Drive-In café on Platia Pythagoras

Seen in October 2008: looks like a market in Samos-Town for the sale of motorcycles and motorscooters. But it isn't!
After most of the tourists have gone, there is room enough for all those fancy vehicles on the Platia Pythagoras again. Quite a challenge, the "real art" is to place your vehicle in a such way that nobody can overlook it!


To me it seems that Samians don't want to walk too much, they need instant access to the cafés on Platia Pythagoras and their scene. Not more than a couple of meters walk and then they want to sit down, take their mobile phones and "communicate". The café Iraion is one of the noisiest places I know on the island! ;-)

Photographers and their habbits

I think every photographer, like all humans, has his habbits....
And some things will never change :)

First picture taken August 2005

Second picture taken October 2008

Well, if i where nasty i could also say: he is not a pro if it takes him that long to get the shot right hahaha... ;)

Sunny outlook on life

For several days we had rain, dark clouds, grey skies, relatively low temperatures. But yesterday the weather was nice and the air clear with good visibility. On my way to Samos-town I stopped and took this photo!
These people from Holland had just arrived on Samos the day before and they sat down on this bench to enjoy the breathtaking view over the gulf of Samos with Samos-town and its harbour in a distance and the old houses of Ano Vathi on the slopes of the hill in the front.

Alyki Wetlands

First snow on Samos for this year after the end of August?
No, not really, though it looks like it at first sight. It's salt!

Driving on the road along Mykali beach to Psili Ammos beach in the south-east of the island, you will pass by a shallow lake with salty water, sort of a lagoon, the Alyki wetlands. Well known for flamingos who stay there for a while in winter/spring.

But now the wetlands are completely dried out, a layer of salt covers the ground and the salt crystals shimmer in the sun.
Here are some impressions of how it looked like in the late afternoon of September 1st.

Fallen Beauties

Early this morning I happened to walk around in the port of Pythagorio. Taking photos of course and watching the early morning sky and the sunrise over the coast of Asia minor. Sun rise today was approx. 7 o'clock. Some clouds around the mountains of Cape Mykale.


When walking over to the side of the port where the Pythagoras statue is located, I came across this fallen beauty . The first one of the new lamp poles in the port of Pythagorio to be damaged?


Here you get an idea of how it should look.

Dirty main street or mainly dirty looking street?

The special alchemy of white stone and dark rubber tyres of vehicles lead to a surprisingly fast change in the looks of the newly paved main street in Pythagorio.

First, almost eye-blinding white, now, 2,5 month after it has been finished, it looks awfully dirty, not only the main street but the pedestrian side walks too.
I mean the main road is as dirty as in all the years before, nothing really changed with regards to the blackening effect the tyres of many vehicles leave behind on the main street. But something has been significantly improved: before it was just dark asphalt like in any other villages too, but now it really looks dirty. Everywhere!

Some people in Pythagorio are still wondering why there was a need to remove most of the trees and renew the main road (again after three years) and spend so much money to achieve such an effect.
But tourists will get used to stumbling down the new uneven main street and will enjoy that "dirty walking" feeling in Pythagorio.

The effect is best seen in the evening, when the sun is low and floods the main street with its light. This is the time when many tourists come to town and walk down the main street to reach the harbour.

Wine festival 2008 in Samos-town

Every year in July and/or August, the Samos wine festival takes place in several villages of the Vathy district. The final festivities are held in Samos-town, a five days event on a site near the harbour with lots of things to eat, drink and listen to.

If you happen to be one of those lucky tourists who like to come to Samos and already uses the intenet, don't try to find information on this years event in advance in the internet! Google doesn't help and on the site of Vathy (http://www.vathi.gr/european_version/index_eng.htm) you will only find last years programme!!!
If you are lucky enough to be already on the island and discover one of the advertisings or even find a printed programme, you will be really positively surprised, because they set up a lot of events and all events are described in greek and english!

This year the Samos wine festival in Samos-town lasted from Saturday, August 16th to Wednesday, August 20th. Different dance groups and bands/musicians were dancig/playing there on a big stage.
I visited the festival on two consecutive days and here are some of my photos and impressions from Monday, August 18th and Tuesday, August 19th.

Monday, August 18th:
first there was a program for children with a clown, the children were fascinated by what was going on on the stage, mouth and eyes wide open ...


then there were traditonal dances performed by "The Kavalla Lykeio Ellinidon Group"





and then the greek "C-Real" rock band with powerful lead singer Irini Douka took over the stage. (website: www.c-real.gr/)
They started with many greek songs but later changed to songs sung in english. Nice to hear they had songs like "Zombie" of the Cranberries in their programme too. After the concert I had the pleasure to talk to Irini Douka for a couple of minutes.










Some critical remarks:
unfortunately, the PA equipment supplied for the Samos Wine festival seems to be designed for a series of hard rock concerts and not taking into account that there are tradtional folk dancers appearing too. So the music for the dancing group sounded absolutely terrible on Monday night. Absolutely imbalanced bass and highs, extremely loud and shattering bass. What a pity for the beautifully dressed dancers.
Already in the last two years I wondered why they set up such huge amounts of equipment there only to achive such poor sound in most instances! The main focus seems to be on pushing up the volume to earsplitting levels. Because the sound engineers do know that, they build up their sound controlling platform at least 50 meters away from the main stage with the loudspeakers. ;-)



I went to the people who control the mixing consoles and amplifiers worth thousands of euros and asked them to change something about it, but they just said: "we cannot do anything, it's the CD they gave us". Listen to the following band, it will be a better sound!
Very professional attitude indeed.
Or pure ignorance for the heritage of Greece?

I'm pretty sure it took hours to set up the right sound for the following rock band "C-Real" using the mighty mixing consoles! And they don't have 5 minutes time left to adjust the sound for the dancing group in advance? Come on ....

My suggestion: why not try a different attitude next year? And focus on the sound quality of acoustic music in the first place?

A very good example for superb sound quality achieving an incredibly beautiful atmosphere was given on the occaison of the concert of "Café de l'art" (Notis Mavroudis, Panagiotis Margaris together with Anastasia Moutsatsou) at the Hera temple on the night of the full moon on August, 16th!

There is something else I noticed. One third of the greeks at the concert on Monday night didn't bother anyway for the sound of the music. Their life style seems to be: mobile phone pressed to one ear, the other ear they shelter with their hand to not hear the music and they make it an olympic discipline to communicate most of the time via mobile phones directly in front of the huge loudspeakers at the stage.

Tuesday, August 19th:
(to be added soon!)