Summer Wedding Part 1

As the song goes : Simera, simera gamos ginetai – Today a wedding is taking place.

 Kalia and Omar and their families not only invited us to the wedding but also to the pre-wedding party which was held last night at the Yacht Club, in Kalimaria, Thessaloniki.  Here we are – the yacht’s not ours!- and I left the intrusive wine glass there as a symbol of how the evening went. Cousins Dimos and Eleni are famed for their hospitality and, as the parents of the bride, they take their responsibilities very seriously.

 

All of the many bottles that graced the table – ouzo, grappa, wines - are personally brewed by Dimos. Being the excellent host he is, he has also arranged musicians to entertain us - the bagpipes starting out the evening with stirring Thracian music.

            

 

It was hard to get them still even for a couple of seconds, so excuse the poor pic quality, but here is a shot of the happy couple, being photo-bombed by the bride’s bruv, Christos!

Kalia has a wee dance with mother-in-law who cuts a fine oriental dance on the sand.

            

 

After a bit, the spirits are rising – having been downed! Here Z turns emotionally incontinent as Dimos regales him with his unparalleled raconteur skills.

Here he is, too, literally having a stab at the famous Panorama triangles, filo pastry filled with crème patisserie and drenched in syrup. I find them so sweet they feel capable of making my teeth melt - Z can make a tray of them simply disappear. He did not down them all but …….took a box of them home with him!

We got home at 3 am – and this was just a warm-up: the actual ceremony and reception is tonight.  Let’s hope our spirits and stamina see us through all the events.

   

 

My departure, incidentally, was more demure than Z’s boxed-sweet-swagger: I had kindly been gifted a pot of basil used as décor on the tables. Since basil is said to symbolize love and good wishes, these are exactly what we wish for Kalia and Omar.

                                            

A Wee Trip to Glasgow

Here we are on a quick visit to Glasgow with my neighbour, Anna. She doesn’t really speak English but displayed great powers of receptivity and a sense of adventure throughout the trip. First day out, we come across a busking piper:  a photo definite op.!

                             

 

We head for the University of Glasgow, this year basking in the laurels of being 65^th in world ranking of universities, 10^th place in the United Kingdom and second only to Edinburgh in the Scottish ranking. Anna meets her nephew, Vasilis, who’s following postgraduate studies there and we also meet Angeliki, currently a tutor on  pre-sessional courses at the university. When I say that the night before her first lesson, she learned that Mati, outside Athens, where their permanent home is, was up in flames, you can guess the kind of emotional turmoil she had been going through. By some miracle, if that word can be deemed appropriate for such a tragic inferno, their house was saved and relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, some of their friends and neighbours were lost to the conflagration.

That day as she admired our national costume, Anna had happened to say how much she would like to see a traditional Scottish wedding. And, as we were strolling round the campus, we turned a corner leading into a quadrangle and behold, in the church courtyard, a beautiful line-up of gorgeous girls and braw, braw lads, completely kilted up, wearing  our national garb with style and dignity.

                               

                

                     

              

After that, we wander to Kelvin Grove, described as:

‘a picturesque and richly wooded dell a short distance north west of Glasgow and was a favourite place for young people to meet on summer afternoons’

 alongside the lyrics of the famous song written by the Paisley-born Thomas Lyle (1792-1859) about it:

Let us haste to Kelvin Grove, bonnie lassie o
Through its mazes let us rove, bonnie lassie o
Where the roses in their pride
Deck the bonnie dingle side
Where the midnight fairies glide, bonnie lassie o

Oh Kelvin banks are fair, bonnie lassie o
When the summer we are there, bonnie lassie o
There the May-pink crimson plume
Grows a soft but sweet perfume
Round the yellow banks of broom, bonnie lassie o

Now two problems presented themselves to me:

• When we talk of Glasgow, is ‘the green’ a noun - as a flat area where the washing was traditionally laid out to dry or an adjective, describing the greenery around the place.
• And why is the Gaelic word ‘glas’ here rendered ‘green’ when I have learned it as the word for the colour ‘gray’?

Apparently this word can apply to both:

Omniglot.com has  glasto as a Proto-Celtic term for ‘green’ whereas Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language by Mairead Nic Craith, Macmillan, 2012, cites examples of glas being used to describe ‘an assortment of shadings in Gaelic’ : green for vegetation and in madainn glas - a gray morning , described as a raw, chilly one.

                              

 

We briefly visited the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum, lack of time and aching feet preventing a visit to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Exhibition – I now regret that decision!

But we had places to go – our hotel – and people to meet – Marina and John, who had driven up from Durham. Below Marina is presented with her loukoumi, Greek delight, fresh from Macedonia.

                                

We round off our day with a fine, relaxed meal at a nearby restaurant.  But our evening unexpectedly ends with a frantic rush to the hotel in torrential rain. Despite our umbrellas – drenched or droukit!