Longing to visit Father Christmas

Iro settles down to entertain me for the two hours it's going to take to charge my battery; she's already asked what I do with the Mac, and is rather sad to say that she isn't able to do anything creative herself, and indeed has to use a Windows machine for her work because the company's customer database is done in a Windows program ...

The need to share files with Windows users, or even to work in the Windows environment, is no obstacale for a Mac user: you simply use a programme like Virtual PC to run Windows on your Mac - you can even have 'Windows' in a window, rather than having it take up the whole screen, affirming your independence from Microsoft and leaving you free to enjoy the Mac's people-friendly environment to do all your creative stuff: it's even much more stable than using a PC because it doesn't go via DOS.

Seems she hasn't heard of running Windows as a window on a Mac, although I noticed that the G4 in the next room had Virtual PC installed ...

From there she started saying how she longed to go to Finland to see Father Christmas, it was so pointless having Christmas in a hot country where there could never be any snow ...

She is more-or-less dribbling at the mouth at my 'fantasy' collection of idealised Swedish Yule-tide photos, and almost as much at my telling her how a Suggestopedic approach can get you started with a new language, painting, singing, acting on stage, in a rather short time ... "What could I do if I came to visit for, say, three days?!"

As soon as she hears a few notes of the harp coming out of the iBook's one-inch mono speaker, she asks if it's recorded, and when she hears an extract from my morning thoughts for the radio she says "Whose voice is that?!" When I says it's my 'professional' voice, she says "Tell me everything!", looks at a good number of my web-sites, and is fascinated to discover the bookmark function of her browser - hardly less fascinating for me to help her with her software when it's all in Greek - literally!

She tells me where I can get gyros and English books in Heraklion, and to try Elounda and Plaka as lovely places to visit.

It turns out to be the only real conversation I get with anyone all the ten days I'm in Crete- lovely to feel I'm someone again, and to gain an insight, however small, into a corner of Greek society ...