viola's people watching blog
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
The autumn rains swept in…first a few scuttling black clouds drizzling the trees and plants and the heads of unwary pedestrians and then the showers, heavy and persistent. Today is Monday and the sky is grey and watery. I put on my hoodie and went out in the rain and […]
Wring out every drop … not really my guiding principle in life… but on the last day of our trip, we wanted to see whatever Alexandroupoli could offer us, winkle out all her hidden secrets. Mid-morning saw us driving out of the city towards the east. All along on the […]
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 […]
Whenever I think about afternoon tea with Mum, it fills me with a deep satisfying sense of comfort. It’s somewhat like when you settle down in front of the TV at night, watching your favourite programme with a plate of comfort food. For me it’s a plate of curried chicken, […]