Week 18 - An Italian boat?

Adventures in Greece as we pursue the dream of buying a boat and cruising the Mediterranean.

I think governments are generally pretty crap at communication. Certainly here in Greece the mood continues as one of doom and gloom, yet we ARE bringing down the Covid case load. Perhaps not as fast as they’d like, but regardless it is reducing from the peak in October.

I’m not feeling that positive about the 7th of Jan (which is the current official lockdown lift date), my guess is by then we’re basically back to where we were when we entered the lockdown which obviously won’t be low enough. They get the vaccine here this week, so I guess we see how that rollout goes.

The boat in Italy turns out to not only exist, but we’ve had several conversations back and forward with the broker, including a video walk through taken a couple of days ago. We’re now trying to get a “Letter of Intent” in place so that we can arrange for a surveyor to do a remote inspection. We’ve been here before (more or less) so we’re not getting too excited, but things are moving in the right direction.

So what else does one do during the never-ending lockdown? Karina has been baking and made and Apple Pie from scratch which looked wonderful, but we both agree unfortunately didn’t taste as good as it looked.

A lot of walking, to the markets, around the Acropolis, up and down hills etc. With friends sometimes, mostly with us and the dog. One nice thing about walking the streets is you’ll come across scenes like the one below where they are replacing pipes or something, but they also have an archeologist on site, cataloging and documenting what they find. It’s crazy walking around and realising that there’s so much undiscovered history literally two meters under your feet.

We mentioned last week that the lights were going up in Syntagma Square, so we wandered up there one evening for a look. They are reasonably spectacular, although also very “haphazard” compared to what you might see in the US. They basically vomited lights over anything that stood still, but it does make for a nice distraction. It’s been interesting just how late in the season the lights have gone up, it’s really just been in the two weeks before Christmas.

Other lockdown activities include me learning languages on Duolingo, mostly relaxed on the bed! I’ve been really getting into French lately after getting frustrated with Greek which is fairly challenging. So much so with the French that I’m going to start some French lessons with Camille this week to actually practice speaking with an actual person instead of shouting into my phone.

They launched “click and collect” here — a way for stores to partially re-open, as long as you’ve ordered on line, you can go to the store and collect what you ordered. We wanted to buy some games, which we did but when we went to collect they were all in Greek, which wasn’t what the pictures on the website showed, so we had to immediately return them! Karina had more luck ordering some crochet materials online and we picked those up this week so she will have that to occupy her in the next few weeks.

Overall it’s going OK. We’re sad they’ve just locked down Sydney due to an outbreak there which means that Jasper won’t be able to fly up to visit his grand parents as planned. Such is life during COVID I suppose.

Until next time,

Tim & Karina