Kalo Taxidi - Coffee grinding grocery (in Andros Chora)

Coffee grinding grocery (in Andros Chora)
I went into old-fashioned grocery / coffee grinding shop for milk. I like NOYNOY [NOY NOY KID - when I first saw it I thought it was goat milk - then I realised it was probably designed for children] The NOYNOY was on the top shelf, i.e. ceiling height. The "light" version was lower down. [should not the heavier milk have been lower?] I thought that the young lady assistant might think I was awkward - and have to use a "claw" on a stick gadget to get it down. No - she had some tins in a compartment down below. She said to me "NOYNOY?" I thought "POO POO", confusing ns and ps. NOPLICKS - the Horlicks sign I saw on train from Cardiff to London. I had just come back from Bulgaria - and was still translating from Cyrillic to Roman. From Bulgaria I went on a day trip to Romania - how easy it was when writing was in the Roman alphabet - though I did not speak a word of Romanian I felt at home with the familiar looking letters. This time in Greece I would sometimes glance at something in Greek, and register subconsciously the English pronunciation. I did that with "kaleidoscope". I would think that I could not possibly have read that word and go back and laboriously translate it letter by letter - and realise that I was right the first time. In Belgium, where I lived in the mid 1970s, I got to the stage when I could understand fast French more easily than slow French. When French was spoken quickly I would subconsciously register the meaning without translating every word. When French was spoken more slowly I would translate each individual word into English. In fact with slow French I would put so much effort into the translation into English that I had a lesser understanding of the meaning than when I let the words soak in. Linguistic osmosis.


An extract from my book about Greece, "Kalo Taxidi".