An excursion to Kalyves

One of our recent excursions has been to Kalyves. We figured that since it has quite a big British ex-pat population it might have a few things open, and we had heard rumour of there being a butcher there who imports....bacon!

We though we might have to rely on my sixth sense for cured pork, but actually we found it really easily - it was on the main street down from the New National Road to the sea. They also had sausages, so we got ourselves the ingredients for a thoroughly British fry-up.

We then had a wander around the rest of town. You can tell there must be a resident population of Brits nearby, as virtually every second shop seemed to be making a living by selling beer and spirits. There were also a couple of warehouses full of tacky Christmas decorations - which obviously got us over-excited at the prospect of annoying our neighbours enjoying Christmas with a balcony full of inflatable Santas.

We found two nice little cafes to stop for a couple of coffees, and also used the local post office. It might be fairly common to buy stamps in bulk near Christmas time in the UK, but this appeared to be a major development for Kalyves.

It took a few attempts to convince the woman that we really did want fifty sets of stamps to send cards to the UK.

"Fifty?".

"Yes".

"Πενινδα?".

"Ναι".

"ΠΕΝΙΝΔΑ????".

"ΝΑΙ! ΝΑΙ!".

Needless to say, it was at this exact moment that nearly everybody else in town chose to come and buy stamps, so I expect the talk in the Kafenions for the rest of the afternoon was about the strange British couple buying fifty stamps, and making everyone else queue outside the door and down the street because it took so long to count them out...