It is a holiday long weekend in Greece

First a message to all you subscribers out there wondering what has happened to your January/February newspapers. The answer is endearingly Greek. The proprietor of the Symi Visitor has asked me to inform you that when he queried the matter with the local post office on Symi he was told that the post master was away on holiday and the stand-in was not authorised to issue receipts and didn't know what to do with the papers. So Nikos approached Rhodes post office to find out if this time we could resend them from Rhodes but the same story applied - the chap in charge was on leave and there was no one else with the authority to do what was necessary. The postmaster finally returned from leave on Wednesday and the papers left the island on Thursday.

Meanwhile the great DEH electricity upgrade has continued and we are still working round power cuts. We wound up finishing the March edition of the Symi Visitor on Wendy's laptop in a hotel room in Rhodes! If you email us and don't get a reply straight away, don't worry - we aren't ignoring you. We are just powerless...

It is a holiday long weekend in Greece as this the climax of carnival and Monday, Clean Monday, marks the start of Lent. This is the day when people pack picnics and head for the hills. The children fly kites and the grown ups drink lots of wine. Tuesday 7 March is Dodecanese Day, the anniversary of the day these islands became part of the modern Greek state. This is a local bank holiday with parades and further consumption of wine... At this stage it looks as though the weather is going to be reasonable for at least the first 3 days of the holiday but it is possible that the rain will catch up with us again on Tuesday, hopefully after rather than during the parade.

We had quite a severe but fortunately short-lived storm last Tuesday afternoon and the sea was still pretty evil when I went over to Rhodes on the hydrofoil on Wednesday morning. For the first time in my experience the captain made straight for half way down Rhodes and hugged the coast from the airport onwards, trying to find flat water as the engines were overheating in the swell. It was not possible for the craft to climb up onto its hydrofoils so we just chugged along in submarine mode only a couple of hundred metres off the breaker line and arrived in Mandraki about 20 minutes late.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,
Adriana

www.symivisitor.com