Now the carnival is over....

Well that's the end of the Easter festivities for another year, we found it all very hard work Sandra was helping Mantha Thursday through to Sunday preparing food that in the main got wasted because there was far too much of it and mostly things which don't keep well but as the locals say you have to be prepared for every single person you know calling in and being able to feed them, all the same it seems to me to be a bit of a shame.

The real event starts with us going down to the church armed with our candles for midnight mass on Saturday night, our village priest does both churches in the village so our midnight was at 10:30 this year but last year it was at Midnight. The candle light is passed on from the priest to all the candles in the congregation, over 200 people this year and probably more at the other church which has the more populated end of the village as it's parishioners. The flame is taken from Jerusalem every year by some Orthodox priests who apparently go down into a cave and the candle (it seems) spontaneously combusts with no human help, they say that this only happens for the Greek Orthodox priests and it has been checked by scientists and police to make sure it's not faked! The flame is then flown back to Athens and passed onto priests from all areas of the country so the all the candles are ignited from the original Jerusalem flame. The service ends with loud fire crackers being let off outside and everyone wishing everyone else Chronia Polla (many years). After this we returned back to Mantha's to have Margaritza, which is a kind of thick soup made with the kidney liver and heart of tomorrows lamb and it marks the official end to lent and the return to eating meat.
Easter Sunday and we looked down over the balcony to wish Yanni who had an house full of relatives staying, "Kalo Pasha" and found that they were lighting the old oven in the shed below our garden bridge in readiness for their lamb. We thought that this machine had not been used in years because there is no chimney coming out of the shed, but that didn't stop them and the smoke just filtered through the tiles. He had with him his son and wife, their two daughters with husbands and their two children, nine of them staying in a two bed roomed house all Easter, it is a family time! In the meantime I went down to Jorgos to see if I could help with anything in the BBQ dept. but found Christos already trying to light the machine with copious quantities of BBQ lighting fluid, enough to last you through a season actually but anyway in the end it was up and running and the lamb attached to the spit rotating away merrily. At the last minute we got a call from Jorgos' brother to say that he and his family couldn't make it as they had more family turn up at their house unexpected so that left even more food to go around us. After being stuffed and watered Jorgos suggested that we went to a taverna for the night where he knew there was a live music act playing, but knowing that we were all ready shattered and also had been drinking (we would have had to drive) we declined and came home for some peace and quite.

(Picture: Left to right, Sandra, Mantha, Les, Jorgos, Yaya (Jorgos' Mother))

Monday we were supposed to be having yet another meal with Jorgos and Mantha's family but Sandra felt unwell so we just stayed at home, in all honesty Sandra couldn't have gone far from a toilet roll!! They all came up to our house on Monday night as they were concerned that Sandra was unwell and it turned out that the meat we should have eaten had we turned out was off and had to be thrown away so they had a vegetarian Easter Monday, I'm sure it won't have done them any harm.

We went to pay our rent on Tuesday to a couple who live just down the hill from us they keep it for the landlord as he doesn't trust the banks anymore. This couple Martha and Niko, entertained us all afternoon without a single word of English being spoken, it was hard work mind and Niko kept trying German on the grounds that German is foreign so we must be able to understand that! We left with a dozen fresh eggs, a kilo of home made goats cheese, two litres of goats milk, four red boiled eggs (Easter Speciality) and four large Easter cakes. You've never seen generosity like these people have. We had just returned when Jorgos and Christos came up with a laptop which they couldn't get to connect to a website and to tell me that their desktop wasn't working. User error on the first part and when I got down there the desktop seemed to work fine. Jorgos said he thinks it's scared of me because it wasn't working earlier, I think user error again. Anyway he said that Christos would be up tomorrow to see to the tree which we have been trying to get pruned a bit.

Sandra and I went to Ioannina yesterday to get some what she calls voile but I call net curtains, she has a real phobia about mosquitoes not that we have any at the moment but she doesn't want them in the house when we are in with the windows open and lights on. We managed to get some at a reasonable price and also got rigged up with a BBQ as it's now getting to that al fresco time of year. When we arrived home the tree had gone, well all but the trunk but unfortunately all the major branches were left in a big heap all over the pathway down hill which yanni uses most days so I had to set about with a little bow say and a pruning saw to cut it down to manageable bits and shift it. But what a view we have now from our breakfast table outside the kitchen door must be one of the best in Europe. I know this picture doesn't do it justice but if anyone wants to come and see it for themselves I'm sure they will get a warm welcome.

Today I have had to manufacture some rails for the bloody curtains we got yesterday and hang them all on eight doors and windows. I will soon need a rest!!