Planned Maintenance or Storm Damage?

Apologies for the absence of Monday's blog.  Symi's infrastructure is not robust at the best of times and we seem to be experiencing one of those meltdowns where no one is quite sure whether this is planned maintenance or storm damage.  Most of the island's internet has been down since some time on Saturday night, hence the nocturnal view on the webcam.  Service has been partially restored but not following any sort of rational pattern.  For instance the Symi Dream shop came back on line yesterday morning but the Olive Tree which is 20 metres away on the Kali Strata is still off.  The banks are functioning but the clinic cannot issue prescriptions as their internet system is still off. Down in the harbour Symi Visitor Accommodation came back on line at about 1 p.m but very slowly and with some modem problems so we tried to phone OTE in Athens to order a new modem, only to discover that although we could phone numbers within the 22460 exchange, we could not ring Athens.  I am posting this by dongle and GPRS.  I am not sure if the reason for the slow connection is due to storm damage or because everyone is resorting to the mobile phone network in the absence of anything else so the bandwidth is clogged up.

We had a south-easterly gale on Sunday  morning, followed by close on 30 millimetres of rain so Symi is looking windswept and waterlogged at the moment.  The long range forecast, however, suggests that there may be some dry days ahead.  We may yet be all cleaned up and freshly painted in time for Greek Easter on 5 May.  By the way, the traditional 1 May holiday has been shifted to 7 May so we will have an amazingly long weekend for Greek Easter - even longer for Symi as we, of course, also celebrate VE Day on 8 May.

Have a good week and I hope to be back with some photos for you on Friday.

Regards,
Adriana