Getting there - part 2

Dear Emirates, forget all bad things I thought about you the day before. As I lie stretched out in my roomy business class seat ( a free upgrade) I think you are the best airline in the world. Silver service, amazing lunch, staff hovering to fulfil our every need. Alan, feeling ultra relaxed, buys two watches on board as the hostess whips out the visa card machine to process the payment. The Spanish man across the aisle gets sozzled on repeated fill ups of red wine as his grumpy son sleeps through the flight.


On the train ride into Athens we meet some lovely young American girls just off the plane from Santorini. They give us heaps of advice about things to see and do when we get to the island. One of them opens her iPad and forwards me a cheat-sheet email of Santorini highlights. Ah, I love travelling in this age of instant communication.

We exit at Thissio and find the Phidias Hotel just up the cobbled street-way, which has open air bars and cafes all along both sides. Amazingly the Parthenon is perched on the hill just above us.

The hotel receptionist is a hip young Greek guy and after checking in we cram ourselves and bags into the tiny lift and shudder our way up to the third floor. Our room is so small and quaint we are a bit taken aback. From 5 star to 2 star (ha I doubt the daughters would even give it that many) we are grateful the bed has clean sheets. The colours of the decor are so daggy and Greek they are almost but not quite cool.


It is late afternoon but we decide to follow the cobbled road up to the Acropolis. It is a perfect time of day to view the Parthenon and surrounding ruins and the amazing view of Athens around us. There is a golden hue over everything and I feel sufficed with happiness. Alan remarks on the sleeping dogs all around the ruins. We start counting them. Six, seven, eight... none lifts a head when we walk by. We walk carefully on the marble steps on the site – they are slippery. Then it is back down the hill to our hotel for a lie down and shower before dinner.


The bars and cafes are more crowded now and there are market stalls selling art and jewellery. It is a great atmosphere. We decide to have dinner at what looks to be the least fancy place along the street – the Greek kitchen. Two American women are having a major debrief about some falling out with a friend, then a fat Italian man in a suit arrives with an attractive woman in a nice dress. Dinner is pretty good – Greek salad, bread, lamb chops for me, chicken for Alan. The wine is awful, warm and perfume-tasting served in glass tumblers. Skinny cats wind in and out around the tables.


After dinner we walk down the street taking in the sights around us. We watch some young boys play soccer on a field beside the street. They are very good and we think of Jac back home who has also learnt some of these very fancy moves.

Our restaurant - the morning after

Getting there

4 September 2010 - We are finally on our way after months of planning, weeks of stressing and numerous packing conundrums.

It is wild and windy weather aka a terrifyingly bumpy flight to Melbourne. It is nice to catch up with Claire but there are still hours to wait at Tullamarine before being crammed into our back-of-plane seats on Emirates night-time flight EK507 for Dubai. I am seated between husband and a pleasant but very large Maori lady who oozes over into my allocated space. 13 hours is a long time to spend sandwiched like this, willing the plane to stay up, trying to watch a movie or two, contemplating the incredible durability of the lipstick on the Emirates hosties and snatching minutes of sleep only here and there.

At Dubai airport I am impressed with both the vast and amazing architecture and the handsome young Arab customs officials. We are met in the terminal by our smiling Radisson Blu representative who whizzes us in minutes to our hotel overlooking the 'creek' in the old part of Dubai.

It is only 6.30 am and I am not sure I can sleep but after a shower and a lie down on the king-sized bed in our glamorous room, we both fall into a deep slumber until mid-morning. We venture out to walk down the street and catch a wooden punt to visit the old fabric market on the other side of the river. All very fascinating but my major preoccupation is with the incredible heat – it is 44 degrees with no breeze. Ramadan means no drinking or eating in public so we feel very dehydrated. Forget sight-seeing – spending the rest of the day in the hotel seems like a good idea. We have lunch before a swim in the pool (disappointingly the water temperature is over 30 degrees) and slumber around in our hotel robes (so fetching with my leopard skin eye mask - thank you Anna) before high-tea on the 10th floor overlooking an astonishing scene of an ancient scene juxtaposed with a modern world The busy activity around the wooden junks and barges below us is like a scene from Ali Baba and the 40 thieves and yet over the other side of the creek there are many strangely-shaped sky-scrapers and the long thin spire of the world's tallest building.The Nepalese man who comes into our room to check the minibar supplies tells us he has been with the hotel for 20 years. He sees his family back home in Nepal for only one month each year. The Indian driver who takes us back to the airport the next morning has a very similar story – 20 years with the hotel and family back home.

Bags are packed

The room we have booked in Santorini!

Ha - I know two and a half weeks out is a bit obsessive but I'm just working out things well ahead and making adjustments every couple of days - extracting items...it really is hard to keep the packing minimalist though.  Shauna has given heaps of 'tidy travelling' tips and loaded me up with Italy maps, sim card, euros, stamps, extra camera card etc.  I like her advice to pack some padded 2kg postbags for sending purchases home.  'What purchases?,' asks perplexed husband.  Oh dear what a worry.  Also her advice to take all the old undies, wear them once, then chuck away rather than washing for the first week or so!

This time in 3 weeks we will be in Dubai and three days after that in fabulous fabulous Santorini for a week.  The rest of the itinerary includes Athens, Rome (a week), Orvieto, Pompeii, Florence (with instructions how to get to Shauna's recommended leather shop), walking around the Cinque de Terre, Nice, the lovely Dodogne stone farmhouse where Sue joins us (a week), Portugal (a week), Paris, Dubai and home... to an oak tree with leaves and a no-doubt overgrown garden.

I will no doubt miss some of the little folk and a few big ones too. Au revoir...

Comfort food

I think my husband loves me more when I make cakes!  He also likes it when I sew his trousers up and sew on missing buttons.  All the old-fashioned stuff - must take him back to his childhoold.

I've been making the following two cake/desserts lately and have had requests for the recipes so here you go.  Both can very easily be made gluten free.

Pear and Almond Flan
1 tbs brown sugar
150g butter
150g caster sugar
2 large eggs lightly beaten
150g almond meal
2 tbsp self-raising flour (use gluten free if you like to make gf)
2 tbsp blanched almonds
3 or 4 pears, skin on

Line a circular flan or cake tin 23cm in diameter with non-stick baking paper. Sprinkle brown sugar over the baking paper.

In a bowl, cream together butter and caster sugar to create creamy mixture. Lightly beat the eggs and add them to the mixture. Add almond meal and flour and mix well.

Cut the pears vertically, leaving the skin on and the stalk at end (I spoon out the pip and stalk from middle). Place the pieces decoratively down in the flan dish or cake tin, flat sides down. Fill the gaps with blanched almonds. Pour the cake mixture over the pears and almonds and press down.

Bake in preheated oven at 190c for 45 minutes or until the filling feels firm at the centre. Allow to cool. Ease the flan away from the edge of the dish with a knife. Place a large serving plate on top and turn over to reveal the very rustic pear side. Looks a treat. I serve with a dollop of Greek yogurt.


Hummingbird slice
¾ cup brown sugar
½ cup (125 ml) vegetable oil (I use olive oil)
2 eggs
½ cup crushed pineapple, drained
1 banana, mashed
1 cup grated carrot (about 2 carrots) – I usually end up with more than a cup and use all of it
¾ cup self-raising flour (I use gluten free to make gf but recipe is for normal)
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ cup shredded coconut
¼ cup chopped pecans


Preheat oven to 160c. Place the sugar, oil and eggs in bowl and whisk to combine. Add the pineapple, banana and carrot and mix to combine. Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon, coconut and pecans and mix to combine. Spoon into lightly greased 20cm x 30cm tin lined with baking power. Bake for 45 minutes (I find needs 55 minutes) or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Allow to cool in tin. Slice and serve with Greek yogurt and a drizzle of honey.

Sad times

It’s a big thing to lose a parent. My Dad died three weeks ago today and I am just emerging from the first onslaught of grief.
My father was such an amazingly zany personality it is hard to come to terms with him not being around anymore. Gavin Buchanan was the kind of person who could make any gathering totally come to life just with his presence. There was definitely some magic about my Dad, which meant my childhood was absolutely fantastic. My father was fun-loving and funny (although sometimes sad), a teaser, a joker, an opportunist, a dreamer, a talker of ‘big ideas’. He was handsome, dashing, creative, poetic, artistic, clever, unconventional, offbeat, unusual, dashing and smart but also naive...


Grief is a perplexing bundle of thoughts and feelings and I think each loss we have brings with it a different mix of emotions. There has been lots of ‘poor me’ stuff and some resentments to work through following my father’s death. For a little while my spiritual beliefs - particularly about the karmic accountability of our actions – also got a bit of a shake-up but I’ve come though all that. More recently I’ve been dwelling on the importance of family, on the progression of the generations (the song of long time flowing), and on my own mortality. I kind of like the notion of ‘going home’ one day to join all my family who have gone before me.


Interestingly I saw in the first week after Dad’s death an absolutely fascinating ABC ‘Australian Story ‘ episode about a harp player, Peter Roberts, who describes himself as a thanologist, one who plays music in hospitals to relax people at the end of their lives to allow them to let go and ‘go home’. Roberts is such a beautiful human being it made me cry (again) to listen to him talk about his own spirituality and the work he does to help the dying.


I have had been so lucky to have had lots of conversations and communications with friends and extended family in the past few weeks – including some friend I haven’t spoken to in many years. The lovely things that have been said about my Dad, and my Mum, and our family have validated how lucky I have been, and am, to have such a wonderful family and memories. Thank you to everyone who has been so kind to me.


Here’s one of the last pictures I took off my Dad in recent months - frail, sick and knowing he was dying but the spark of his personality is still very much there.

Goodbye dear Daddio!  I love you to bits. xxx

Regrets

My husband was in a total pickle this morning. The Australian dollar has taken a dive against the Euro. On Tuesday one Australian dollar was worth 72 Euros but this morning one Aussie dollar is only worth 65 cents. He meant to buy some Euros the other day for our overseas holiday but was too busy and now he is beating himself up with regret that he didn’t do it. Nothing I said seemed to make him feel better. He was in total angst.

Last week I went to visit my father in the Blue Mountains. He is very ill and frail and very unhappy. I contemplated his state of mind and wondered if some of it might have to do with regrets. After my mother died and he remarried we became a fractured family. I don’t think he meant it to be this way but it’s just how it ended up. He didn’t keep up the friendships or connections from his life with Mum and us either – but started a totally new life with his second wife. They have moved so much they don’t really have any friends close by. I think he’s lonely now. I suspect he has a lot of regrets. It breaks my heart to contemplate this.

When I get older (I know I’m old now but I guess I mean the usual average end-of-life type old) and reflect back on my life I don’t want to have a huge bundle of regrets. My vision for old age is one where hopefully there might be a certain satisfaction in looking back and thinking you’ve given it your best shot and learnt a bit of wisdom along the way. There will be joys and sorrows to contemplate and puzzle - and I know we can’t avoid having some regrets but I hope I won’t have too many. I also want to still be having robust relationships with my lovely family and the very many important friends I’ve made over the years.

My friend Peter said to me on the phone last night that watching his father die, taught him a thing or two about how to die. When my mother died I felt the same way – she kept on living right up until near the end and died with a lot of dignity. Peter’s father told him he was glad he had time to tie up loose ends and make amends for some of his wrongs he wanted righted. He was glad his exit wasn’t a heart attack or sudden dropping off the twig.

I’d like to imagine dying as being a time for some meaningful philosophical and spiritual contemplation and a time for some really satisfying conversations. A time for tears but for laughter too. I hope I’m not being too naive.

- And sorry this isn't my usual light and fluffy stuff... (and the photo is of a beautiful house in the Blue Mountains)

Good riddance to March

I haven't been blogging much as the last month has been a horror one. My daughter had an operation, my granddaughter had an operation and my father was diagnosed with two major illnesses.  It's been a month of angst, a few tears, sleepless nights, teeth grinding, stomach clenching and lots of self talk in an attempt to remain on top of things. I had a special herbal concoction made up at Goulds and it did calm me down - or at least got rid of that imminent heart attack feeling. It's a mixture of rose, lavender, caraway, peppermint, motherwort and blue flag.

My major diversionary activities lately haven’t been very creative but more in the form of Sudoku at airports, in planes and in hospital wards and a bit too much retail therapy. Yikes hope husband doesn't scrutinise the last credit card bill too closely!

I am so glad April is now here and we somehow all got through. Once again I have learnt the lessons that one really does cope somehow, that just as day follows night, good times follow bad times, sunshine follows rain, and that catastrophising is a really bad trait I really do need to keep a handle on.

Easter has been a very welcome break, back into the garden again after too long letting it go.  It was nice to pick a giant pumpkin out of the vegie patch today. And this weekend I've been sewing again too.  Made a red linen skirt with a pocket made from the floral linen scrap I bought at Bellingen. I am really happy with it.  Not sure how much more sewing I will do though - I am craving a new creative outlet.  Might get back to the mosaicing...

Happy Easter.