There’s something I forgot to mention when we were spending a week in Siteia back in May, and that was a seemingly little thing that speaks volumes about the relaxed attitude they have to customers in many of the café/bars in these parts. We sampled a number of different bars along the very attractive harbour front in Siteia, and at one of these the waitress bore a striking resemblance to a young Sandra Bullock. I’ve read somewhere that if you’re the type who’s always spotting resemblances between people it could be an indicator of a creative mind. I’ll take that, sounds a bit encouraging, right? I mean, when you’re a writer, which, after now having published fourteen works and counting, I can rather gingerly lay claim to being, to have a mind that’s not very creative would be quite a handicap.

Anyway, when you order coffee at a coffee bar in these parts you always also receive a free bottle of water. Sometimes it’s a plastic bottle of branded mineral water and sometimes it’s a refillable glass bottle, the kind many people here keep in their fridge so as to have a regular supply of cooled water in the summer months. I’ve mentioned this before, I’m sure, but the tap water in this part of Crete is infinitely better for you than that of the UK, IMHO. For starters, it doesn’t have chlorine or fluoride added to it, both of which carry risks that the public are generally not aware of, and the very fact that UK water has those things added tends to take away the citizen’s freedom of choice, doesn’t it? The water in Lasithi in general is stone-filtered within the mountains from which it emerges as springs, and it’s primarily snowmelt which is also not too crammed full of minerals and salts. You can’t really get better quality water to drink than that, so we have no problem when a waiter/waitress places a glass bottle on our table, often a 1 litre bottle at that. In fact, we mainly avoid drinking water from plastic bottles wherever possible because, as anyone who’s spent any time over here will have seen, huge crates laden with hundreds of plastic water bottle are often unloaded from trucks and left to bake on wooden pallets in the sun before they’re eventually shipped into the shade to be fed into restaurant fridges for human consumption. It’s an established fact that water in plastic bottles left in the hot Greek sun causes an interaction between the water and the plastic of the bottle. Enough said, I reckon.

The reason I’m rattling on about all of this is because, when we were sitting at our table on the waterfront in Siteia (and, to be fair, this happens here in Ierapetra too), as we got to the end of our iced coffees, and thus to the moment when we’d be supposed to pay up, get up and leave, ‘Sandra Bullock’ arrived at our table with a fresh bottle of water, and took away the nearly empty one. She did this with a friendly smile too. Now, think about it: Since we had only the dregs of our iced coffees left, the staff could well have cleared the table, giving us the strongest hint that it was time for us to leave, so that the establishment could hopefully get a new couple of bums (not the American understanding of the word, OK?) on the seats and thus make some more money, right?

This may seem like a small thing, but to me it’s not. Having patronised cafe-bars in lots of more commercial ‘resorts’ here in Greece, including, sadly, the very beautiful, but somewhat excessively tourist-trampled Lindos on Rhodes (just using that as an example), we see a marked difference in how the staff treat their customers. At that table in ‘Sandra’s‘ café-bar, that extra bottle of water was a statement that the staff had no problem at all with us staying around for another half an hour, even though we were not likely to spend any more cash. We all know the scenario: you just about finish your drinks, or maybe your meal if it’s a restaurant, and the staff, who’ve been watching you like hawks, are there in a jiff, whip away all the debris and leave you sitting at an empty table. The message is clear, often because they will also bring your bill before you’ve even thought about asking for it, and that is, “OK, clear off now. We want more grockles at this table. You’ve had your turn.”

If you’re used to staying in heavily touristy areas, you’ll probably be well used to this ‘conveyor belt’ system at restaurants and bars, but it saddens me greatly. I know, they’ve got to make a living, but what kind of taste does it leave in your mouth? The traditional Greek hospitality is ebbing away in such places, I believe. So, that extra bottle of water from our Sandra Bullock lookalike told us that we were in a less spoilt area, an area where most of the clientele are still locals and people don’t worry about how much time you want to sit around at one of their tables.

OK, yet another soapbox moment over. Here are some recent photos, some of which were taken with this rather neat, although slightly ageing by now, Canon digital camera that my brother-in-law Martin gave me a few years ago. It has a modest zoom on it, not a digital one either (since they tend to lose picture quality rapidly, don’t you think?), but the real McCoy. Back in the day it was one of the more expensive mini-cameras you could buy, and with age its image quality doesn’t deteriorate, even if it doesn’t have bluetooth or wi-fi. OK, so I whip out the SD card and plug it into the side of my laptop to upload the shots, but take a look at some of these, mainly taken around our garden a couple of days ago…

Above: Two of our potted hibiscus plus a euphorbia, ‘Crown of Thorns‘ plant. the euphorbia family is huge, and some types you’d never believe are actually euphorbia, but these ‘Crown of Thorns‘ ones are really good to have around your garden, because they need very little water and the leaves and flowers almost never drop.

Above: What about that for a quality shot of a cicada sitting in one of our olive trees, eh? If you ‘open image in a new tab‘ and blow it up, the detail is amazing.

Above: This year looks like being a very good one for olives. Plus, they may not be ripe yet, but these grapes are already adorning our muesli at breakfast, and they taste sooo sweet too.

Above; Another close-up of a cicada on the back fence of our lower garden. These little chaps really do fascinate me. You hadn’t really noticed though, eh? Here below are a couple of views from our garden…

The first two above are the view from our veranda, tough eh? In the third one above, I was intending to get a shot of Evangelia’s ‘alley’ when she emerged and walked off to her neighbour’s door. So I didn’t intend to ‘snoop!’ She does though, add a little to the picture’s atmosphere I think. Taken from our lower garden terrace. That one was taken at around 4.40pm on Saturday.

Finally, we’ve got a smart new carved stone sign at the southern end of the village. Angla’i’a, the village ‘proedros‘ recently organised a team to set up a little picnic area under the pines on the tight bend in the road just below the village. When they’d finished they left this huge boulder just sitting in the modest parking area beside the road. It’s about as tall as I am (6 ft 1″), if you want an idea of the scale. For several months it just sat there, apparently without purpose, until now, that is. A couple of days ago we heard some ‘chipping noises’ from the veranda at home. Looking down with the binoculars, we could see a couple of men humping a huge slab of stone on to the top of the boulder. Curiosity getting the better of me, I went down for a shufty. Imagine my delight when I found this…

Hope that little lot contained something you found interesting. Until the next post, look after yourself.

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My official website about my writing: https://johnphilipmanuel.wixsite.com/works

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