A Flat Pack in Greece [Paperback]

Finally she took the plunge and decided to take herself to the warmer climes of Greece to live. Braving the horror stories of naïve foreigners beeing fleeced by wily natives, she bought a plot of land and built a house, putting into motion a roller-coaster ride into the abyss...

I am averse to using lending libraries. Any books I read I want to possess, not just borrow, and this idiosyncrasy also applies to houses. I dislike anything as temporary as renting, so, consequently, I wanted to own my house in Greece, and I began to prepare myself for a venture into the Greek property market. Having heard horror stories of naive foreigners being fleeced by wily Greeks, I realised that, in order to have even partial control over the proceedings, I would have to come to grips with the language. True, I had learned some Greek phrases with Costas, but only of the intimate variety; now I needed more useful words, sufficient to ask for prices, or check bylaws, or, more mundanely, to read road sigs. I had noticed that Greek motorists were very volatile, and I didn't want to go the wrong way down a one-way street. To overcome this communication gap, I enrolled in the City Literary Institute in Holborn, known universally as the City Lit. It is a sprawling, brick building, nof far from Holborn tube station and at the end of a narrow alley, next to an Arabian publishing house. Thank goodness, Greek Cyrillic scipt is a little easier to master than the Arabic variety.