Eeeek!

Eeeek! This derelict old camper got (literally) dragged in and dumped here a few nights ago! This is my new view.

As you can see, it doesn’t even have any wheels! It considerably changes my lovely sea views. And I found out that it has been parked here every fall for at least the past three years, and spends the whole winter here. I am not happy!

I think I’ll be moving, even if it does cost me one month’s rent to get out of the rental agreement. Hopefully I can find a cheaper apartment that’ll make up for the money loss. It probably won’t have a sea view but I’d like to be a lot closer to the shopping district, especially since I’ll surely be having to schlep around in the rain for at least three months of the winter here. Nearly all the annual rainfall comes between November and that’s a lot of rainy days.

I’m making slow but steady progress in finding my way around town. The Halo store I really need to get to is a 1.5 mile hike from the downtown bus stop so I haven’t made it there yet. The past two times I’ve gone to town, I’ve had to go to the Sigal health insurance office and it’s 1/4 mile in the opposite direction, so that would be a little too much walking for one day. My I.D. card hadn’t arrived yet when I went yesterday so I still have to go there again next trip too. Darn it!

But I did find the cell provider store and renewed my cellphone plan, it’s $11 a month for a huge amount of minutes and data. Next time I might just get the $8 plan, since I really only use the Albanian phone for Google Maps to find my way around town. I mostly use the US phone here at home on the wifi connection. My US phone plan is with Visible, only costs $25 a month for unlimited usage, and my US phone number works here without any foreign country or roaming fees. I have to keep the US number viable because my bank and some other websites send texts with access codes. I got a US number from Text Now but it’s not accepted, darn it!

I also found a store that sells bulk foods and the Benn Kafe store that sells whole coffee beans, yay! The pre-ground stuff I’ve been using is Lavazzo brand (also in the US!) and it’s pretty good but the store where I got that has closed for the winter. The beans only cost about $6 a pound; I got regular and decaf because I’ve picked up the bad habit of having a cup of decaf after dinner. It helps me to not be hungry between dinner and bedtime.

I need the Halo store to get a bathroom scale, it’s driving me nuts to not know what I weigh. They’re also supposed to have a lot of imported and hard to find items. I’m having a real problem finding a number of foods I use on keto, particularly natural sweeteners. They sell artificial sweeteners like saccharine (yuck!) and cyclamate here and I did find stevia with erythritol in one store but I’m hoping to find monkfruit or xylitol, which taste far better than stevia. I also can’t find ground flaxseed and I need a queen size blanket or quilt.

The only cover that fits my queen size bed is a really thin thing. There are 3 twin size quilts though, and only one pillowcase. Weird. My bed didn’t have a top sheet either! The bottom sheet is a flat sheet all tucked in. But I dug around the other day and found a fitted sheet so I’ll change those around the next time I wash the sheet.

Also measuring cups….. that’s a bad mistake I made! I had read that you should bring them but so many other things took precedence. I did bring my favorite 1/4 cup measure and yes I do know it’s kinda crazy to have a favorite measuring cup! Well duhhhh! Here the measurements are metric! And all I’ve seen are big 1 liter cups, measured off in milliliters. Not helpful. I did bring measuring spoons, thank goodness!

Last night was another really spectacular sunset. In the distance across the sea are two tiny Greek islands.