Tough Competition

---

Issy and I opt for a rest day. No rest however for most of the Rembrandts; they head five kilometres or so along the steep and winding road around the bay to Paralia Agios Konstantinos. They’re taking the sensible approach; they’ve chartered a fleet of taxis for the trip. Most of them already think I’m a bit unhinged, so I think it might be better if I don't let it slip that I walked there a couple of days ago.

We stir from our slumbers in the late afternoon just in time for another session of show and tell. Actually it was probably just me who stirred from a slumber … I don’t think there’s any chance that Issy nodded off; she’s been way too nervous at the prospect of showing off her masterpieces to the other Rembrandts for the first time. She tells me she’s going to volunteer to go first. She says that that way she won’t be shown up by the better masterpieces that’ll come later. Huh? I think her work is excellent, and from what little I’ve seen it stacks up very well against the rest. And anyway, some of these guys do art for a living. One of them, gentleman Bill, has won awards in major art shows, and is apparently a very well known artist around town. He’s in his eighties, but he still teaches art, and there’s a long waiting list to get into his courses. And then there’s Linda, who Issy says she’s fairly sure is an art teacher. Tough competition, and it’s not even supposed to be a competition.

I don't think I'd properly appreciated how barren and sparsely populated Astypalea is. There are only three small villages here, and we've now been to all of them - Livadi where we're staying, Chora and the port, and Maltezana which we visited yesterday. The island then continues for about ten kilometres north from Maltezana, but there's virtually nothing there - a couple of small tracts of agricultural land around Vathi Bay, a handful of isolated churches, the remains of an Italian World War II military base, and that's about it. The total population of the whole island's only around a paltry 1,300. The vast majority, around 1,000, live in Chora. The ever-reliable Wikipedia thinks that the population of Livadi is 39, so obviously whoever made that claim has never tried to get into a restaurant here at peak hour. I'm not sure what the ever-reliable's cutoff population for a village is, but it seems to think the 14 in Vathi qualifies it, so I guess the island might actually have four villages. Anyway, a great place, not many people, probably even fewer trees, but a great supply of stark, barren beauty.

---