Contents
Around Town
Metropolitan Moves
Immediately after the elections are over (read more about these on the next page!) work should start on redeveloping ‘Metropolis’ Square. Hopefully the DEH will soon have finished the work they still need to do on the underground electricity sub-station that they built last year. The municipal plan of action includes repaving the square and the surrounding streets, installing new street lights, building public toilets, and planting some trees. Assurances have been made that the work will be carried out in such a way to minimize disruption to local businesses and residents. However, we have heard this one before, and the work is scheduled to take at least a year to complete. Some people in the area are already getting rather nervous about the prospect of the bulldozers moving in once more. Still, it should look great when it’s finished….!
More Market Mania
Well, we told you that this story wasn’t going away! Where has the Thursday Market gone to now? Well, one thing’s for sure, it’s not at the marina anymore. It’s not at the place where it’s supposed to be either (the Monday Market place), because traders don’t want to hold a market in the same place twice a week. On the first two Thursdays in September, some traders carried on setting up stalls near the marina. Since then, they have moved to the car park by Four Martyrs Square - completely illegally of course (and causing considerable chaos in the process), but in a pre - election climate who is going to risk sticking their neck out on this one?! As we were going to press the topic of the relocation of the market was once again on the agenda for a council meeting set for September 29th. We will update you with all the latest developments in this fascinating story on the Bugle
Facebook group and also on the
www.rethymnon.biz website. In the meantime, if you want to go to the market on Thursday, we wish you “happy hunting!”
Sport Review: Team Talk
We’re pretty upbeat about the sport this month. Asteras, our local football team have had an OK start to the season. So far they have had one draw (0-0 against Episkopi) and one win (0-1 against Anogia). The club’s management are not trying to set unrealistic aspirations for this season either, which makes a change. The main aim is to build a team that could challenge for promotion next year. Lots of new players, mostly from the wider Rethymnon region joined Asteras over the summer and everybody realises that a new team can not be created overnight.
Agor, the Basketball team have been training quite hard and had some reasonable results in a few pre-season tournaments. They’ve had their first competitive game – Phase A of the Greek Cup started on the last weekend of September – and they won. They beat Apollon Kalamarias by two points – not a massive win, but a win nonetheless. The second game in the A phase will be against Iraklis. If they win this game then they will play the team from Ilysiakos (A1) on October 7th in the Melina Mercouri Sports stadium.
The women’s volleyball team OPER have also been training hard. They ideally would like to do more than ‘just fighting for survival’ in their first season back in the National League A2. They have strengthened the squad with some experienced players and the coach is convinced that the home games are theirs to win. They start their season with two away games, and their first home game is on October 31st in the Melina Mercouri Sports stadium.
And finally, even at this time of year, we have some beach volley news!
There will be some top class athletes from the women’s beach volley circuit visiting Rethymnon for a training camp between 11th and 18th October. The Greek team of Maria Tsiartsiani and Vicky Arvaniti will be joined by the European Champions from 2008: the Germans Laura Ludwig and Sara Goller, along with their compatriots Katri Holtwik and Ilka Semmler and the Belgian team Liesbet Van Breedam and Liesbeth Mouha. On October 17th they will be participating in a ‘friendly’ tournament. For those not in the know, this means that the top three teams in the current European Championship ranking will be doing their stuff here in Rethymnon. Boys, don’t you just love living here….
Double Standards at the Marina?
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| The Delfini Building |
What a surprise! The new location of the centre for monitoring and controlling safety and security in the harbour and marina areas is in an illegal construction on the roof of a building that has no building permit. The Delfini building has never been issued with a building permit, but it still manages to accommodate the Greek Tourism Office, the Tourist Police, the Technical Department of the Municipality and the offices of the Harbour Fund. This obviously raises the question of how one is going to motivate people to comply with local legislation if the authorities responsible for enforcing the legislation are themselves acting illegally. Seems to be very much a case of ‘Do as I say, not as I do’. As we reported last month, EU Inspectors announced that they would be paying a visit to check that safety and security measures in place at the marina conformed to European standards that became law in 2004. This of course resulted in a sudden burst of activity to try and put things right in time, five years down the line. Anyway, the Inspectors visited and were apparently happy with what they saw. We could make a few comments at this point, but we won’t!
