Tag: Crete

Kazani!

Posted on by Neal Asher

This last weekend Pandelis came up to still his raki, with the assistance of Nectarius who owns the kazani next to our house. Being English we worry about being rude and imposing ourselves there, but it’s more the case that not turning up to try some proto raki and eat brisolas, is rude. So, on the Saturday, Pandelis arrived at 8.00AM to start the fire and get to work making raki.

We went down to Makrigialos for breakfast, then on the way back stopped in at the butcher’s and bought two kilos of pork chops. We dropped those off in the kazani building then disappeared into our house for a while, doing a bit of work, whatever. At 3.00 we wandered out whereupon Nectarius stuck some brisolas on the barbecue. We then sat eating barbecued pork, baked potatoes, pomegranites etc and drinking raki.

I brought out a jar of my chilli sauce for the Cretans to try with their brisolas and was surprised, despite its heat, how much it was enjoyed. Occasionally we cleared our palates with lemon and salt – as with tequila – and then finally stumbled off to bed at midnight.

The next day Pandelis arrived at 9.00, looking slightly the worse for wear. I was too, and required large amounts of coffee and water, and some breakfast, before I started to feel human again. A Liverpudlian called Roddy came up to our house at about 1.00 – bringing two kilos of brisolas – and an hour or so after that we again went over to the kazani. The chilli sauce again went down well and I provided quite a few of the Cretans with some plants I had been growing. The local drunk turned up and bartered some sweetcorn for raki, got wiped out fairly quickly – he probably has just a few ounces of liver left – fell asleep in his chair with snot dribbling out of his nose, got up and staggered a few yards to some nearby stone steps and fell asleep on them for a few hours before later getting up and weaving his way down into the village. Pandelis finished doing his raki and left at about 8.00. We stayed there with Nectarius, his wife Eli and his son, and again didn’t get back home until about midnight.

Next weekend Nectarius is making his raki and our attending his compulsory. This next week I’m swearing off the booze in readiness. It is perhaps a good thing that we’re heading back to Britain on November 3rd, since the raki season is only just kicking off. A whole month of kazanis and I’d be the one with the dribbling nose.

Thursday 21st

Posted on by Neal Asher

Though fairly bright yesterday it was windy, which dragged the temperature down a bit, so I lit the stove. As Caroline pointed out, central heating is just not the same, no matter where the thermostat is set, and it’s nowhere near as fast. Within about ten minutes the house temperature had risen by two degrees. Later, while preparing food, we put the saucepans on the stove to heat up initially, only finishing the job on the cooker. Then well fed we didn’t bother with baked potatoes or chestnuts. Maybe another night.

Later still, while we were watching the last episodes of Dexter, I noted that I was feeling rather warm. The stove had taken the temperature up to 28 degrees despite its vents being closed – the wind was drawing rather well through the chimney – and thermostatic control involved opening the terrace doors. This might seem like a waste, but we have plenty of wood, like the old beams from the ruin, and heating up the inside of the house will continue the long process of drying it out. As has been pointed out, the two feet thick limestone and mud walls have been soaking up rain for years and it will probably take years for them to dry out. And, since there’s no damp course, it’s doubtful that they will ever dry out completely.

The tiling inside the ruin is now complete, but the exterior tiling has stopped until things have dried out a bit more. Tomorrow we’ll go to Sitia to buy some light fittings that I’ll probably put up next year. Maybe the plumbing will be done this year, if not it’s no problem since we’ll be here for three or four months before anyone turns up. This will give us time to tidy up all those bits that are always left after a building job, do the painting, fit the small furnishings that’ll be required, like shelves, a holder in the shower for shampoos etc, a bathroom cabinet and other paraphenalia.

Wednesday 20th

Posted on by Neal Asher

Now we’re tending not to sit outside on the terrace in the evenings, we’re watching more TV. We pay a minimal amount for Greek TV as part of a council tax that goes on to our electricity bill (the words ‘council tax’ have an entirely different weight in Britain, but I expect it will get to be the same here – the amount of government theft from the populace never goes down). However, what there is to watch on it is limited for us. We don’t know the language well enough to keep up, so we won’t be getting addicted to Greek soap operas any time soon, have just a marginal understanding of the news, and mainly turn on the TV to check the weather forecast. Cookery programs are okay, and a quizz called Fatus Olus during which the questions appear as subtitles on the screen helps us learn the language, lots of American and British series do appear, with subtitles, but our reception of Star, which shows the best films, is crappy, and the commercial breaks are long enough to make a cup of tea, cook dinner and repaint the bathroom. Mainly we resort to DVDs.

This year we had what appeared to be a nice stock of stuff to catch up on: season 8 of 24, the last two seasons of The Tudors and the latest Dexter. All of these have been immensely enjoyable. The 24 was right up there with the best of the previous seasons, though annoyingly one critical episode near the end wouldn’t play; The Tudors is a historical drama I would rank up there with I Claudius, The Borgias and Rome; whilst Dexter, which we saved for last, is as enjoyably gory as ever, though now we only have a few episodes left to watch. Next we’ll start going through The Great War, then after that the well will be dry.

I guess, at this time of year, the news and documentaries we can understand, films, police procedurals, historical dramas and thrillers are what we miss most. Also, since the TV is definitely not what occupies our time when the weather is crap outside, the lack of constant Internet access can be annoying. I’ve considered the various satellite systems both for TV and the Internet, mobile Internet and other options, but the price always seems to be in the region of €50 a month, and reports of the quality of connectivity are not so great, especially where we are. The information age is upon us an accelerating, but still has yet to reach rural mountain villages in Eastern Crete.

Tuesday 19th

Posted on by Neal Asher

After writing a blog yesterday and doing some further work on Zero Point, which has now passed my before-we-go-back-to-Britain target of 80,000 words, we headed down the mountain for our Internet session. It was spitting with rain up here but that got a little heavier on the way down. It’s quite odd being out on a grey and rainy day wearing only a T-shirt, jeans and plastic crocs. My British experience tells me I should be wearing thick socks, a jumper and a leather jacket, maybe a woolly hat and gloves too, but the temperature was about 25 degrees.

Having been kakos pethia over the weekend, we confined ourselves to orange juice in Revans (Internet bar). By email I got the initial Jon Sullivan cover for Prador Moon, then shortly after that the new improved version, which I will show here once I get a jpg of it. The air was already full of sea spray dripping off the tamarisk trees along what remained of the beach, the sea very rough (though some were still swimming in it), then the rain ramped up as this next picture shows.

We hung around a little longer, drinking a very nice filter coffee, then headed back. I did some more work on Zero Point, then turned my attention to my tobacco leaves. Here, in order, are the pictures of my second attempt at making cigars, some of which will hopefully be dry enough to smoke during the next kazani next weekend.

Tobacco

Posted on by Neal Asher

As I mentioned before on this blog, I was given some tobacco plants by some friends and am now growing them. Now, I smoke rollies, and one of the problems with rolling tobacco, especially here, is that it dries out. There are numerous solutions to this but generally what you do is put some moist bit of vegetation in the tobacco pouch. We were using mint, because we have so much of it, but then I thought, why not stick a green tobacco leaf in? I did, and, when the leaf dried up I mixed it with my rolling tobacco and smoked it. It was pretty tasteless and only by checking the numerous tobacco growing Internet sites available did I find out why.

The leaves have to be big, sticky, starting to turn yellow and the stalks snapping like celery before they are ready for curing. When I finally got a leaf like this, which was after the plant was about three feet tall and flowering (and after I topped out the flowers), I partially dried it out and put it in my tobacco pouch. When it was dry enough in the pouch, I crunched it up and smoked it as before. The taste I got was of cigars so later, when I had a good bunch of such leaves hanging up and curing, I thought I’d try an experiment. Before the leaves were completely dry, and therefore still sticky and malleable, I cut out the stalks and with the remaining half leaves made a cigar. Later still I decided that a cigar the size of a cruise missile might not be something I would want to smoke. I took it apart again and turned it into three reasonable sized cigars. They looked rough, but the right colour…

This Saturday we had three couples round, all friends, and one of whom provided me with the original plants. After copious alcohol, I decided we should try one of these cigars. It constantly needed relighting because it was still too damp, but the taste was exactly right, very good in fact. I microwaved the next one to dry it out further and it smoked a lot better. I can’t remember smoking the third one because by then the raki was kicking in and people were dancing in the kitchen.

The next day was kazani day right next to our house. Nectarius, who was stilling raki, obviously wanted us to come over but we hid ourselves away for most of the day, quite rightly suffering a severe hangover. Later, at 9.00PM and to be polite, we popped over and had a few rakis and some barbecued pork. I told Nectarius about the cigars and he said he will provide the raki and I’ll do the cigars. This week I’ll make some more, since there’s another raki making session occurring here next weekend. Out of interest I’ll take pictures of the whole process and post them here.

Monday 18th

Posted on by Neal Asher

The tiling in and on the ruin continued all last week, including Saturday, and here’s the result thus far.

Today it is pissing down so no work is being done, since most of what remains is outside: the step on the roof of the main house, which was torn up last year to expose where two roofs nearly met over a wallm these joined with reinforcing steel including and earthquake column and the whole thing concreted again; some edging on the ruin roof followed by grouting.

Tuesday 12th

Posted on by Neal Asher

Mikalis paid us a visit yesterday to do a bit of measuring up and quote for putting down the tiles in the ruin. I felt the price was a bit steep, but he’s putting a waterproof layer down underneath them, using an expensive elasticated tile glue and, judging by the work he’s done here before, I know it will be done right. This morning it’s all go again and hopefully the final jobs will be completed round there by November 3rd when we fly back to Britain.

In a recent post I mentioned a walk to a village called Vori. It was there, last year, that I gathered dried chillies from the ground from which I extracted the seeds to grow some of the plants we have now. I wasn’t sure whether the plant these chillies came from was the same plant, or one planted new every year (as would be the case in England where chilli plants die off each winter, sometimes never having produced chillies). It certainly sits in the same pot. This time I had a chance to study it more closely and saw that it is actually a shrub with a woody stem about two centimetres thick. Therefore, I realise that when I’m told that someone has a chilli plant two metres tall, I’m not being bullshitted. I’ll be transferring our plants into even bigger pots, and I’ll also plant some straight in the ground. I look forward to seeing chilli trees growing here!

Incidentally, on a side note to that, I must go to the village of Pefki and collect some of the fruit of a tree there. It shades the eating area of a taverna called The Pepper Tree and is, you guessed it, loaded with peppercorns. Maybe we can become self-sufficient here as far as spices are concerned.

Monday 11th

Posted on by Neal Asher

We went on two walks over the weekend. On Saturday, as about 3.00 in the afternoon, we walked to a village called Armeni in the mountains behind us. This took about three-quarters of an hour up and down hills but by road, so slightly easier. In Armeni we visited a couple we know there who, having been working away in their garden, were stopping for a beer. The health aspect of our walk went downhill from then. We ended up getting a lift home at about 10.30 at night. Here’s a few photos of that and our next walk: our kafenion, our house from above, one of the fequent roadside shrines, and Papagianades from a distance…

On Sunday, by way of punishing ourselves, we did the walk of a hundred staircases by road down to a village called Vori, then back up by the tracks through the olive groves. There’s few pictures I can show that are any different from what I’ve shown before (I hear the voice of John Cleese declaring, ‘Olive trees, and more fucking olive trees!’).

Today – Internet day – I feel slightly worn out, but intend to persevere with this. It would be nice to flatten out my gut a bit before the five months of being trapped in our house in England.

Friday 8th

Posted on by Neal Asher

Yup, we got some heavy rain, the water butt is full again the garden is soaked and I’m now diverting the waste water down the drain rather than saving it to water plants. Being British I look at cloudy skies, rain, damp and dropping temperatures with a frown on my face, then reluctantly close windows and doors before returning to the bedroom to dust off my jeans and jumper. Not so with the Cretans. They love it when the rain comes because it’s good for the olives and other crops, the water table is filling again, and they gaze upon our glum British expressions with evident surprise. I try to explain that we get more rain in a British summer than they get in a Cretan winter, but that only evinces further puzzlement. Rain is good. I wonder how long that opinion would last if they experienced a few months of grey British winter with its endless days of drizzle, downpours and sitting inside with the lights on.

In the guide books we’re told that here in Crete there are 300 days of sunshine every year, and yes, that’s about right. And what sunshine it is. You simply do not get the same intensity of light in Britain. Our house here is dim inside, the windows small, and a trip outside on a sunny day renders me practically blind for a few minutes after I return inside. I would say that the light intensity on a cloudy but not rainy day here is about the same as full sunshine were we live in Essex, but then, that house is forty miles from London in a highly populated area and there’s plenty of crap in the atmosphere.

Traffic through our village in Essex is heavier than through the largest town here in Eastern Crete, and traffic in Chelmsford, the largest town close to us in Essex, is probably ten times that of the largest city on this entire island. Living here has brought home to me how big the difference in air quality is, and I suspect my lungs have enjoyed clean air for the longest period in my life. Bar the cigarettes, of course.

In an effort to beat the damp here in a house built before damp courses were thought of, I’ve acquired a dehumidifier which, when run for about eight hours, takes two litres of water out of the atmosphere inside the house. How much of that is actually coming out of the walls is a moot point, but it should certainly help and, next year, maybe I won’t have quite so much paint falling off of them. Installing damp courses would be preferable, but can you imagine how much fun that would be in stone walls that are two feet thick?