After a wonderful January of warm days and hot sunshine, although much lower rainfall than we needed, February has brought us the first real cold snap of the winter. We did have a couple of days at the end of December when it got a bit chilly, but this time it’s a week or so of daytime temperatures around the 12-13ºC mark, decidedly cool for us!! It’s pretty much par for the course to get a couple or three cold snaps each winter, and they usually come in February because the sea’s much colder then, so we can’t really complain.

Coupled with the cooler air-mass, though, is the fact that we’re getting very strong winds at the moment. The cooler weather we can deal with, but I have to admit that we don’t like the wind when it gets this strong. Our house actually doesn’t suffer anything like many of our neighbours, and that even includes the town, six kilometers below us, because the winds are predominantly from the north and we have the huge crag immediately behind the house to the north, phew. But we only have to venture a few metres away from our veranda to be blown away. Never mind, the photo above was taken on January 29th during a really nice walk we did over towards the west, with spectacular views down across the coast due east of the town. This was before the cold snap got to us, of course. Here are the rest of the snaps from that walk…

That little brown kid was a delight. He seemed to think that he knew us, because, as the herd began moving away due to our approach (photo at the top of the post), he ran towards us. We stood stock still, hoping not to freak him, and his mother soon bleated to him that she was approaching and no doubt trying to tell him not to trust those two interlopers by getting any closer. She came trotting past, as close to us as she wanted to get, and he finally decided that curiosity was one thing, but trusting your mum’s intuition quite another, and off he trotted.

We hung past Angla’i’a and Giorgo’s the other day too. Giorgos was sitting outside his kitchen door on a rickety old patio chair, tattered cap pulled low enough to shield his eyes, as he was sitting in full sun. At this time of the year you can do that, at least for a while. The lane that runs past their door was once, many years ago, the main thoroughfare through the village, but in the 1960’s they excavated the area immediately below it to make a better road for motor vehicles and now their lane sits ten feet above the main road, with a tubular metal railing, along with various trees sitting beside it, preventing people from falling. Alongside that railing is the area where Angla’i’a and hubby keep company when neighbours drop by, which they do on a very regular basis. They have a small round patio table there and a stack of old plastic chairs, plus the ubiquitous homemade oil-drum BBQ on re-bar legs (welded on) and a wooden crate for their firewood.

It’s probably ten feet from Giorgo’s chair to the patio table across the way, and sitting in the middle of that table was a transistor radio, powered by a cable extension that was stretched from the top of their front door (which is also their kitchen door BTW) and blaring out Radio Lasithi. The cable was wrapped around a bough on the huge rubber tree that provides shade on the far side of the lane, right above the road below, and so one could walk beneath it with confidence. The funny thing is, Giorgos and his industrious wife also have a much larger rectangular patio table right beside where he was sitting and against the wall of the house, but he for some reason didn’t want the radio there. So, as we approached from around the corner, we could hear the radio blasting away well before reaching our seated octogenarian friend. I didn’t like to ask him why he had set up this bizarre listening arrangement, and anyway we were soon in conversation about why his wife Angla’i’a wasn’t there. She’d gone over to ‘Agio,’ as the locals call Agios Nikolaos, to see relatives. Ah, well, we’ll have to drop by another day, probably after this cold snap’s behind us though.

The snap below was taken at the Plaz on the waterfront last Sunday at around 12.45pm.

And these two of that glorious almond tree right beside the old mill in the centre of the village were taken at ten to six on Wednesday, which is why the light’s a bit dull…

Next week it’s looking like warming up again, and it won’t be a moment too soon. TTFN.

Oh, and I nearly forgot, the Santorini thing. I’m sure you’ll have heard that the island’s experienced literally hundreds of quakes and tremors this past few days and, as a result, thousands have been evacuating. The evacuation has been complicated by the high wind situation, because almost no ferries are running their scheduled routes at the moment and no aircraft are flying from the islands either. In normal times, this presents no great problem, apart from a minor inconvenience for business travellers and supplies etc. Maybe the supermarkets run out a few things now and then on the islands, but it soon goes back to normal. Blue Star, though, the country’s largest fleet of inter-island ferries, have been running a few from Santorini, risking very high seas, because of the sheer numbers wanting to get off the island. The experts say they have no idea if and when the quakes will stop and they don’t really know if a big one’s on the way, so the uncertainty is dreadful. All we can do is spare a thought for the businesses on the island, because tourism is already reportedly drastically down for the coming season.

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