Summer Fun

Several years ago I decided that holidaying with my husband and holidaying with my children were not compatible. I try to be (mea culpa, I know) all things to all family members and end up stressed out and moody.

Best Beloved likes to go to restaurants or cook nice meals with local ingredients, drink good wine and visit the places where it’s made, sleep after lunch. His back problems make taking public transport with baggage, sleeping in different beds with different pillows, slow walking (museums, zoos, and window shopping…), and eating off anything but a table uncomfortable at best and with a worst-case scenario that includes stiffness, pain, and a need to spend long periods lying semi-supine on a hard floor. The children are more active but slower paced, thrive in marginal conditions, enjoy the varied experience of public transport, and for the most part do well with slow-paced pedestrian activities. When we went to the Greek islands two years ago I arranged the two-week segment that Best Beloved could be with us in a comfortable pre-booked apartment on the island of Patmos. During the other four weeks, the kids and I took pot-luck with ferries, busses, cheap and cheerful digs, and picnics.

So organising this summer’s Odyssey En Famille and keeping everyone happy was something of a masterpiece. Best Beloved did most of it. Building our destinations around the wines that he was interested in sampling and the fact that I believed that the Big Ones’ GCSE studies of World War One made a trip to Flanders a good idea (I had always wanted to go, too), he trawled the Web for well-appointed self-catering properties that were within our budget range and available between the end of school and late July, when his wine-making activities begin in earnest.

Our first house was in Edine Gaiano, not far from the shores of Lake Iseo . We spent twelve days there, driving around the lake, visiting the wine estates of Franciacorta, and exploring the alleys of Pisogne. All the children enjoyed swimming and fishing, especially on the island of Isola. One day we drove up into the foothills of the Alps. Sophia and I took a trip into Milan by train – despite being barred from the interior of the Duomo (I had wanted to go up to the roof) by not being sufficiently modest in dress, and having to scramble for some necessities, we had a good day out.

I am not a good passenger on long car trips, so to keep stress to a minimum, we had decided that I would take the train to Beaujolais – our next port of call and the jumping off point for me and the Big Ones to go to Flanders. So Best Beloved drove Zenon and me into Bergamo early one morning to start our trip to Bourg en Bresse. The trip to Milan Central on Trenitalia took an hour. Then we boarded a more luxurious International Express for the four hour journey to Geneva where we waited for an hour munching sandwiches on the platform and finally took the Paris-bound TGV for Bresse where Best Beloved picked us up for the last hour of the trip to Fleurie.

We had stayed in the same house six years earlier, and Monsieur and Madame welcomed us back, fanning flushed faces with their hands and apologising for the heat. The Big Ones and I only spent a night or two before heading for Macon Loche TGV station, Paris, and Lille en route to Poperinge. During our absence, Best Beloved took the Littles to the first class exhibition on winemaking at the Hameau du Vin in Romaneche-Thorins, and on several wine appreciation drives as well as spending time at the TouroPark and the Jardins Aquatique as well as fishing in a nearby tributary of the Saone. When we returned from Flanders (I’ll cover our visit next post) we had only two nights before heading back to Italy, but on one of those evenings, Best Beloved and I settled everyone with pizza and the tv remote and drove to the nearby village of Julienas for a first-class meal.

I had been unable to get train tickets for the trip back to Italy – no seats were available on any of the southbound trains – so I had to go by road. From where has my irrational fear come? Before I met Best Beloved I spent five years driving a right hand drive Toyota van all over Europe and the Middle East – from Cairo to Nord Capp and back via Kurdistan, Baghdad, and Damascus. Now the thought of spending a couple of hours on the Autostrada left me almost paralysed with terror.

“Just sit in the back and read your book, Manamou,” my husband advised. But in the end I was needed as navigator.

Unfortunately Casa di Gallo was not available for the entire remaining twelve days of our holiday, but we spent the final five nights at Wisteria Cottage just a few kilometers away. Wineries in Barolo and Barbaresco notwithstanding, the highlight of the area was, without a doubt, the municipal baths at the ancient spa town of Acqui Therme. Billed as the largest pool in Europe, its two swimming areas and spacious surrounds easily accommodated 500 people, and while the kids spent literally hours jumping and diving off the boards during the three afternoons that we spent there, Best Beloved swam laps and exercised constantly, thrilled at the therapeutic effect that it was having on his back.

Language? I used to speak passable Spanish and can manage (present tense only) in French, so Italian was challenging but not impossible and we all picked up a smattering -- come on, how hard is 'uno gelato, per favore... grazie!'? In France, Sophia found that her school French -- which includes past and future tenses! -- allowed her to communicate and to understand signs and menus -- only in Flanders were we somewhat stumped by Flemish (and given stink-eye if we spoke French!).

A word about food. Eating out as a family of six on a daily basis would have been prohibitively expensive, but… Italy is the land of pizza, and the most delicious pizza is only about 6 Euros… Best of all, all my children love pizza – the simpler, the better: Margharita with a little extra ham. Lunch? Done.

Fresh pasta and salads and a range of terrific, salamis, cheeses, and sauces – fresh basil pesto, walnut pesto – with a slab of barbequed steak or guinea fowl, or a roast chicken on the side – was on the menu most evenings, accompanied by a bottle (or two) of the terrific local wine – and for Best Beloved’s birthday (yes, I remembered it this year!) a half kilo of pistachio ice-cream to die for. My clothes all seem to have shrunk… I blame the washing machines!

So a family holiday that keeps us all pretty happy can be done. Maybe it’s because the children are all that bit older now; maybe I have mellowed somewhat and no longer hold myself responsible if not everyone has a perfect experience all the time. Next year? Well, let’s just wait and see.

Weary Donkey Arrives Home

At two yesterday morning we arrived back from our 4-week family Odyssey to the Continent. We had flown into Milan Orio al Serio airport on Blue Air (a Romanian budget airline that is now Cyprus based – our tickets were 6.50Euro, plus tax, each), rented a Mercedes mini-van, and stayed in self-catering accommodation in the Italian Lake District, Beaujolais, Flanders, and Piemont.

We had a good time: ate lots of pasta, drank lots of wine – or at least Best Beloved and I did, swam a lot, read a lot, played many games of cards. The weather was hot, and we had our fair share of moans – a trip that manages to address the needs and desires of adults, teens, and younger children is neither easy nor cheap, but we covered a lot of ground and everyone came home wiser.

Italy was surreal: as Sophia and I decided after our one day trip into Milan – we could not send a letter from the post office, we could not buy an International train ticket from the train station, we could not cash Travellers’ Cheques at a bank or Bureau de Change. Seeking information we were shuttled from pillar to post in a charming but frustrating manner, and what was supposed to have been a ‘girls’ bonding trip’ involving cafes and boutiques turned into scavenger hunt for stamps, cash, a bathing suit, and a ticket for me to travel from Milan to Macon the following week.

In France, Best Beloved sought the ultimate Beaujolais in the vineyards surrounding Fleurie with the Littles in tow, while I took the Big Ones up to Ypres to visit the battlefields of Flanders. We stayed at Talbot House, an everyman hostel that catered to all ranks during the Great War and now houses a poignant museum, and completed a 45 kilometre-cycle tour of trenches, cemeteries, and landmarks – leading Sophia to swear that she will never ride a bike again.

Back in Italy we stayed in two lovely houses in the Piemont region sipping Barolo, nibbling cheese from Roccaverano, and waiting for the Alps to reveal themselves from behind or beneath a haze of humidity. Finally, on one day, they did – a majestic and still-snow-covered arc that spanned the horizon. We agreed that May or October would proabably be a better time to visit. But would cooling off in the giant municipal pool down the road in Acqui Thermi been as welcome a respite in the cooler months? Would pistachio gelato been as delightful?

Leo managed to end the holiday on an appropriately surreal note by locking himself in a toilet stall in the airport as we prepared to fly out. Poor bambini! The service personnel had to break down the door to retrieve him, and he spent the rest of the trip warning us each time we visited the bathroom.

Then, after landing at Larnaca, our Scots captain David Blaney, who had flown us to Milan four weeks earlier, invited Zenon and Leo into the cockpit and explained the workings of the radar, the auto pilot, and a host of other buttons, screens, and levers. Zenon emerged with a grin as wide as the Po Valley and a new-found ambition to become a pilot.

Over the next few weeks I will post separate stories of our adventures as well as some pictures, as one post is not nearly enough to do justice to our adventures.

Greening up the Place

With respect to growing things, I’ve always said that if I can’t eat something, I’m not interested in planting it, but now that I have the vegetable side of things proceeding well, I am finding an increased interest in beautifying the surroundings with plants… in other words creating ornamental gardens.

The first place to get my attention was the back verandah. While I love the space (great for skateboarding, cricket, and running races), its clinical starkness, broken only by a stringy basil plant, has always depressed me. So Best Beloved and I focussed on it a couple of weeks ago with the idea of turning it into a sight more soothing to the eye rather than a cross between a runway and an operating theatre.

‘This end,’ he said rather pensively, referring to the far end off the sitting room. ‘I’ve been thinking of enclosing all together. We could turn it into a winter sun-room, and shade the windows in the summer with big blinds…’ So we left that end for now and concentrated on the kitchen end.

We’ve been considering a big barbeque to replace the foukou (Cypriot grill) for some time, but deciding the location took some haggling before we decided to site it around the side of the kitchen. There’s no point in having a view like ours if you go and block it with a barbeque, and the side is convenient to the kitchen and dining room, and downwind 95% of the time. We deferred the construction for a while, but moved the foukou to its new spot.

Next… ‘I’ve been thinking of some big pots with maybe a bay tree and a lemon near to the back door,’ I began tentatively.

‘A lemon tree in a pot?’ Best Beloved roared. ‘They’ll never stop laughing at us, Manamou!’ But he wants a lemon tree, too, so the idea took root.



‘Then tall pots, like the ones we saw at Green Forest last year,’ I continued. ‘One for each roof support…’ He warmed to the idea more and more and before I knew it we were at the nursery choosing pots and plants, and arranging to have them delivered that very afternoon.


Two days after the plants were installed a vicious wind tore all the leaves from the lime – he chose a lemon for near the other door and planted it, to save his reputation, in the ground – and withered the wisteria and the jasmine. But nurturing and plenty of water has put new life into them, and looking out of my kitchen window is now a double pleasure: I see both the wonderful view down the valley to the sea, and the gentle waving of healthy greenery.















Now to look out for the side garden.

Medical Morning

Alex and I had a medical morning.

Last night, while sparring in Tae Kwon Do, he kicked someone who used his elbow to block. Elbow connected with instep, and Alex was worried that he had broken a bone in his foot.

Although I knew that there is not much that can be done for him – he was walking, albeit painfully, and he said that some movements made him feel sick – I said that I would take him to the nearest private hospital, Iasis, for an x-ray after dropping Sophia at school. I didn’t want to face the bureaucracy of the General without Best Beloved to smooth the way.

So at 7.30 this morning, we rocked up to Casualty under the sign ’24 Hours’. Casualty was empty. We went around to reception and I explained our mission. “Oh, you’ll have to wait half an hour or forty-five minutes”, said the receptionist. “Staff aren’t here yet.” Alex and I discussed waiting or checking somewhere else, and the receptionist helpfully said: “And we’re closed between noon and four!”

“What,” I asked her “happens if someone needs an emergency x-ray at lunchtime?” She didn’t understand.

I called Evangelismos (another private clinic), but their radiography department wasn’t open until eight, either. We opted for the General Hospital, and I checked my wallet to make sure I had the ‘Poly Techni’ card, the card that says that as a family of at least four children we are entitled to free state medical care. Only problem was we are not pre-registered at the hospital for any care, and previous experiences of the State medical system did not bode well.

“Prepare for a Cultural Experience!” I told my son.

“Beats school,” was his answer.

We drove to the General, but could we find parking? One would think that in designing a new hospital for a mushrooming town fifteen years ago, the architects would have made enough parking spaces, but no. We parked on the street 300 metres from A&E. Once in the door into the empty department, I said to the nurse under a sign marked ‘Triage’: “ I need an x-ray for my son; he thinks he’s broken his foot.”

“This boy?” she said. “The one who’s walking?” But we filled out the forms, showed our poly techni card, and almost immediately were seen by a doctor who poked the lump on the side of Alex’s instep, grunted, and motioned down the hall to the x-ray department.

More forms. “Can you tell us how long we’ll be waiting?” I asked the receptionist. “Not long,” she assured me. “There’s just one ahead of you and then they’ll call you.”

We sat on the slatted wooden benches and looked around the crowd.

Most of the patients were older people from the villages. Neatly dressed, well groomed, and bearing themselves well. None looked ill; there were no emergencies here, just routine visits requiring endless waiting on the hard chairs, a gossip with neighbours and friends from previous visits. There was some good-natured grumbling about how ‘we could die in here in turn waiting to be seen’, but by and large people waited quietly. An electronic counter on the wall proclaimed ‘Your turn’ but the number space below was blank. A hand-lettered sign on the wall notified us that if we missed our turn for any reason, we would have to reregister. People kept coming in, going to the desk, signing in, sitting down. The room grew stuffy.

Lise’s mother-in-law arrived for her weekly check-up, immaculate in her widow’s black, gold cross on her chest, each grey curl in place. She recognised me and we chatted for a while but I found her rapid Paphos dialect too fast to follow properly and she smiled and turned to the man at her side who was from the same village – but not before inviting me, with the infinite hospitality of the Cypriot villager “To come some time with Lise and drink coffee with me at my house.” I assured her that some day I would.

After an hour Alex went to the desk. “Can you tell me how long I’ll be waiting, because I’m missing school?” The woman shrugged. “God knows.”

An elderly woman emerged from the corridor leaning on a stick. “I was the first,” she announced. “They’ve only just started on the queue down there.”

“Mum, let’s go,” he said. “You won’t be charged because although we’ve signed in, I haven’t had a procedure, and this is just a waste of time!” I looked around at the handsome, patient faces in the waiting room and had to agree with him. We weren’t retired with nothing else to fill the day, but I hated to leave the foot unattended.

As we walked across the parking lot, Alex winced again. “Maybe we’d better go to Evangelismos,” he said. “They’d be open now, and where the doctor poked me, my foot really hurts.”

A young man in blue scrubs was behind the desk at Evangelismos A&E. He took Alex’s details and an elderly doctor made a quick exam. “Might be broken,” he said. “X-Ray’s down the hall.”

We didn’t wait at all. The Bulgarian technician took Alex straight in and, spotting Alex’s uniform quizzed us while we were waiting for the pictures about Alex’s school. We had to wait a while for the radiographer to confirm no fracture, but chatted with the receptionist – who turned out to be a paramedic friend of SH who taught my Emergency Care course last year, and also the man who took such good care of my friend Angela when she had a mini-stroke last year. Angela had sung his praises to me several times: how patient he was with her, and how reassuring. I was glad to be able to pass on her thoughts.

I dreaded the bill. Private hospitals have a reputation for charging the proverbial arm and leg, but the doctor waived his fee, and when he heard that we have only in-patient insurance, the receptionist charged us only for the x-ray and the bandaging. We paid only 44 Euros – less even for when SH brought me in in the ambulance during the course for a dicky heart after a hornet sting.

Alex tried to weasel out of returning to school but I wouldn’t let him. I did let myself off the gym, and three and a half hours after I’d left the house, walked in the door to face the breakfast dishes.

Postscript: Rescue Horse

I called Animal Welfare this morning to see how our patient was doing and if the owner had shown up. The receptionist was brusque: "No, the owner never claimed the horse and the horse had to be euthanised. One of her back legs was broken and she had massive internal injuries.

I was very sad. I had been worried about her breathing and the possibility of internal bleeding, but I hadn't realised that her leg was actually broken, although she had been so reluctant to walk.

Poor Lady. There she had stood, parched and patient for so many hours, and in such pain. And there she would have died if we hadn't taken care of her and called the Rescue Service.

I'm sure that this cycle of tragedy is not finished. It began about six years ago when a man lost either his son or his grandson in a tractor accident. He became depressed, moody, and eventually homicidal and murdered two people at the coffee shop in Choletria. The man whose wife was killed can't bear to live sober now and kills a horse -- so far. If he regularly drives that drunk it won't be long before he kills someone else or himself.

The police know, the family knows. No-one does anything about it.

Rescue Horse

Zenon’s tenth birthday party was planned for Saturday afternoon. He wanted Best Beloved to do a souvla, he wanted a cake with DragonballZ from Zorba’s, and he wanted a crowd of friends over for games that included water balloon paintball and three-legged races. So we complied, planned, invited his friends and their parents, and prepared for the day.

At about 10, Best Beloved went out to buy the souvla meat, and as soon as he came back I left to collect the cake. As I passed the turning to the dam, just past the end of our road, I noticed a horse standing by the side of the road.

“That poor thing!” I thought to myself. It stood hunched in the blazing sunshine, its head hanging. As I drove down the road I wracked my brains to think whom it belonged to: there are few horses in Cyprus, and I thought I knew most in the neighbourhood. “I’ll take it some water as soon as I get back, and I’ll call Yianni (a friend who keeps racehorses in a nearby village), he must know the owner.”

Resolved, I continued on the cake mission, and a moment later my phone rang. It was Best Beloved: “Did you see the horse?” I told him that I had, and what I had decided to do about it. “Keep Yianni out of it for now,” Best Beloved advised. “It got hit by a car last night and the police are looking for the owners. When you get back, we’ll take it some water together.”

The cake collection was completed in record time, and back at the house Alex and I filled eight four-litre bottles with water, put them and a big bucket into the Land Rover, and headed toward the horse, stopping to pick up Best beloved from the field en route.

Close to, the horse was smaller than I thought – only about 14 hands – and standing awkwardly, tied to a boulder with a rope, chain, and too-large head-collar. She was resting a back leg, a gaping slice carved out of her side midway between hip and shoulder. Blood still trickled down her matted coat, and the flies clustered hungrily.

As Alex and I approached with the bucket and water bottles, she lifted her head and whickered, moving painfully toward us and plunging her nose deep into the bucket. She drained four litres in a gulp, so I gave her some more and more and more. After four bottles, she slowed down and I decided to wait before she had any more in case it made her colic.

She allowed me to stroke her nose and examine her wound: her shoulder was bruised, and her stifle, and I went around the other side to see if I could see any other injuries. There were none visible but a slightly swollen fetlock on her near hind leg. While she had some more water we discussed what to do and Best Beloved filled me in on the story as he knew it.

Billy had been drinking at the Cousin’s Café until late last night, and one of his companions had been the man from Choletria (the next village up) whose wife had been murdered last year by the man who had lost his grandkids and his mind in a tractor accident five years earlier. This man spends his life now in a bottle, and when he left at two in the morning (after Billy had gone home) instead of going up to his house, he inexplicably turned south – and hit the horse broadside. He returned to the Café with a broken windshield and an incomprehensible tale. Then went home.

At some time in the morning the police came, tied (and left) the horse and breathalysed the driver, finding him still well over the alcohol limit. Billy was trying to find the owners of the horse.

We called Yianni who said that he was working thirty miles away but would come with painkillers at about five. We called other people in the village, but nobody knew the horse or the owner, so we finally called Paphiakos Animal Welfare, the only people in the country who do large-animal rescue and who are fortunately just down the road. They said they would be with us in half an hour. Meanwhile the horse downed another twelve litres of water

They were as good as their word. Half an hour later two men pulled up with a trailer. “Still no word on the owner?” they asked. And when we said that the matter was in the hands of Kouklia police, and that we had advised the Boys in Blue that we had called the Rescue Service, the lads went into action. Examining the horse gently, they tried to lead her forward, but she rolled her eyes and refused to move until they put a rope around her hindquarters. They half-lifted her up the ramp into the float, and securing her head-collar set out for the animal surgery in Kato Paphos.

“Well, that’s the drama of the day over with,” I said to Best Beloved as we rolled up to our house.

“The party hasn’t started yet!” was his reply. “Sixteen ten year-olds are descending on us in a couple of hours…”

And so they did – with their parents and their old clothes. And a good time was had by all.

Marcos, the son of our former land-lord, broke the piñata with a brilliantly placed swipe, and showed his practical side and engineering skills in building towers with balloons. The teams drew in the paintball water-balloon war, with Kay’s little Marios switching sides like a demon. And we never got to the three-legged race. The souvla, hoummos, salad and spuds, cake, jelly, and baklava were cleaned up with just enough left-overs for Sunday lunch, and people began to trickle away at around seven-thirty – tired, happy, and full. The way that people should be after a good party.

I will call the Rescue Service next week and see how our Lady is doing. I did think about trying to adopt her if her owner doesn’t show up, but we have no place to keep a horse properly and no time to build one, so I’ll keep that idea in fantasy land and refrain from mentioning it to my children.

Making Flaounes

In the run up to Easter, every self-respecting Cypriot housewife on the island prepares her flaounes, her eggy-cheesy Easter pastries. In this, unlike in most Cypriot traditions, I am no exception.

I hated flaounes when I first tasted them. I found them too hard, too goaty, too salty; I had to lie when I wrote articles for the in-flight magazine about the delights of Cypriot Easter cuisine. ‘Yuck!’ I thought. ‘Who in their right mind could really call these delicious?’ For the first few years of my wedded bliss, I sureptiously dumped my mother-in-law’s offerings and played ‘dumb foreigner’ when asked if I had liked them.

Then, dread day: nine-years ago, Best Beloved asked me to make them. ‘Because my mother always makes them with raisins and I prefer them with hash-seeds!’

(Before you rush for the phone to call the Drug Squad down on me, let me mention that hash seeds are a traditional part of Cypriot cuisine: my father-in-law remembers being fed them as a small child for their soporific effect, and the area of riverbed below the village was given over to hemp production – mostly for the making of rope. These days, the seeds are denatured – adding a crunch to the dish rather than a buzz to the brain.)

I tried to get out of the baking project, but Best Beloved was insistent, and I do love him, so I pulled out The Taste of Cyprus by Gilli Davies, and together with Kay, got to work.

The recipe was surprisingly simple – a basic pizza dough encasing a mixture of special flaouna cheese, halloumi, eggs, mint – and of course the hash seeds – for the filling. Kay’s Cypriot husband likes raisins, so we made two batches.

They were delicious. Soft, un-goaty, just the right balance of salt and egg. They didn’t sit like boulders in my stomach, sending up fumes every quarter of an hour for the rest of the day like all the ones I’d ever eaten before. ‘Not quite the traditional Cypriot taste, Manamou,’ Best Beloved said. ‘But tasty, none the less. And with refrigeration these days, we don’t need ones that will last forever like they did in the old days.’

This year the Little Ones helped me – kneading the pastry, mixing the filling, and rolling out the discs of dough. We made a batch yesterday using flaouna cheese from Best Beloved’s goat-keeping Auntie, and I have another kilo of cheese for a batch next week.

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