viola's people watching blog
My rose bush of little white roses, a hybrid variety, forced into domestication, to sprout flowers perfectly shaped and to blossom in spring and early summer…has succumbed to the call of its untamed beginnings. Under the Cretan sky with the frigid breath of the icy mountain ridges and the salty […]
Two weeks before Christmas I was soaking up all that festive cheer, sauntering in the streets and stopping in front of shop windows and admiring the season’s apparel on skinny, long-legged, small-waisted manikins. They were wrapped in clothes of emerald green, the ones that glide over your body as you […]
The grey skies had been pouting and threatening to pour it all down when I called my friend last Friday to ask whether she wanted to resume our sulky weather habits…to sip on some alcoholic beverage to warm our chilly bones and just catch up…we’re always catching up and I’m […]
Yes…autumn is the time of the year for letting go…of buckets of summer sunshine and ripe fruit with sweet dribbling juices and buzzing bees and the shrieking of children splashing in the waves and need I say more. Chania has gone quiet now with the children off to school and […]
We took whatever was available for a speedy escape from Chania before the autumn rains swept in and reminded us that summer was actually over. And the only place that was not fully booked was Budapest. We had never been to Budapest, a name that evokes images of sepia photos […]
Louise taught me one thing…be careful what you say or do in front of a toddler. They’re little sponges, they soak up everything and squirt it right back at you. She was 17 months when she flew in with her parents in July for the summer holidays. The parents needed […]
Why is it we can never tuck away our childhood and forget about it like old toys or even chuck it off like dreaded old school books? Well my childhood was in the 50’s and 60’s on rubber estates in peninsula Malaysia and those experiences had been hanging in the […]
After our friends left on 12 May we had to pack in a hurry because we were leaving for Brussels on Sunday 14 May well before sunrise, to catch the first flight to Athens. We had just one day to throw things into our luggage and it was fine by […]
There we were Yiannis and myself at the inter-city bus station at Chania, waiting for the coach to pull in from Heraklion. My old friend Kim and hubby, all the way from Malaysia, were coming to stay with us after trotting around various places in Greece. We hadn’t seen each […]
The first couple of days this week…the Holy Week of the Greek Easter.. and the weather was acting up. It was chucking it down outside and the forecast was that it was going to be sullen and grey throughout the week and our pouting friend had forced me to stay […]