"Street Life..."

".......You can run away from time..... "

There is lot to be said for the Greek way of doing things! .........They just do it!!

More than once locally and several times in Corfu Town we have seen amazing daredevil workmanship going on;

Workman removing window frames with a crowbar!

.....where men would stand over sheer drops and work without hats, nets or safety equipment of any kind,

Note the total lack of any safety equipment plank on plank,

a great balancing act!

and at the local petrol station, where it’s tradition to hang out with your mates, pull up a chair outside on the forecourt, have a frappe and of course a cigarette or two!! Back in the UK we seem to hold a healthy respect for our electricity supply, we treat it with care and teach our kids not to stick fingers in the sockets etc.. and we can’t even tinker with the electrics in our homes ourselves without being qualified to do so.

However, here in Corfu it doesn’t appear to hold the same mystique or fear factor, maybe its because the electric supply comes from the mainland (underground or underwater)
Nobody seems to have a problem propping a metal ladder against an electricity pole (no boots, helmet or mate to hold the ladder at the bottom) and connecting or disconnecting the supply at will!
This happened the other week when the truck that dumps seaweed up the hill from or house (see last years blog) managed to tangle a low hanging electric cable (that feeds our street lights), around the cab roof! He disengaged it and drove off but the cable was left hanging very low down across the road. He did this on a couple of occasions that day and on the third trip just revved the engine a bit more and pulled the cable from its socket on the pylon and drove off. On his way back down he stopped, picked up the cable from the middle of the road and dumped it in the hedgerow outside our house!!!!
Two days later a man from the electric company appeared, put his ladder up against the pole, picked up the discarded cable, climbed the ladder in shorts and sandals, then “taped” the cable back together, job done!!! a bit of gafer tape should do it!!!!

Today we woke up to no electricity (again!) In hot weather, this can happen as everyone switches on their air con and overloads the fragile system we have over here. So with no power we are sat on our balcony, the only sounds coming from the resort are the birds in the trees and motorbikes and one solitary generator somewhere in a taverna in town and that’s it,…. peaceful !!!
Suddenly we saw huge jets of water being sprayed in the air at the other side of the village for no apparent reason, then it moved to a point where we could see an orange coloured water tanker with a jet hose on top doing what at first appeared to be watering the large pineapple looking trees near one of the bigger hotels. It moved on and arrived at the Athina hotel where it was then obvious it was spraying the main electricity pylons and switch boxes that control the electricity supply into the village!!!! water cannon on electric cables .....priceless!
Having done this for several minutes they stopped and drove up and down the path to the poolside bar a couple of times and then stopped again.

electricity truck at the Athina pool

We thought they were going to move on and towards our house so we might get a decent photo of this bizarre event, but no, they stopped, and with the usual fuss , noise and gesturing proceeded to insert a large hose pipe into the Athina pool from the truck!!!! They had run out of water!!!!! filling up with water from the swimming pool, make sure you dont suck up any small children !!
So now they began to refill the truck with water from the swimming pool much to the amazement and horror of the people bathing in the pool and sunbathing around it, 10 minutes later with the truck full, off they go to water the rest of the electric pylons in the village!!!

By now we have been awake for over an hour and the need for a coffee is overwhelming, so I’m sent next door to the studio where we have a gas cooker, to warm up milk and the coffee jug and fairly predictably half way through the process the electric came back on.

Hey ho good old Greek infrastructure!!!

There is a tradition of street selling throughout this part of the world. Many products are hawked around the streets on trucks, carts and donkeys; we have seen vehicles overloaded with pots pans chairs and tables etc. and they advertise their wares over a load speaker.

this is a flat bed astra van, loaded 8 feet high with everything including the kitchen sink!!!

People sell fruit and veg, bread, fish and garden plants, in fact many of the restaurants buy their sundry items from these people, usually with much haggling and of course gesturing and brinkmanship.
We have been drawn into this world and over the past few weeks, sometimes with a bit of help from our Greek neighbours, we have bought an extra table and chairs for our patio, a huge string of garlic enough for the whole summer, some tomato, pepper and basil plants to grow and cultivate for our own consumption and cooking.

It is a fun way of doing things and you know it's local produce you're getting; and beats going to the supermarket.

"Street Life, But you better not get old

Street life Or you're gonna feel the cold"