Blue on Blue

A wee blue house with blue shutters and blue trim.

Hoop Dreams

The Greeks love their basketball. It's on telly as much as the football. I guess the game suits the climate - concrete is easier to maintain than grass in this heat.


But they don't always look after their hoops. This one is in the playground of one of the abandoned schools near us.

One thing about learning Greek is getting over the fact that they miss out vowels where a regular civilised person would expect a vowel to be.

Look at this sign for a vet. The Greek word for vet Kτηνaτρεio starts with a K and a T, which are letters that sound the same in English.
If the British were inventing a word like this we would force ourselves to insert at least a little "i" as a proper division between two hard vowels.

But not this mob.

They just batter right on. K-Teen-ee-ah-tree-oh.

Nutty as a fruit cake. But you get used to it.

East Beach

You can't beat the East Harbour for a bit of serenity. At least, when its not overrun by the funfair of the damned or fighting dogs.

The rest of the time it looks like this:

Three minute walk from the town centre that is. Nice.

National Day of Greece 25th March

The Greek National Day was on March 25th. The protocol in Kalymnos is fairly well established having being free of Italy for over 60 years now.

First: the army walk up and down to military music, waving a flag.


Then the girls walk up and down to military music, dressed in traditional Kalymnian costume. One girl gets to carry the giant sponge.

Then its all over and everyone can have a fag.

Welcome (back) to Kalymnos

This is the bronze mermaid at the entrance to Pothia harbour, the chubby, cheery sea-whore who welcomes one and all to Kalymnos.

And she's starting to see a bit of business again. Winter is officially over and the first tourists have been spotted this week: climbers returning for their fix of limestone.

You can spot the climbers a mile away: slimmer than anyone else on the island and always wearing very pracitcal-looking Northern European leisure gear.

We watch some of the climbers disembarking the "Star" and being met by a Kalymnian who happily loads their packs into his boot

"Ah you have a new car" says a French accent.

"Yes," beams the Greek, and an old friendship, albeit a commercial one, is resumed.

Abandoned School

We found this abandoned school on the East Side of the valley.

Apparently the story is that a local woman left some money to build a school. However, sensing an easy buck, the builders did a cheap job and built the school with leftover cement and bits of cotton wool, pocketing the cash they saved on materials.

Next thing you know, the school has to be closed down because it's unsafe - it might fall down and wipe out all the kids inside. Result: a cool abandoned school.


It looks like they had to leave in a hurry.

Some of the kids have been back with spray tins.
The front door is locked but there's a big open window round the back.