Plaza Hotel offer and other news
There are notices up around Yialos at the moment advertising an offer from the Plaza Hotel, Rhodes. From now until the end of March, double rooms are only €40.00 per night, including breakfast, and if you stay for the weekend, Friday to Monday morning, there’s a deal per person for room, breakfast and a meal for only €90.00 for the three nights. I thought you might like to know in case there’s anyone travelling this way over the next three months. I think we’ll use it when we go to get our annual health MOTs done in March – looks good but check with the hotel in case I have misremembered those details. Here’s the website for The Plaza Hotel, Rhodes. I’d advise ringing them and saying you’re going to/from Symi and ask about the offer.
What have we been up to over here since we last spoke? Well, Neil went off to Rhodes on Friday to do some shopping and have his phone put onto a contract. When I took up my contract a couple of months ago, I popped into the shop, chose the €13.50 per month bundle, called back an hour later, and it was all set up and running. I have 3.5 Gbs of data, 500 SMS and 1,000 minutes of talk time (within Greece) per month. That’s more time than I spend talking to anyone in person let alone on the phone, but I can connect to the internet anywhere. Neil’s phone still isn’t doing what it should be doing, and he needs to call the helpline to sort it out. Panormitis at the phone shop on Symi has had a look, and one sim card is working fine as it always did, but he’s locked out of the new one and… well, I don’t understand it, but it’s nearly sorted.
I met Neil and Ms DJ at Rainbow on their way back from their expedition, ladened down with Jumbo bags and news of their day. We went through the shopping on Saturday, so there are now loads of small, useful, plasticy things around the house and some things we did need. After popping to the phone shop for advice, and collecting a parcel from the bookshop, ordering a new carpet from Crystalo at the back of the town square, helping ourselves to a beer at Pacho’s (Yiannis was out and about somewhere and it’s a common practice) and chatting to Hugo, we went for a giros. You could call it the annual Symi Dream, Christmas lunch; two chicken pittas and a bowl of perfect chips.
Thanasis was around to taxi us up to Horio with the bags and boxes, and then it was an afternoon at home before popping out to do more shopping at the ‘American’ supermarket. We don’t often go that way as Sotiris is nearer and we’re lazy, so it’s a treat to take a good look around the recently re-vamped shop, or partly revamped. It has expanded over the years, been rearranged and now has three main sections. When you pass by you might think it’s only the downstairs that’s available, what you can see from the street, but go through and up, and it’s an Aladdin’s cave of a store. I found some Brasso – not for a Christmas Day tipple but for polishing the brass on my desk and trunk as I am also revamping in the New Year (my office, but more about that another day), and then home again to plan Sunday.
Which is where I am now, with the sun coming up behind rain clouds. If you have been following the water business at our house, you might have picked up that we need a pump in our new tank, so we get more than a spit of hot water in the showers and sinks. I phoned Symi Property Services (you can find them on Facebook), and we’ve arranged to have our old pump removed from the sterna, checked (as it suddenly stopped working at the same time as we switched tanks) and, hopefully, have it put into the new tank, on Tuesday. All being well, we will be back to normal after that. Today, Sunday, I am sorting out the new Jumbo store (our house) and preparing it for Christmas, and then we’re up with the godboys and sporting out theirs, so I better go and get tinsled-up. More tomorrow.
