them, they shared a Greek travel blog site, I am looking forward to reading. They had another tip, find out peoples names and then on their name day wish them  Xronia Polla or Polyxronos to impress them. I said goodbye to my friends and headed up to Hora to meet my Greek friend in their house. My cat sitter friend was joining us and this house, recently refurbished is absolutely gorgeous. It’s traditional inside and out and looks over unspoiled views to the now green mountain sides and the sea. 

We had an amazing lunch, a lovely omelette, potatoes, courgettes with Feta cheese all beautifully cooked and I had the honour of looking out of the house to the view. I mentioned the people carrying bread last night, saying it did have a spicy taste. That was aniseed apparently. We have since found out the celebration was for Saint Barbara. For dessert we had Melomakarona which are a very traditional Greek Christmas treat.

 Our Greek host, has some interesting tales to tell, like all my friends and we got talking about other stories from childhood. Kallikantzaros were mentioned, these come from a fairy tale, the Greek friend was told by the grandmother, these are a sort of Goblin, who live underground, cutting through trees. I just wish these stories are still told to children and don’t just reside on the internet in the future. The Greeks like us do put money in a Christmas treat, but theirs goes in a cake not a pudding. We had funny discussions about Yorkshire pudding, which must seem a strange thing to non UK people!

I did find out that there is a rock museum in Mega Livadi, like a lot of places here, they are not open much, but if you know the right person… fingers crossed there! We then drove to Kalo Ampeli beach, and walked to the church on the way to the beach, then onwards. At this stage, we went straight on to look at the rocks to the right of the beach, which are like a moonscape, the rocks have veins of a different rock running through them, making them look even stranger. The sun was setting which made the scene even more special. Eventually we set back to the car, but met a French lady gathering some small leaves to eat. She wants to get in touch with us both, as she and her husband spend a lot of time here, but will be back in France for Christmas. 

Back in Livadi, our Greek friend wanted to buy a huge container of Olive oil, so we went to a place that grows olives and extracts the oil themselves. It’s of a very high quality. As the huge bottle was rolling about in the boot, it was decided to put it on the back seat and have the cat sitting hang onto the top to avoid an oily mess being deposited inside the car.. One last piece of news, when we got back to Hora, the rock team had erected netting over the rocks, I think they are temporary, but let’s see, they are meant to catch any bits that fall off those overhanging rocks. We also heard they were going to dynamite a few bits of rock down below, to protect road users  in the future. That sounds interesting, I would like to observe that….

Photo interlude, Olive trees growing in the back of a lorry ( not really of course!)

Todays photos are all about Kalo Ameli, houses are private things, and I respect the privacy of peoples houses, and not share photos of them on public sites. As I explained to my Greek and cat sitter friend, Never a Dull Moment on Serifo