Corfu. Part Two!

2008-06-17, 10:03 p.m.
Its Corfu Number Two! Some more essays from �Stepfie�s holiday diary� plus a shitload more photos to bore y�all silly with!

Corfu, in case you were wondering, is a land of teeny frogs

teeny frog!

Fabulous sunsets

corfiot sunset

And middle aged honeymooners snogging in a pantomime style

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There�s lots of flowers there, too!

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So. On with the stories, then��.


Nikos� bar was quiet, save for a couple of couples. Northerners; the women offensively dressed in bikini tops and pareos, flab spilling over, under and around the flimsy constraints of a few triangles of Lycra and some string � cackling non-stop at notyhing-at-0all. The men the colour of a creosoted fence, in trainers and ironed shorts, glints of gold chain at wrist and bulldog neck.

L and I sat sulkily away from the bar, one eye on a basketball game on the huge TV. With commentary and on-screen graphics both in Greek we had no chance of following anything but the rudiments of the game and we spent our time tutting at the cackling Northern women and feeling superior.

As the game was ending, a family came into the bar and sat at the table next to ours. Parents with three boys, they were always going to be one seat short at a table for four. Me, I would have pulled up another chair. They preferred to let their children duke it out, in an ever more violent game of musical chairs. Without the music. Just �chairs�, then. The youngest son, aged about 4, eventually lost the battle despite employing use of a weapon in the form of a shrimp net. He didn�t actually hit anyone with it, but being a very small boy, with a net clearly made for someone with longer arms, standing significantly further from the floor, each time he turned to protest to his parents that he had nowhere to sit, another eye got gouged, another shoulder jabbed, more ribs scraped and another drink sent skittering to the floor.

The yelps and cries of �Mu-um! Look what he DID!� sailed on the night air and combined with the hyena calls of the nearly naked northerners as the perched on their barstools like toads clinging to a bulrush. �Fancy a game of pool?� I said.

Not so much a pool table, more a relief map of the Pennines; gullies, slopes, hollows, unexpected peaks, dimples and meanders. The many-times repaired baize criss-crossed with glued down rips and shiny with a thousands attempts to place the cue ball in the long since worn away D.

The barman gave us enough free tokens for three games, I imagine in a mixture of apology and pity. L won the first game fairly conclusively. The cues were as splintery and twisted as rustic fence posts and each shot, no matter how carefully calculated, had no guarantee of reaching its intended destination as the uneven baize bumped and rolled every ball onto cushions, away from pockets and spinning into the very clusters from which the shot was intended to keep away.

Somehow, this uneven playing field�ummm�evened up the playing field! My lack of skill double-kissed off L�s surprise at his shots not going where they should have. I drew on long-forgotten memories of every single bloody interminable attempt that Shagnasty had made at teaching me pool and remembered the basics of topspin, side and backspin and combined it with my own special brand of �filth playing� (the usual mean tactics every pool player employs when they think they might lose, added to a lot of bending over in the tight white pencil skirt I was wearing!) to win the second game. With me buoyed up with success and L full of macho pride, the third game was always going to be close and went right to the last ball before L. who is by far the better player, finally finished me off. In celebration he bought me and ice-cream from the shop next to the bar. The barman gave us free shots of Sambuca, which we downed despite Sambuca tasting like Listerine and Tramp�s Piss. �Let�s go home and fuck�, says L.


We�d missed breakfast after another night of drinking in Nikos� bar and stumbled up the stairs to reception feeling bleary and liverish.

The receptionist called me over while L was having a smoke and explained in barely comprehensible English that, if we wanted, we could take a trip in the hotel minibus to Sidari. For 8� (�6/$12), �go and come back�, which seemed a cheap way to wake ourselves up and to work up an appetite for a late breakfast. As we didn�t have any better plan than that, we paid our money and got on the bus ten minutes later with our driver, a hotel employee of indeterminate job spec and two elderly couples from the Midlands, in sunhats and orthopaedic sandals.

The road from San Stefanos to Sidari winds through mountain tracks � olive groves and lemon tress on either side � for fifteen minutes or so before beginning its descent towards the town.

Sidari �city limits� appeared to be the usual Corfiot blend of scrubland, half-built (or half demolished?) villas and the occasional faded, tatty-looking bar.

to rent

Sadly, as we reached its epicentre, it didn�t get any better. We parked between the co-op and a parade of tired looking shops and all jumped out of the bus. �Back here, yes. Two o�clocks� said our driver, before vanishing quicker than Mr Benn�s shopkeeper.

Curiously, Sidari�s main (only!) street has a feel of the Wild West film about it � if Wild West films had been filled with bars and souvenir shops, that is. Every second building advertised English Breakfast and so, as we hadn�t yet eaten, we went into the warehouse-like Manhattan Bar and L ordered �The Full Monty� for �2.90. Curiously enough, no nearly naked out-of-work Sheffield steelworkers turned up, but a very nice breakfast did. The coffee was as black as pitch, bitter and strong. Sadly even a full mugful wasn�t enough to induce a �caffeine poo� � something of which I am badly in need, if I�m honest.

After breakfast we strolled around Sidari High Street in silence for a while. As the 100th shop we passed belched forth yet another bloated, sweating, family of walking sausages � their scarlet tattooed bodies bursting from their skins of footie- shirt and club-wear off the market, a six year old boy with a bleached blonde faux-hawk screamed himself puce for want of some gaudy trinket or other. Taking L�s hand I ventured �Its fucking shit here, isn�t it?� �Mmm�, he said, trudging grimly onwards.

The council estates of the North West and the South East are surely quieter places this week, at their mottled inhabitants waddle through Sidari, trailing Lambert and Butler smoke and fake D & G in their wakes. Windows stay unbroken, corner shops retain their stocks and teachers manage to get through entire lessons while the progeny of this underclass whine for ice-creams and swarm down the streets like polyester ants in their age-inappropriate slogan T�s (eg a cartoon of spermatozoa, looking hopeful.., the one at the front turning its head with a worried expression �Bad News lads!� he is saying �We�re in an ass!�. The child wearing this particular t-shire was about 10.)

Sidari beach is a wide stretch of mud-coloured sand, strewn here and there with rubbish and deserted aside from a few pasty looking couples, playing a grim game of bat-and-ball with stoic determination to have a good time regardless. It was a half-arsed game, and nobody was smiling.

As we walked along, past pedalo stalls and the backs of the bars we�d passed earlier, I told L about pictures I�d seen of Sidari, with a picturesque sandstone cove. It seemed like a cruel hoax as we trudged past the overflowing litter bins and West African pedlars with their nylon hold-alls full of pirated DVDs. At the end of the beach was a path, rough hewn slabs of peaches and cream marble, set into the sand-mud and edged with white painted kerb-stones, winding up and out of sight through bushes and trees. �Maybe that�s where the cove is?� I said, trying to sound hopeful. We had half and hour left before we had to be back at the minibus.

Scrambling along the path as fast as our flip-flops would allow we finally found the part of Sidari so sorely wasted on those crass, lager swilling, chip-eating louts, their shrill foul-mouthed wives and perpetually under-achieving spawn. How the Corfiot must despise the English.

From this

Shit-dari

To this

Canal d'amour

canal d'amour

In just quarter of a mile.


That�s the end of the notebook stuff. So I just need to tell you that we hired a buggy:

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And drove all over the island. From Kassiopi

Kassiopi

To Paleokastritsa

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And everywhere in between!

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And then back to San Stef for swimming

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Being uncouth

no glass!

And downright cheesy

dumbass cocktails

Aaah! Happy holidays!

Later

S
x





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