Wednesday 20 June 2012

The wind in Chalkide (or Kalkis)

It is very hot. But a wonderful wind (blowing light plastic bottles along the streets and tangling the streamers from boats and shop fronts) makes life quite bearable. We decided to spend a week here. It's a sizeable town, quite hilly, boasting several churches -- one medieval, and an old castle, and a museum. Hope to get there but right now the hours between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. are too hot for me: even with factor 50 suncream my skin is not happy.
Brilliant light, fading at the end of the day into pinks and mauves and opals and reflected across the water. The heat is happy-making. Our boating neighbours sit on deck in the shade of their awnings and read; I study Greek, the men from this shipyard work, all through the heat, wearing large sunhats, communicating by cell-phone. Their langauge still sounds strange to me, words resembling Russian, sometimes like Spanish-Arabic -- and then I hear something I recognize. We met an Italian couple (Paola and Francesco, for the change!) who had sailed in Greece for eight years and still had problems understanding what was being said (the difficulty of dialects!) but told us they did find many words similar to Italian.
David (and Yannos) are mounting a wind generator so that the cool-box will be more useful (joke) when the engine isn't running.
We have found lots of interesting shops here, a wonderful laundry where they are also making up some fitted sheets for Stroemhella, and truly excellent places to eat. Delicious meals for ten euros a head. Wine included.

So why quit Chalkide? (above two funeral stelae from the first century AD, I think)

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