As predicted, I’m now ensconced in the hotel with a glass of Mythos by my side and feeling like I missed a night’s sleep – which I effectively did. It’s all very lovely here, but a terribly disturbing thing happened as I drove the rental car out of Mytilene on my way to Molyvos which I’m trying desperately not to let ruin my state of mind here and thus my holiday. I was feeling extremely tired as I collected the rental car at the airport, and was a bit perturbed to realise it was a manual drive left-hand-drive car, which would take a lot of focus at the best of times, let alone having just arrived on the island and feeling so very tired. However, I soon got the hang of it – I did have a stick-shift car when I lived in Texas, but that’s a long time ago now – and was scarily quickly driving the ‘island way’ – i.e. as though the busy city roads were a dodgem circuit. But as I tried to navigate through Mytilene, with only myself to both drive and make sense of the Greek signposts – where there were any – I took a wrong turning and ended up in a packed car park at the water’s edge. It took a lot of manoeuvring to get out again, but if I hadn’t taken that wrong turn I wouldn’t have come across what I then saw on a hugely busy intersection with juggernauts bearing down – a hobbling, disfigured, disease-ridden old dog in the middle of the road. There were cars bearing down on me too, and in that split second all I could do was put my hands to my face in horror and drive past. I couldn’t have stopped without causing a mass pile up and probably ending my life too, and even if I had been able to, I’d probably have scared the dog into the path of a vehicle. Even if I had managed to scoop him up, where would I have taken him, with not a useful word of Greek to my vocabulary, not any knowledge of Mytilene, and no knowledge of what possibly infectious disease the poor old creature had? But the image continues to haunt me, as it did the entire rest of the journey across the island, that took me to two roadblocks, through a horrendous cloudburst that was so heavy it obscured the road markings, and up the scariest hairpin-bend-ridden route I’ve ever driven in my life. I also came across a huge number of mangy dogs by the roadside, so it seems that dogs wandering in the road is just the way it is here. But I still can’t shift the image of that particular dog. Nobody may be interested in reading any of these ramblings, but it doesn't matter – I just needed to write all of this down to somehow get it a little bit out of my head.
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