We woke up this morning feeling a bit like a pair of kippers and the smell of woodsmoke was really strong! However the warmth of the house the evening before made up for this and I set about opening the windows for a little while and mentally preparing myself for a shower in the arctic bathroom.
After a 30 second dash under the hot water and a race to find lots of layers of clothes and went to hang the towels on the line and stopped for a moment to enjoy the sound track. My word, people in large cities would pay good money to buy a CD with this wonderful sound. I called K outside and asked how many sounds he could identify:
Sheep and goats bleating; sparrows chattering, doves cooing, cocks crowing, the odd bark from a distant dog and a lonely bee buzzing away over our new log pile. It was a FANTASTIC start to a sunny Saturday morning and not a train, plane or car anywhere.
We packed up a few bags to take with us because we were spending a few days in Rethymnon. There is an exhibition of students’ work to be held at the art school in the village called Kastellos a short hop up the mountain road from the town. We can also get some important jobs done and visit the bank while we are there.
After the idyllic start to the morning a loud mechanical sound fired up very close by and it sounded very much like a bulldozer. K went to investigate. The stone walls in the village are beautifully made but sadly a lot of the old houses are beginning to fall down leaving ruins that would take vast sums of money to renovate. Our friend Rik the Builder has rebuilt the old village mill and it looks wonderful now finished with lovely mountain vistas in all directions. However, the lane to our house had a wall that even I had noticed was beginning to lean rather dangerously and it had been decided to bulldoze down the empty place before it fell on somebody. Thus we had packed up the car but our passage was completely blocked until the work was finished.
Eventually we set off for Rethymnon with a shopping list and another list of all the people we needed to call from Anna’s telephone. She had a good town based telephone and broadband package which allowed unlimited phone calls to worldwide destinations. At 4.30 pm we drove from Rethymnon up the Spilli Road to Kastellos which we have known for many years because it was here that K’s sister Zoe had owned a little house when she lived in Crete in years past. By co-incidence, a new School of Art had opened there and was operating from the School House which had been completely renovated by the Local Municipality and was now being used as a community resource/museum/gallery and now Art School. On one of our first trips to Crete, Zoe had seen the potential of the place and tried to persuade us to buy it and do it up! I was interested to see what the students had been up to and managed to sign up for the next half term of lessons – every Tuesday morning. Several of our friends were attending already and it was good to catch up with a little party and lots of laughs. The couple who bought Zoe’s house (an eminent neuro-surgeon and his wife) also came to look at the exhibition but were sadly only in Crete for a week before going back. They seem to have all sorts of problems with planning permission for the house but Kastellos is very near some Minoan archeological workings and this has an impact in the area for any building work people want to do to their houses.
What Anna’s house made up for in warmth and home comforts, it definitely lacked in delivering a good night’s sleep. All the youngsters coming home from nightclubs in the early hours of the morning seemed to be shouting outside her door for hours and it was like trying to sleep at the end of a megaphone since all the stone alleyways amplified the sound and the people were not lowering their voices in any sense! We decided to return to our village sooner than anticipated.
The sky and sea were blue and flat but the roads were so quiet that I had my first taste of driving in Greece on the way back. We noted that the garden centre where we wanted to get supplies was not open on Sundays and we will have to try again tomorrow. In the meantime, we cleared our small patch of giant size weeds and started off a couple of packs of seeds we had brought with us from England. I also hoped that my Mum’s green fingers would rub off on me as I scattered the seeds from the pepper I was cooking for lunch and planted a few lemon pips to see if we could generate a few plants of our own. As I cleared a little patch in front of out garden wall where some bathroom tiles had appeared from nowhere, I spied our resident toad nestling beneath – bright orange in colour with black spots. We can only surmise that some softhearted local spied him there and found him some temporary cover!
As we were out in the front of the house, our friendly neighbours, Costas and Angeliki had an identical problem with their log burner and chimney so it was not just us townies with fireplace troubles. The model of their log burner is alarmingly called Napalm 78! It was great that K and I could lend them our camping mallet and tall step ladder to help them clear their chimney but they still could not accept even this little help without bringing round 6 more lovely fresh eggs to say ‘Ehfaristo. How sweet is this village? The fire roars and our toes are warm!
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