Back to Mach.

The day began dry but very grey with strong waves pounding the beach and the outfall. Later we had some blue skies but only for a short while.

This morning we met up with our friends in Mach library to practise our Welsh. That was after we had caught up with each other's holidays in Yorkshire, Scotland and Crete. 

At the moment we are learning I would - faswn i together with if I  - taswn i which naturally have different endings for I, you, he, she etc. Oh and often when spoken both are abbreviated to 'swn i' We quizzed our lovely Welsh speaking librarian on how to know which it was and she confirmed that it is simply by context. Very confusing especially when as in English the phrases can be swapped around eg. If I won the lottery I would buy a new house / I would buy a new house if I won the lottery. To add to our confusion when the verb 'had' is thrown in the mix then 'if I' gets changed to 'if it'. I suspect that is something to do with the different ways to say had. In north Wales it's the same structure as in English eg 'I have a cake', but in south Wales it would be 'There is a cake with me.'  No wonder it's taking so long for us to learn the language. 

As Pete will be going to the dump tomorrow afternoon I carried on working in the garden when we returned home.  The rest of the knautia was ready to be cut back and the towering verbena had finished flowering as well. I finished off by picking up leaves and stalks from the shingle and weeding some of the beds. A thousand knautia seedlings and more myob dealt with. 

One very last photo of Crete to go with a few random observations.

Something that was very different to home was the amount of people smoking. Here in the UK it is only the rebellious young, a few older folk who can't give up the habit and the ignorant who smoke. On Crete we stepped out of the airport building in the middle of the night to find a whole row of men and women all puffing away and generally we would see people smoking everywhere apart from restaurants, shops or on the buses. One afternoon walking along the road in Plaka we were passed by a police car. The policeman driving had a cigarette in one hand and his colleague had one arm out of the window with a cigarette in his hand. All very laid back. 

Scooters and small motorbikes were very common. In Plaka almost half the scooters we saw parked up still had the keys in the ignition sometimes with the helmet hanging off the handlebars. That wouldn't happen here.

Something else that was different was how people dressed on the beach. Admittedly here in Borth many people go into the water wearing a wetsuit but I still see swimsuits and bikinis in the summer. In Crete there were bikinis, but only just. It took me a while to adjust to seeing women of all ages wearing what I would call a thong. It was fine when they had the body for so much of it to be exposed but there were those (and yes often those of more mature years) when it would have been better to have more coverage of sometimes very large and flabby bodies. Not wishing to expose my wobbly tum I stuck to my standard swimming costume. 

People often went in the water wearing jewellery, sunglasses and/or hats. The water was very buoyant so some people just bobbed around chatting with their friends. I saw people in the sea with adult sized blow-up rings, pool noodles or other inflatables. 

One Sunday we watched a lovely group of five young folk in the water with a small baby sat in a double ring with seat thing. There was lots of encouragement as they pashed the baby from one person to another over the small waves until eventually with much splashing the baby was kicking its way short distances between its doting family. That's one child who won't be frightened of the water.

I really enjoyed snorkelling, there was so much to see even close to shore. On one occasion I counted 12 or 13 different species of fish and also saw a group of squid, sea urchins and a starfish walking on the sand.