under another sun

Our last full day. Much like the others, breakfast on our balcony, in the warm sun, and then we mooched down to the beach, armed with a couple of spanakopitas and read, and cross-stitched and listened to podcasts. A last big swim, although just as I was about to start swimming I was ambushed by a panic attack. Typical scenario for me -- anxiety striking when I am at my most relaxed. However it was all over quickly, and Lorraine and I headed back into the water for a lovely swim.   We saw two octopuses. one hiding between rocks watchful of us, and subtly changing colour and the second, brilliantly, over a sandy bottom and swimming and crawling along the bottom on its eight legs and inserting itself into the long seagrass. It was fabulous and strangely exhilarating to see it.  Back on shore, an older local guy crept into the water with an evil tripod tipped spear gun. He emerged some time later with a dead octopus -- which we felt quite sad about -- and two or three fish all bou...

Lorraine and I flew back from Cephalonia, Kefallonia, Kefalonia or Kefallina depending on where you read it. In our last morning we quickly packed, and then slipped into the glassy sea, which was just a few steps from our door, and snorkelled around the harbour bay of Assos (or Asos). For two weeks we had swum and snorkelled every day, in what was something like a vast aquarium. There were a couple of dozen varieties of fish: highly coloured ornate wrasse and rainbow wrasse,  blennies, gold striped dreamfish  that can give you hallucinations if you eat them, dark little fork tailed damselfish, shoals of mullet and sand smelts, parrotfish, two banded bream, saddled bream, little yellow finned annular bream, tigerish painted combers, garfish (which I always like to see as it takes me back to fishing in Guernsey where they are called longnose) and dark little fork-tailed damselfish. These latter when very young, and viewed by certain lights glowed violet. There were hand sized ...

Plodding along with the cow work. Broken by an occasional stretch of my legs around the garden or the park. Little to report today, other than I got a voicemail message from Bob saying among other things that he'd broken his ankle, which sounds ouchy.  Following the Greek crisis quite a bit. I hate to see the Greeks blamed for the failures of global capitalism, and being lazily portrayed as workshy tax dodgers while their pensions are being halved by the governments, and employment tumbles. I've met many decent, hardworking folks in Greece. Lorraine, Betty and I eating salmon outside in the garden tonight, plucking a few strawberries from our strawberry pot, and then doing some watering. A garden connects you to the outside world, a world beyond the advertising concepts for cow ailments that has big skies and flowers. In the evening persisting in my reading of John Ashbery, who whenever I've read him thought he was tripe, so imagine my disappointment when I was reading ...

Below, Kokkari harbour wall at dusk, the beach in late afternoon, the corner between beach and harbour where we stayed, our apartment in the building on the left top floor, a perfectly placed bench, a narrow backstreet, moonrise, and some of the tavernas on the water.

Below a shot taken from our balcony of the sun diamonding the sea; the view from the sun bed; goat shelter; graffiti in Samos Town, the square in Kokkari, a Kokkari street, Lorraine in Kokkari.