So far our road trip is mostly about walking the streets of Athens. 16,000 steps in 30 degree heat today. Starting with an early morning trip to an art supplies store to buy more watercolour paper but also because the owner makes his own artisanal wax pastels. His store was fabulous and his work station at the back of the store was a riot of colour.
I’ve never used oil pastels but these were sorely tempting. For the sake of luggage I bought a small tube of watercolour named Olive just to celebrate its Greekness.
Getting to the store was a fabulous trip of street graffitti and a ridiculously named Vinyl and CD store.
My self-portrait was taken on a tree that had been painted blue and decorated with shards of broken mirrors.
Traditional end of the holiday shot. The real life one, is of course, the washing machine churning her way through piles of sandy but barely worn clothes.
Our beach had two ends Bougie and Boho.
We were primarily Boho in our choices . Towels not sunbeds, happy Greek families not Golf Club types.
But the people watching and the coffee were fabulous in Bougie land. Bougie land had pool bars and women with inflated lips and men with inflated egos. Book covers on the bookshelves in Bougie land were as pneumatic as breasts and lips.
Both ends of the beach were rather fabulous. The snippets of conversation were infinitely more interesting in the bougie end, significantly because we could understand 50 % of them. Although listening to Greek families nattering is what Greek holidays are about. A simple conversation always sounds like a drama.
And then the flight home, Bougies and BoHo’s all sat on the same coach and the same aircraft. All happy that they had achieved their holiday goals. All fairly similar in the cold light of an airport arrivals lounge. Everyone has dirty washing.
A bug eating her supper. Someone else’s rose bush so I am charmed rather than irritated and so much prettier than a slug. Slugs are the main consumers in our yard. They never exude charm, just slime. A slug slimed across a pencil sketch I had left in the yard recently. Instead of a twinkly trail , she left a luminous yellow stream of consciousness. I pondered the point of slime that is twinkly in most circumstances but luminous yellow on white paper
There must be a reason but I’m not certain I can work it out for myself. On a dull day I will google slug slime and learn something which may or may not be ponderable. I know the beauty industry uses something euphemistically called Snail Serum. I have never seen anything slug related.
I’m just squeezing the last rays out of my holiday sun. Hoping for dry hair before the transition stage of coaches, queues and aircraft.
Paperbacks all cast out into the world of perpetual holiday reading for strangers, while I return to the electronic world of Kindle.
Long before daily blogging became a thing, we were regular Greek Holiday goers.
Covid put a stop to all that and then catching up with far flung family took a few years to achieve. Greece became one of the many things associated with the COVID hangover that we are all living through. Adding Greece as a tag and category in my blogging world feels like an achievement.
Tomorrow I will be back to less forgivable bugs eating rose leaves.
At home or abroad I waste the most time pondering. Pondering looks unproductive to the outside observer but the time is never truly wasted. Pondering also occurs when I look gainfully employed. Pondering often gets me out of trouble because pondering sometimes causes a change of direction with human interactions and different endeavours. Mulling things over or reflecting are just other words for pondering.
Holiday pondering is just the same as home pondering but in a better climate. Today I pondered Donkey Milk. Unknown to me it has been a beauty and health product from the beginning of time. Donkey milk is the closest thing to human milk . Which puts a whole different view of the Christian Nativity. When I was young I wondered/ pondered why a nine months pregnant woman would want to ride a donkey. When a mule/pony/horse would have been more comfy for her blessed lady garden and or pregnancy created piles.
But here I am the daft one. Joseph on a last minute shop before they set off was sent for some formula, just in case. Breast milk substitute and transport all in one cute package.
I’ve just gone for a face cream. Two choices 24 hour, or wrinkle.
The wrinkles arrived a while ago so that seemed like a lost cause but 24 hour cream regularly applied could give me eternal life should I choose. Warding off the grim reaper one day at a time.
I have completely failed to mention my Kindle book reading. Which this year is my non-fiction holiday read. I am a good deal further into it than this picture suggests. I had excellent history teachers at my school and wish I could have studied it beyond O level but I wish that about lots of subjects. I have never wished for different History teachers until now. Shalina Patel serves up history so intriguingly she would most certainly get an apple from me everyday.
The Hotel Shelf book has been chosen. It will almost certainly be the flight home book.
I picked up a fabulous life quote from my current read, soon to be set free to roam wherever with all the other Hotel shelf paperbacks the world over.
” We can’t all live in perfect harmony with our integrity “
I will be taking that sentence home with me.
Necessity is the mother or father of invention. Overnight I remembered my dad sharpening pencils with glass paper ( sandpaper) . An Emery board has done a very good job. No pencil crisis any more.
In hotel bookshelf faux science I would say that the majority of guests here are German and they read a better standard of books than the British guests. There are some shockingly bad cover art examples in either language. Predominantly ‘Romance’ novels that my mother was very dismissive of when I was younger. She called them pulpy kidney books, as if describing some terrible medical malady that would befall anyone reading such stuff. Not for her and her second wave feminist friends, except…
When it was time to clear my parents home following their deaths I found a surprise stash of exactly that type of novel in the back of her wardrobe. She didn’t sink to Mills and Boon but the subject matter was predominantly historical and medical romance.
At death her kidneys were in fine form so maybe she never crossed a line or maybe she imagined pulpy kidneys.
Book 4 of the holiday reading pile includes a lot of rape. Hardly surprising as the core of the narrative is the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong during World War 2. In this book , so far , none of the main characters are involved. The brutality of the Japanese Occupation is the background to the narrative. I can revel in knowing the location well and slotting history into well-known locations is always fascinating.
In other news two new-to -me, Greek words have cropped up this week . Thanks to my fellow bookworms.
It was too tempting not to include a book and buttocks in a beach sketch . Surrounded, as I am, by buttocks both beautiful and not.
All that buttock sketching has revealed an error on my packing. No pencil sharpener!!
The second word is Ekphrasis.
Vivid description, oh how I wish I had the words. I may no longer have a useful pencil but I do still have my paints and a camera to enable a vivid end to the holiday.
The first book from the hotel shelf has been picked up, lets see how that goes.
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