I suppose it was always going to happen sooner or later. You know how I’ve often mentioned that it’s a constant source of amusement to me that in every Greek kitchen cupboard or drawer somewhere in a Greek home you’ll find a blood pressure monitor, right? And I’ve often banged on about how in the UK I don’t think I ever knew anyone who had one in their home, whereas just about everyone over here does. I’ve talked before about the fact that, in just about every Greek kitchen that I’ve ever visited, there’s at least one drawer stacked so full of drugs that you could open a pharmacy, yeah? I’ve observed that I’ve known groups of Greek women who get together for coffee in someone’s home, and for a topic of discussion, they get out the blood pressure monitor and all take their blood pressure as something that’s kind of accepted as normal. It’s frequently done as though it were the most natural thing in the world over coffee and kourabiedes or melomakarona, maybe even croissants (Incidentally, the Greeks seem to be mad for croissants, as one of their major TV ads – fronted by a top flight basketball player trying to assert that your life just wouldn’t be complete without a chocolate croissant from a major confectionary/bakery brand pre-packed in colourful foil in your sports bag or school tuck box, I kid you not, will confirm).

Well, it’s rather embarrassing to have to admit that we bought ourselves a blood pressure monitor this week. In our defence though, it was on the advice of a doctor in the local hospital. Yvonne’s had a few weird things going on lately (no need to go into the details) and it prompted us to drop by the hospital in town a few days ago, just to get it checked out. Even though we’re both very ‘alternative’ when it comes to treating ailments and general health maintenance, there’s no substitute for at the very least getting whatever is ailing you diagnosed by the medical profession, now, is there? Anyway, she ended up spending 6 hours in the outpatients’ department and they gave her a full roadworthiness test.

At this point I must spring aggressively to the defence of the Greek system. I’ve read comments by a lot of expats, who were either here on vacation or had moved over here, to the effect that the Greek medical care system wasn’t up to much. Well I must strongly disagree. On two previous occasions since moving here to the Ierapetra area we’ve had cause to take my wife to the hospital after she’d either felt something odd was going on inside, or had fallen and cracked her shoulder blade. On each occasion the local medical team has been so thorough as to check out every part of her with great diligence. They do scans, take x-rays, blood tests, and all kinds of examinations that I’m sure would not have been done were she in the UK. By the time they’ve finished with you, you walk out of there with a huge white envelope containing all kinds of reports, together with your x-rays, and, as long as you’re insured (which residents here ought to be, and that involves having what’s called an AMKA [Αριθμός Μητρώου Κοινωνικής Ασφάλισης] number) you don’t shell out a bean, not a penny. In the UK we’d say ‘she’s had a thorough MOT’ [Ministry of Transport vehicle roadworthiness test).

This visit, as I said, involved her staying for 6 hours, during which they actually took her blood three times, sent her along a couple of corridors to the lab to get it tested and then, after she’d returned, learnt the results through their internal computer system. She told me that, apart from one doctor (whom we shall just call ‘Mr. Grumpy’) all the staff were kindness itself, and were working their flaming socks off, the place was that busy, and this during Christmas week too. Critics, leave off, OK?

When I eventually returned to pick her up (owing to how much time she was there, I’d had to go out and get on with some errands we needed doing in the town area) she told me that the diagnosis was nothing to worry about other than that her blood pressure was a bit high. The female doctor who kind of ‘signed her off,’ as it were, said that she ought to take her blood pressure twice a day for a while, record the readings and see it if came down at all, since they understood that part of the reason for her high reading whilst she was in there were down to her anxiety at having to be in the hospital in the first place. She said that this doctor expressed surprise that we didn’t already have a blood pressure monitor in the house, ‘Odd these foreigners, aren’t they,’ she probably thought.

And thus, my friends, however the process played out, we became even more like the locals this past few days, since we’ve now got a blood pressure monitor in the home. Tell you what, however else we become even more assimilated, we’re definitely not going down the ‘lace doily on top of every piece of furniture’ route, all right? Good, I’m glad we’ve established that.

Here are some photos; some recent, some from my archive. Oh, firstly, the one at the top of this post was taken during our very enjoyable Boxing Day walk along the length of Pachi Ammos Bay. The rest of the shots I took then are in this first gallery below…

If you study the first one in that series above carefully, you’ll see that behind that rather unattractive see-through curtain fence, there’s an archaeological site of an ancient villa. There are a couple of major sites a little further away from the village, the most notable of which is Gournia, but this one here doesn’t even get a mention anywhere that I can find on line. That’s the thing about Greece in general, there is just so much archaeology, that they have an embarrassment of riches here.

Above: from April 2016, during a visit to Paros.

Above: Peeping through the doorway of the renovated fortress at the harbour end of Ierapetra seafront. It’s still not reopened to the public after more that 5 years of working on it. I’m dying to get inside again, since the last time we were able to do so was when we visited Ierapetra from Rhodes during November 2015, four years before we moved here.

Above: Traditional kafeneio in the square on Patmos, May 2019.

Both of the above: During a walk up the lane towards Meseleri yesterday afternoon at around 3.50pm. Above Yvonne’s left hand is the village of Kalamafka. Above her right, and the photo on the right as well, was the first view we got this winter of the mountain we call the ‘kourabieda’ with its first dusting of snow. It’ll look like that for a few months now, if things go as normal. It’s one of the peaks that surround the Lasithi Plateau.

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