Another metal bird but this time purely for joy! A peaceful escape to the hot sunshine of Greece where we could leave our worries at home and lie in the heat, escaping into our books and cooling off in the sea. I booked it in a moment of rage in late July when the rain in Cumbria was pouring so hard it was bouncing back at me. Knowing the prospect of nights drawing in was looming ahead, I had to get a last burst of blue sky. We took a chance on a cheap package, read the reviews for the resort and decided that people were just being picky and we, being far more tolerant than these people with unrealistic expectations, could suck it up. It’s only for a week after all!
Fast forward to the moment on the plane where the woman next to my husband informs him we’re expecting bad weather! What? But it’s forecast to be thirty-three degrees and sunny every day, we protest! Not now we’re told! Surely she is mistaken! The weather app on our phones has had those little orange sunshines showing for the next ten days!
We de-plane and are relieved to feel that longed for burst of heat! We get on the little transfer bus and feel that lovely combination of excitement and apprehension at the thought of seeing our resort. We are duly deposited, greeted by an abrupt lady who informs us of the additional charges and how much the desperately needed air conditioning will cost. We decline for now and we’re grudgingly escorted to our accommodation. I nod quietly as we see it.
“Well, we’ve been to Greece loads and never stayed in luxury!” I assure my lovely husband, who is anxiously awaiting my reaction. I can see him exhale with relief. I pack some clothes into the ramshackle furniture, and we set off to find something to eat and drink.
“We’ll need to find a fan if we’re not paying for air conditioning!” I announce.
My beloved barely conceals an eye roll and asks “tonight?”
“Yes! I’ll never sleep in a room that hot!”
His expression is weary as we are persuaded to have a meal in a restaurant that we are assured has a beautiful sea view. Sadly, neither of us can see it and we question our host as we leave. He smiles with all the smugness of someone who has just gained fifty Euros from two unsuspecting tourists, shrugs and points to somewhere that is obscured by a load of buildings! Suitably ripped off, we go on to buy a large pedestal fan for which my darling has haggled a price reduction, and he is now feeling very pleased with himself. He is not so pleased, however, that he now must carry it through every bar we visit on the way back to our apartment! Nor is he pleased that people keep making jokes about it! “Is that your number one fan?” being a favourite! We get said fan home, plug in the mosquito repellent plugs (who says romance is dead?) and lie there waiting for the fan to take effect. I look above me at what I can only describe as industrial ceiling tiles, the kind they have in business premises, and realise that the four above me have the most garish decals on. Brown and orange with metal trim arranged at a jaunty angle, they are as much of an eye sore as the dust-gathering dried flowers in the vase in the corner. Never mind, I’m here in Paradise, and tomorrow is another day.
We wake up to Paradise being overcast but hot. We reluctantly accept that this weather was not in our plans, but we will make the best of it. We start the queue for the tourist train into Zante Town and are joined by the family from hell! Noisy, cranky children being dragged through their holiday by hostile, grumpy parents determined to have a good time despite their little treasures! The train comes along, and we leap into the furthest away position from the Noisy Family that we can find! An elderly couple sit beside us, and the lady keeps trying to catch my eye to chat. She looks slightly frail and nervous, so she never actually strikes up a conversation. We are dropped off at the harbour and we pause to admire the beautiful yachts, especially the one with the helicopter pad on top! Who has that kind of money? Total extravagance, we mutter, while turning green with envy. We walk into the bustling streets filled with tourist shops and cafes. Everywhere is busy but we notice a place full of local people (always a good sign!) with a lovely atmosphere – shade from the trees and old men playing backgammon as though they have all the time in the world. The beauty is that they do! They are smoking heavily and drinking expressos, but I conclude that their longevity is due to the lack of stress and not so much their lifestyle!
An English couple invite us to sit down at their table and we accept gratefully. He is a very slick James Bond look-alike with a younger, pretty wife. He sits and holds court in the café with the air of someone who thinks himself king of the castle. A table becomes freed up and we thank our James Bond lookalike host and his wife and retreat to our own table. We decide that he must be a local gangster when someone comes to get him, and they go off down the street purposefully! We think they are planning something sinister and wonder where they have gone. Of course, this could well be the wanderings of our over-active imaginations at play! Breakfast is lovely and we wander off into the colourful shops with their brightly coloured leather goods, Zakynthos bathmats and selections of olive oils and olive oil toiletries.
On returning to our not-so-deluxe accommodation (really must take better note of those reviews next time!), we walk past some skips which are overflowing with rubbish and cats! The cats are everywhere, lying on dilapidated cushions, eating from old trays of food and castoffs from the local restaurants. They are fighting, climbing in and out of the skips and hiding in the trees. I decide this must be the inspiration for a Disney film and start to consider the plot! We return to the apartment, are grunted at by our not-so-congenial hosts and we decide playing Scrabble on our patio is preferable to gazing at the roof tiles while we aim for a siesta. We look from our patio to an apartment at the other side of the complex to see a very large Mr. Budgie Smugglers stretching on his patio. Not the most attractive backdrop but he was clearly living his best life!
We get dressed up for the evening. All glammed up and reeking of mosquito repellent – ah, that romance again! The weather has become more threatening of rain, and I wish I had brought my brolly! We find a fabulous family run restaurant where we have the loveliest, yet most inexpensive, meal. We are greeted and seated by a man we presume to be the son of the elderly man at the back who sits and counts money all night! The waiters (more sons?) circulate, checking that we are all happy and moving through the numbers of people waiting outside in the rain, delighted that they now have a captive audience who just want to get into a dry place without shopping around.
We go off in search of a brolly, then find ourselves in a bar with live music. Great! The band is a duo who perform rock covers and there is a lively atmosphere where people join in the singing. We are very grateful for the brolly as we negotiate our way back that night through the pouring rain. It rains all night, and the streets are still running with rain the next morning. We now know that the UK is having a heatwave which started the day we set off to Greece. I see pictures of people revelling in glorious blue skies all over the UK. That’s nice, I hiss through gritted teeth!
Still, we are achieving what we wanted which was an escape from working life where we could relax with our books and just spend some time together. Yes, you keep telling yourself that while you keep looking anxiously at the sky and praying for the weather to break! Comments on Facebook include “Really glad I’m not in Greece at the moment. Have you seen the flooding?” Not helpful for our morale but we soldier on with more Scrabble on the patio, Mr. Budgie Smugglers overlooking us and counting cats by the skip when we walk home!
There are different bands playing in our now-favourite bar every evening so we return to see who’s playing tonight. Another rock covers band but this time with foreign accents. We smile at the renditions of Can’t Get No Sateesfaction, and the fact that “Mudder Mary comes to me speaking words of weesdom!” “Ees these lof that I’m feelin’?” sounded vastly different when performed by Whitesnake!
I watch a beautifully groomed woman in her slim fitting dress and high heels as she attempts to flirt with her husband. He looks at her with disdain and I suspect he is a businessman of some kind who doesn’t easily let his hair down. With every drink she becomes more flirtatious, sidling up to him and singing as he contains an exasperated eye roll. Now captivated by this fascinating people-watching, I see a tanned lady in a see-through white dress singing Stand By Me with full gusto to her husband. He is cuddling her, and they are in a world of their own. How lovely that they can have this precious moment, away from their everyday lives, just to make memories like this. If only Mr Uptight could look at his flirty wife in the same way!
The bar manager has now joined the group for a rendition of Sweet Home Alabama and the crowd (all fifty of us!) go wild! By the end of the week, we had seen him join whatever band was playing. Rock star aspirations must have been part of his story. The climax of his performances was when a band were playing Born to Be Wild and they rode a motorcycle, with him on it, through the bar and up to the stage. Rock on!
I drink in every moment, conscious that it wasn’t so long ago that the world was quietened by a pandemic and there were no crowds, music or unadulterated joy like this. So, I, like the rest of the crowd, sing my little heart out to Take Me Home, Country Roads and embrace the happy atmosphere. To make my night complete, Mr Uptight has now had sufficient alcoholic lubrication that he is on the dance floor with his wife and they are laughing together. I silently hope he will do more of that! She looks so happy.
By day three, the weather has now become what we hoped it would be – glorious blue skies and hot! We find a lovely pool bar where we can spend our days lying in the sun with our books, dipping into the pool to cool down and moving to the waterfront restaurant for lunch. These are the lazy idyllic days that we dreamed of. More people watching and we start counting the women with trout pouts and numerous tattoos! Lots of big men in budgie smugglers alongside tattooed ladies in bikinis that are too small. A tiny lady circulates the pool bars offering massages and we watch as many people take her up on the offer, receiving back, neck or foot massages while lying in the sun. The lady wore a face mask which struck us as unusual in our post-Covid world. She lowered it one day and we were stunned to see that she had the biggest, most blindingly white teeth! They were so disproportionate to the rest of her! It gave us quite a start! Why was that Colgate ring of confidence advert from the seventies haunting me?
The waitress who served us every day at the pool bar seemed to never stop smiling. She treated everyone with the same lovely positive attitude. She never seemed phased by the endless requests from customers, trying to carry huge trays of food and drinks when the waterfront restaurant was windy. If only she knew what an effect she had on us as guests in her country and how her smile will be etched on our memories forever. This was in sharp contrast to the foul tempered bus driver who arrived at a bus stop where there must have been several delayed buses or no-shows of scheduled buses. He opened his doors to be greeted by a barrage of questions from people about where his bus was going. On being asked a variety of places to which he might be going, he just put up his hand and screamed “nooooo!!!” at the perplexed passengers! On being asked where these poor people could get their buses from, he just shrugged his shoulders and yelled “I don’t know!” and shut the doors on them. Customer service is alive and well!!!
We realised we were near the resort where we had stayed nineteen years before and where we had met our very good friends with whom we still meet up annually. We took a bus trip out there and we could not believe how all those years had slipped away in between. The resort was barely recognisable. What had once been rustic and quaint was now a small city by the sea with modern hotels and expensive bars and restaurants. We went for breakfast to the place we had frequented all those years ago. It used to be a thriving, bustling place. Now it was deserted and the despondent man who wearily showed us to our table turned out to be the same owner that we had known years before. He stood leaning on the railings and looking out at what had once been so busy and he despaired at how the place had changed, obviously moving the bulk of the business to another part of the resort. We felt sad for him. We could see the soul had gone out of the place. It was tired looking and in need of refurbishment which he probably didn’t have the heart for. Some memories are best left as they were.
We were sitting on our patio having a nightcap one night and the elderly couple we had seen on the train on day one stopped to talk to us. The nervous looking lady turned out to be very chatty and her husband more so. It turned out they spent months every year there as her husband played mandolin in a local group. They told us they got a long booking at our apartment complex every year so he could indulge this hobby. What would draw him back to this complex every year, we asked, incredulous? The friendly staff, he smiled! He must have met someone that we hadn’t! He then proceeded to recite us a poem. I can’t remember what started the process. I only remember ten minutes longer wishing it would stop! Don’t get me wrong – I think it is very clever to be able to remember a long poem and deliver it with such passion, but I would rather have been counting cats in the skips!
We found another bar we liked where there was a very friendly English lad who was a window cleaner in England in the winter and a bartender in Greece every summer. Who does your window round when you are away, I asked. He responded that they wait for him, and they are very understanding clients. Presumably happy not to see out of their windows all summer, I think! There is another perma-grinning waitress at the same bar. Again, she opens her mouth to reveal the most bedazzling set of teeth! What is with the Greek toothpaste, we wonder?
As the sun sets on our last day, I realise I have forgotten about the grey weather at the start and the grubby ceiling decals on the tiles. I will remember only the cast of characters we have met, and the peace of our silent camaraderie as we lay in the sun with our books, the joy of singing along with the music and people-watching, how we couldn’t resist counting the cats near out not-so-lovely apartment! I will cherish the sun-kissed, windswept lunches by the sea away from the worries of every day life. Not quite Paradise, but almost.
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