viola's people watching blog
A few weeks ago Yiannis walked in and announced that we were invited to the 50th anniversary of the founding of this company that produced specialised building materials. It would be in Athens and they would be putting us up in a 5 star hotel and the whole shindig would […]
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 moon had been waxing and waning in nebulous March skies…sometimes a shining crescent, hanging like a pendant and other times, lying like a cradle, suspended in the darkness, only to vanish behind an inky haze. But there was this one night when Yiannis walked in after concluding his business […]
We’ve had buckets of sunshine the last few days on these…`Alkionides Meres’ or Halcyon Days. Halycon is a kind of kingfisher that nests by the sea and lays its eggs in the frosty month of January. But nature in its mysterious ways, calms the icy winds and cracks open the […]
As the summer buzz and dust are washed away by the first rains, I find myself slipping into the quiet pace and beauty of autumn…the rich hues of russet and gold of our vine leaves and the ripening of fruit, sweet and juicy…our pomegranates, apples and oranges. The skies are […]
We needed to snatch up the lingering rays of summer and make a hasty getaway…but…we didn’t want to be the masters of our ship…no putting on our thinking caps and booking flights, hotels and renting cars and listening to muddly directions from the GPS…turn left turn right and then…silence. We […]
Why do I remember this old song from way back in the 1890’s by Charles K Harris before anybody I knew even existed? Well, in primary school, Sister Cecilia used to sit at the piano and plonk out this melancholic old number, drawn out and dripping with nostalgia and we, […]
When the leaves of the grape vines begin to take on shades of russet and gold and the autumn breezes skitter in, we know it’s time to harvest our cardinal grapes, hanging in heavy bunches of berry red and wine red and sometimes appearing a little cloudy with the first […]
I’ve got a curry leaf tree in my back garden which I smuggled from my sister’s house in Malaysia all the way to this sunny isle of Crete. She had wrapped up this small fledgling of a plant and tucked it into my suitcase some ten years ago and now […]
My first dip into the sea was a very long time ago, in a different country and what seems to me a different lifetime. I was in Standard One and the nuns took us on a trip to the seaside, to a place called Morib. They might as well have […]