As per weather warning, today is a day of rain, sometimes heavy. It's also the start of a long weekend, with Monday being Green (or clean) Monday. Green Monday is, in the Greek Church, the beginning of Lent, but with a fairly cheerful fresh start feel to it rather than a penitential one. Traditionally people head for the countryside and fly kites as well as picnicking. During Lent not only meat but eggs and dairy products are not eaten (which takes us, cross-culturally, to the Western Church's pancake day as a day to use up milk and eggs that will be verboten for the next forty days or so) and fish is eaten only on feast days. Happily, if surprisingly, seafood is allowed, so in a country where fresh fruit and vegetables are everywhere this makes for a remarkably unpenitential start to Lent, with family seafood barbecues and large salads.
Saturday would normally be the day to buy all the food, with the farmers' market thriving, but not many people are out today. And, as usual when there is rain here, the streets fill up pretty rapidly with water, so that the usual problem when caught out in a rainstorm is not wet hair and clothing but having to wade ankle deep across intersections. But we're well supplied, so have a day reading books and looking out the window as passing cars create waves in their wake.
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