OCTOBER
WEATHER ...
Continued, like September to be very, very changeable. A few beautiful sunny days (and nights)
varying erratically with severe storms - which had the ability to spoil
holidays, damage homes and wash cars into the sea. predictably
unpredictable....
Latest
Crete Weather Link.
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Recent Storm - Kastelli Harbour
Kastelli
Storm
©
C.Turvey@Cretanvista
Another
recent storm this time pictured at Kastelli Harbour - Kissamos. There was
considerable damage on the north western coast of Crete..
Astratigos
Village Life...
Thrummm, thrummm, thrummm, Pissshht! Well, that really was the very loud
noise which appeared one morning recently. Just after the bakers van arrived in
the square delivering our daily bread, so to speak.
And it appeared to be moving. The noise not the bread that is. The bread
always moves rapidly as the baker does not want it to cool too much over it's
5 Kilometer journey from Kolimbari. But this noise was not the baker.. It came
from around the bend at the village entrance - the place all eyes were turned
to as the sound moved inexorably towards the corner. And then, there it was. A
huge yellow- painted truck with flashing lights on the front and large
'overtake this side' arrows on the rear. Thrummm, thrummm, thrummm, Pissshht!
It
seemed to be following in the tracks of our baker - like a triffid following an
ice-cream van with it's chimes switched on! The bakers' van blocked it.
Thrummm, thrummm, thrummm, Pissshht! Pissshht! Pissshht!
Our neighbour Eleni gazed, in what could, in other circumstances,
have been
fatal fascination at this machination of some far off bureaucratic mentality.
'Ti enai?' (what is it?) she asked without taking her eyes from the beast -
'Ti enai?' It took a little while to figure out, until someone noticed a broad
white trail snaking along the roadside behind it....
What was it? A white lining machine, no less. Painting a broad line along
the edge of the road like some overgrown ink-jet printer on wheels - Thrummm,
thrummm, thrummm, Pissshht! With each 'Pissshht!' a broad rectangle of
brilliant white was added to the end of the previous one, drawing (forgive the pun)
Astratigos, which has sat quietly here since Minoan times - well, Venetian
anyway - firmly forward into the 21st century.
At
each side turning - usually a driveway - the machine sort of hiccoughed
several times as it passed the opening - Pissshht! Pissshht! Pissshht! Pissshht!-
leaving behind a broken line - presumably to allow entry and exit, before
continuing on.
Half
an hour later it returned from the direction in which it had it had disappeared,
now drawing a
line down the opposite side of the road. 'Side' that is, until it reached the
church. At that point it veered away wildly towards the middle of the
square - presumably to allow parking outside the church. Either that or it was
a vampire....
It was then that the puzzled looks became smiles.... The machine sprayed
the paint. Over anything beneath. Sticks, stones, gravel and
the Sahara sand so recently deposited on the newly laid tarmac by the wind and
rains were all being sprayed where they lay. Very white. Very neat. But of
course when you moved any of the debris the white line - most of it anyway -
went with it!
A lot of it has of course dried and set all things it touched like glue. I
suspect that in a few thousand years time a David Attenborough look-alike will
be on some futuristic TV - perhaps simply appearing in thin air before his
viewers - declaring that the ancient Astratigonians preserved their valuables
in this white material they called 'chroma' (colour), but that all that
remains after so long are a few sticks and stones!!
Come
to think of it - and judging by his present performances, David himself might
still be around.....Think of that - a three thousand year-old David
Attenborough....
Back to the present. Intrigued by the possible costs of this white-lining,
and the space age technology involved, we tried to work out the benefits of
this modernisations of ancient Crete to it's modern dwellers....
There are, right now, around 30 people resident in Astratigos, though with the arrival of
visiting relatives; the baker; the doctor; the occasional fish merchant; shoe and
clothes sales vans; the yoghurt man (and the school bus driver) etc, this can
rise to 59!! However, usually, the thirty of us, our seven or so cars (plus a
couple of tractors) have around 2Km of white line and two road signs (village
entry and exit signs) to share between us - easily enough to go around! That
doesn't include the 80 or so sheep..
'But what's it for persisted Eleni.. What's it for?'... I knew the answer,
I'd heard it years ago at Kolimbari crossroads - it's for the tourists!
But that was before their white lines disappeared....
