Walking around Mitilini

Having spent 2 hours wrestling with the blogging app, Blogsy, to lay out and present lots of photos and description about the last day.... Sod's Law took over, the app crashed and will not recover all that work from its servers wherever they are. I am quickly coming to the point of view that iPads are great viewing/listening devices, but for authoring a laptop is far superior. Anyway, there is nothing I can do about that till June, so I will use good old vanilla Blogger till we get back to Britain.

Moan over - onto telling you about our holiday today. After a pleasant, quiet and quick flight from Athens, we landed in Mitilini last night. Emerged into the baggage collection area to a scrum of welcoming friends and family. People have to vote where they are born in Greek elections apparently (a bit Biblical!), so there is a lot of travelling going on ahead of Sunday's election.

Got to our hotel via a circuitous back-street route, so didn't really see where we were last night. Awoke this morning with a dawn chorus of cooing pigeons,and opened the curtains to blue skies and roofscape.

After a leisurely breakfast we started to explore - first one way up the harbour, and then the other before branching off by the Communist Party (KKE) election poster. Saw lots of interesting things:-
• a piece of militant baldness graffiti. I probably wouldn't have put it quite so strongly myself!
• a Harley Davidson with horns (probably owned by one of the Mitilini Pirates chapter we've seen driving around)
• inside a cafe where we stopped for a drink, giant reproductions of photos of old Mitilini
• a statue with what looked like a mutant otter on his head
• as well as lots of scrawly graffiti, some rather good stuff and stencil work
• a rather revealing garment, complete with furry handcuffs. My un-named travelling companion (:-)!) insisted I include this picture
• the bell tower of St Athanasiou cathedral (where there was a funeral taking place when we looked in)
• some ruins at the back of the cathedral
• great shop front for "Idea & Techne", which turned out to be a wool shop. Any yarn-bombers on Lesbos?
• last but not least, we saw loads of Lentisk trees in flower. We first came across these 21 years ago on a little hard-to-reach Cycladean island called Folegandros. This is where we decided to move South from Hebden Bridge. It is also where we met the very charismatic poet, Tom McEachran who was unfortunately by then in the last stages of full blown AIDS. He made us laugh and was very courageous and witty and outrageously camp. So this picture's for him. RIP Tom.

While watching the world go by,we had a long conversation about what to do in the next phase of our lives. Greek watersides are the right places for these discussions.

Finally, thanks to all my former work colleagues for their support for this arduous endeavour we are undertaking!

Apologies if the photographs are out of sequence. I will work on this over the next few days... Hope they give you a flavour of Mitilini - we think it's got a lot going for it!