We’ve been reasonably lazy since we arrived, spending our mornings doing some jobs and the afternoons lazing around and in the pool. Some of our summer guests left us some fabulous floats and we also have 1 of our own which is stored away and we’ve been floating around, asleep half the time!!! The weather has been very warm 29/30C and of course, dry. There was a good breeze on Wednesday and Thursday but that seems to have gone away now too. The prevailing wind here is often from the west and we are lucky that our house sits squarely to the west of the pool so it is sheltered from the wind very often. Anyway, the tans are on the way back. There have been some amazing sunsets too and we’ve enjoyed a night swim.

Our jobs have been pretty light. Mostly deploying decorative things we’ve bought for the house over the summer in England and in Hungary. Bob has deployed surge protectors around the house too. There have been a lot of power cuts this summer, generally short ones, but a lot of them….. we’ve been fairly lucky with problems. Our dvd player fried itself as a result of one of the sudden power cuts/restarts and our router reset itself to factory settings. John and Wilma leant us a dvd player but we have brought out a new one and installed it, and Bob has been playing with the router a bit. It’s working fine but the name is no longer Villa Rockheart and the password is the original unintelligible character string. We will let it go for now but get it fixed for next year. I’ve deployed a lot of the decorations including a little ceramic plaque of 2 lovebirds we bought at a pottery in Tihany on Lake Balaton after the wedding.

Mostly we’ve eaten in, bbqing and eating on the terrace or beside the pool. Breakfast outside is a particular favourite and there are some lovely fresh figs here which I’ve been enjoying with local yoghurt and honey. Just delicious.

We have met up with our dear friend Pamela and had dinner at Tervetuloa, our local go-to restaurant. Facebook We had a lovely evening talking non stop, emotional at times – we lost Eddie, her lovely, lovely husband, back in June, but with laughter too. Tervetuloa is a beautiful courtyard garden setting. Efet the owner has green fingers for sure, there are lovely plants and the whole garden is covered with a huge vine of gourds. She turns these gourds into intricately decorated lamps and lights – we have 5 ourselves. A summer’s evening there is quite magical under the lanterns. I would buy loads if I could!!!!

Quite exciting this time because Efet has radically changed the menu after 20 odd years. It is still possible to order the traditional meze based grills and dishes like Mama’s Moussaka and kleftiko, but there is also a new European style menu which comes surrounded either by the full meze or just a small one. We opted to try this menu with the small meze. This consisted of hummas, salad, beetroot salad, bread, tzaziki, and, specially for me, some chicken livers. For mains, I had a dish of fish and seafood which was totally delicious and very large. Pamela had chicken kiev and Bob had a pork steak with sauce. Everyone enjoyed the food very much. Pamela’s kiev was so big that she took half of it home. My dish had 2 pieces of salmon fillet, 2 skewers of king prawns and some white sea bass pieces. After the mains we were served a dessert plate and Turkish coffees. Sadly the complimentary brandy has gone west…… Prices have gone up here as everywhere else, perhaps more so as the government struggles with inflation. But still a good bargain. Dinner with tip, including copious g&ts and bottles of water, Bob had a be.er too came to just over £22 each.

This morning we went to the market at the hotel Chateau Lambousa in Lapta. We haven’t been for some years and it certainly was a lot bigger and busier than the last time we went. Perhaps a sign of the times. There were a lot of second hand clothes stalls and also Indian style hot weather clothes. There’s a baker who sells there, nice cakes and bread, knick knack stalls, ceramics, jewellery and some plants. We’d gone principally to pay for and pick up our tickets to a pool party with music that we are going to next weekend in aid of the Royal British Legion. It’s £25 each for a big buffet with bbq, live music and a lot of fun and in aid of a good cause. Anyway, after we’d done that, I bought 2 new pot plants for the terraces to replace 2 that had not survived the summer heat. The terrace in front of the house often proves too much for pot plants other than the hardiest. If I was here all the time I could keep anything alive, but you can’t expect guests to water plants every day. Got two nice plants for very little money including a big spider plant with babies. It’s a good place to buy plants, cheaper than the nurseries.

We are now awaiting the arrival of two American friends, Don and Joan, who are staying with us for a couple of days. We met them on the Queen Mary in 2019 and we’ve seen them a few times since in the UK and once in Florida. They’ve just been cruising in the eastern Med. and we are so pleased that they have added a couple of days with us into their holiday before flying back to Virginia. My next blog will detail our sightseeing with them. It’s not a long stay – 2 nights and only one full day – so we will have to pack it full.