The fabulous Serge Dive’s PURE Life Travel fair is harder to get into than the jeans you had when you were 18, but oh, once you are in…… Regular readers of this blog will know what I had to do to get the zip up… (just type PURE in the search function).
I have never seen such astonishing parties – dry ice, floating candles and whirling dervish dancers with glittering streamers on spotlit plinths, all reflecting in the pool, Berber horsemen and palm trees, amazing food and terrific music.
We now know that it is a myth that Eskimos have 25 words for snow, but it is true that Greeks have about 25 words for noisy fun/merrymaking/fuss/chaos/milling about and general liveliness. Fassaria is one of these words with connotations of annoyance. Vavoura is one that indicates lots of noisy people having a good time.
Mykonos in October is free of all this – no vavoura, no fassaria, just serene and lovely light, clear sea, great food, friendly locals, sun and beauty.
I am in Athens at the moment, great, good-humoured uproar as Central Athens was closed off and cleared, Beijing style, for Angela Merkels’s visit – funny news coverage too – flag-waving lefty ranting hysterically “Suppose I say today I feel like a nice walk through Plaka with my friends to see the Acropolis, which is my right as Greek, as a human being, as a…..are you telling me I can’t??”
“When did you last want to walk anywhere, let alone see the Acropolis” shouts back the right wing politician –
“Well what if a Spanish tourist wants to walk to see the Acropolis with his girlfriend, and it is his last day of holiday and he can’t?” says the lefty with a brave rally – “Did you care about him last week when we had a general strike?” shoots back the Rightie –
Much discussion about whether the German flag stuck on the windscreen of the Merkel-bearing aircraft “Bundesrepublikdeutschland” was indeed smaller than the Greek flag stuck on the other side of the windscreen or not. Not, we thought. But the German national anthem is certainly longer. Samaras is taller than Merkel though.
Dante, in his “Inferno”, wrote that there is no greater pain than remembering times of joy in times of sorrow – the opposite is also true, there is no greater joy than thinking of Northern Europe’s autumn gales and dead leaves while strolling through the leafy streets of Kolonaki in Athens, in a balmy 30 degrees while piles of purple figs and translucent strawberry-scented grapes spill out from the grocer shops, and blue plumbago festoons itself around the outdoor cafes.
While sitting at a table outside, waiting for a friend and staring into space thinking of what to write for this blog, a man at the table next door asked what I thought staring into space would do. I replied “I am waiting for the Muse,” to which he replied, quoting in ancient Greek, the opening of the Odyssey. (For those who haven’t yet discovered the joys of Homer, it opens with “Sing to me Muse, of the man and his wanderings”) As an Ithaca girl, from where Odysseus set forth and to where he took so long to return, that pleased me enormously. Only in Greece….
Whoever as a child read Mary Renault’s fabulous historical books “The King must die” and “The Bull from the Sea”, about Theseus, the gallant young Athenian bull-leapers, King Minos, poor mad Ariadne, and tragic Hippolytus, set in Minoan Crete, will love the fact that Red Bull are doing their leaping on Santorini this year, with the crater of the volcano that destroyed Minoan Crete and liberated Theseus and his bull-dancers, as a backdrop. The universe does sometimes come up with these things thank goodness, and although I prefer Vinsanto to Red Bull, I am all for this modern version of Bull- leaping . And who knows perhaps the Ancient Bull Leapers of Minos drank something like Red Bull too?
A very elegant and blue-blooded client of ours, seated next to me at a dinner, whispered in my ear that he had been spending his midnight hours secretly at his computer looking at our website – the beautiful pictures, the descriptions of islands and islanders, landscapes and food, and above all the blues of the sea and sky, the dusk and wooden shutters, the lavender of the evenings, the azure of the flowers, and so forth – you get my drift. “It is not a website,” he said, “It is soft porn”.
I am glad I studied Philosophy – it has so many practical applications.
For example, I am frequently asked by clients who have booked a villa what the address of their villa is, as they do not believe/like/trust our rather boring villa names – “Spetses1E” for example.
“But what is the villa really called” they ask plaintively, “and what is the address?”
In reality the villa name and address is probably “The villa built by Yanni behind the church, when his wife ran off with Dimitri his brother in law, the house with the grey shutters and the pink bougainvillaea in the front.”
One of our most successful holidays this summer has been a package of boat and villa. Whether you are an adventurous, adrenaline-seeking couple who can’t decide between a hidden retreat on a remote bay, and a sleek and adrenaline fueled racing toy like a Riva, you can take both, and alternate the atmosphere of an authentic, not very comfortable but highly romantic beach shack, with 500 horsepower of 21st century speed and trimmings. Maybe you are an inveterate villa -lover wanting to get some peace and quiet and offload a restless husband and noisy children, or someone with lots of friends to entertain in the area – either way, the addition of a boat can sprinkle stardust on your holiday.
This blog is a resume of all the queries that guests have been making and worries that have been raised, largely by irresponsible press coverage by possibly well-intentioned but in that case badly-informed journalists:
So, to set the record straight;
There is lots of good news about Greece for visitors, though sadly, as I said, nothing that would make headlines in the newspapers;
GOOD NEWS (always comes first!)
