Well, winter has arrived for sure. We’re experiencing our first cool air mass since the summer and it’s brought the daytime temperatures down into the teens. In fact, today we’ve just been for an hour’s walk up towards Meseleri and the temperature on the veranda when we left the house was only reading 15ºC at around 3.30pm, which is generally as cold as it ever gets during the day at any time in the winter. We’re not complaining though, because we still had our coffee out on the sun-loungers on the terrace this morning as the clouds scudded sedately around above us, occasionally granting some warm sunshine and other times obscuring the sun so that it instantly felt colder.

We’ve actually now had some real rain too, and that’s good because the drought was getting rather serious. A few nights ago Storm Byron swept across the whole country, bringing fast-flowing muddy torrents even to the streets on the tiny island of Kastelorizo. We saw this on the TV news report and decided that we’d got off very lightly here. All we had was a rather wild night, and the worst of the rain only lasted about an hour. There were, however, a few major wind gusts, one of which managed to knock a couple of plant pots over and rearrange the patio chairs a little. We didn’t lose power either, apart from one very brief millisecond when it went off and immediately came back on again. It did annoy me anyway though, as I was watching a music documentary on YouTube at the time and had to wait a few minutes while the router reset itself.

That’s nothing though. In Myrtos, just 15k to the west of us, some friends of ours said that they’d lost power in the night and it was off for most of the next day. 

Passing by the mailboxes in the main street on Friday, I opened ours to find it empty (it usually is), although it did grate slightly because Yvonne’s been waiting for a new debit card to arrive from our UK bank, and you just never know how long mail is going to take from the UK ever since it left the EU (grrr). The boxes are only a couple of minutes walk from the house, but we usually pull up beside them in the car as we’re returning home from town. I was just about to get back into the car when a voice called out, “Hang on there Gianni!”

I looked up to see that Angla’i’a was trotting towards me, a bunch of letters and a package or two in her hands. She came right up to me and asked if I’d help her sort it all, and thrust them all into my hands while she fumbled with the master key to open the front panel of the village mailboxes. 

“How come you’ve got it all then?” I asked her, “and the master key too?”

‘The latest postman’s too lazy to hang about long enough to make sure that all the mail goes into the correct boxes,” she replied, “so I told him to give it all to me and I’d do it.”

That figured. At least she knows that she’ll do a good job, especially when she’s got the likes of me happening by to lend a hand. Sifting through what was in my hands, I soon discovered that half of it was either for us or our next door neighbours, so I was able to take that off her hands. There was a package from Healthspan, the UK Channel Island-based company from which we order all our herb supplements and vitamins, and there was also a letter for Yvonne with a stiff section in it and, when we opened it, it proved to be that which we’d theorised. Her new card had arrived safely, phew. The mail only comes to the village once a week, and the recent TV news report about the Greek Government’s decision to close around 200 post offices nationwide set alarm bells ringing loudly. We’d seen a newspaper report that the ELTA Courier office in Ierapetra was closing without delay, so not a few people around here also concluded that we were in danger of losing our main post office too, which would truly be a disaster for this area.

Just last Tuesday we’d had to go into town to see if we could get Yvonne’s new driving licence sorted. I’m not about to tell you how old she is, but both of us need to renew our licenses every three years now. Sigh. Still, we knew what to do because we’d already done it a couple of times anyway, the last time having been when I renewed mine last winter. In case you’re not aware, in order to get your new driving license ordered correctly, you need to fulfil a number of criteria.

1. You have to get a ‘paraboli’ from the local KEP office. That’s essentially a form that you take to either your bank or the local Post Office where you pay a fee of €105.

2. You need to get two identical photos done and they need to fulfil the right requirements size-wise and content-wise.

3. You have to get a doctor/cardiologist to check your heart over and sign that you’re not likely to keel over while at the wheel.

4. You need to visit an optician where the eye test isn’t as rigorous as it would be for a new pair of glasses, but you need to be able to read numbers and letters from a specific distance. He or she too has to issue a certificate declaring that you can see OK to drive. Both the cardiologist and the optician levy a fixed fee of €20. It’s gone up a bit over recent years, but not a great deal. I have heard some horror stories from ex-pats living here, though, who tell me that they were charged well over the odds, like for example €50 a pop, or even more. It’s a lottery depending on where in the country you live, it seems, but if you speak the language well enough, you’re OK, they’ll treat you as a local and you’re less likely to be ripped off.

Once you’ve got all that done you have to go back to the KEP office where they’ll process the application. This time around we were well impressed at how much progress the government has made in digitalising the whole process. When you go to the KEP office for the paraboli it now has a four digit PIN on it. That PIN is then used by both the optician and the cardiologist to process their certificates, and it’s all done via the government’s computerised system. Wow, eh? Greece is well and truly getting adapted to the 21st century and no mistake. The photo too, isn’t printed out like it used to be, the photographer merely emails it to the KEP office, and from there it’s added to the online application, and bob’s your uncle, all done. Say goodbye to reams of A4 photocopies with rubber stamps all over them. Ooh, I could get quite nostalgic, but I won’t, don’t you worry.

With only a couple of slight hiccups we got it all done in the one morning and went for a coffee on the seafront to celebrate. Oh, and since we were in the Post Office to pay the paraboli, I was able to ask the lady behind the counter if ours was going to close under the Government’s sweeping reforms. “No,” she replied, “it’s not.” Boy was I relieved to hear that, as no doubt would 26,000 other local residents be too, I reckon.

Here is the usual selection of recent photos (and maybe a nostalgic one or two, we’ll see):

Above: Coffee at the Plaz on November 14th, around 1.00pm.

Above: At last, with the weather cooling down we can go back to taking walks in the olive groves and mountainsides, a truly joyous winter pastime.

Above: the view through our French Windows on November 28th at 8.25am.

Both of the above: The north beach at Ierapetra, November 30th at around 11.25am

Above: We’re giving our olive trees a serious prune, but that doesn’t mean we can’t stop for coffee.

Above gallery: Just after dawn last Thursday, as Storm Byron retreats into the distance.

And, finally, one from the archive…

Above: Believe it or not, the above is a colour photo. It was taken Friday 9th March 2012 from our garden in Kiotari on Rhodes, and I still marvel at the beauty of those cloud formations. The photo is not retouched in any way.

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