Since I’m now part of a team of four bike guides, I’m spending less time cycling than I’m used to, and more time attending to the bike shed, which is positioned in the hotel car park, right in front of the hotel’s grey water treatment works. It smells disgusting, and guests often come over, notice the stench of sewage and make comments to me about how unpleasant it must be being stuck here all day. Yes, madam, it is. Thankfully, our brains seem to phase out such smells after a few hours, until we are reminded of it by guests. |
| To keep myself entertained, I’ve invented an absolutely thrilling game that I like to play during the afternoons. It’s called ‘bikes or tennis’. Basically, you see someone walking out of the hotel wearing sporty clothing and trainers, usually holding a water bottle, and you make a guess whether they are heading to bikes, or to tennis, which is next door to us. Sometimes it’s easy. Lycra = bikes. Racket = tennis. But it can be pretty exciting: the other day some chap totally threw me by coming over to bikes in full tennis whites, racket in hand, to ask about the ride the next morning. Never saw that one coming. As you’d expect, it’s a story that has been reverberating around the bike shed ever since. |
  This week has been strange. The future has been scaring me and the past has been enhanced into glittering showreels by the ‘memories’ feature on my phone. The present, as I write this from the bike shed, smells disgusting. It’s easy to start feeling a bit ridiculous for being out here. But the fact is that this place doesn’t reflect what I’ve spent my summer doing. I’ve spent my summer cycling and windsurfing, not sitting among the stench of sewage, getting fat on unhealthy staff food.   Setting a personal project seemed the best way to improve my mood. So, I created a banana ripening system in my room. The staff food bananas are always green, so I take one a day and add it to the end of the production line. It’s so rewarding watching them progress through the stages of ripeness, and within the next day or two, I will begin to harvest the first crop of the system, as the bananas collected earlier this week begin to reach the yellow spotty phase that I prefer.  Surprisingly, the best part of my days here is our evening games of tennis, which I play with a few people who came with me from Vasiliki and a few people from here. In fact, our enthusiasm is such that we’ve formed the Levante Lawn Tennis Club, which meets on the court for a ‘hit’ (tennis term for playing tennis), or a ‘knock up’ (another tennis term for tennis) at around 7pm. The rules, culture and tradition of the LLTC are still in the making, but we have already decided that new members must (as we all did the night we formed the club) take a plunge in the icy cold recovery pool situated near the courts.   To be fair, it’s actually not that bad here: I have my own room in a nice little apartment I share with Isaac and Matt from Vass, and the tennis genuinely has been a blast. Plus I went to Rhodes city on Friday and it was very lovely. Ultimately, these last few weeks are a perfect time for me to get my shit together for the future. Let the work commence! Good week on your end? Love James |
Bikes or Tennis?
