Mandala Yoga Blog

Ben on the jetty at Arillas beach When we decided to move to Corfu I was envisioning a quiet life of  teaching yoga and meditation, of pottering around the garden, of doing lots of music and spending long lazy days on Arillas beach.    I dreamed of a simpler and more relaxing life (...not that my life was terribly frantic before but there is always room for improvement isn't there?!).      Ben dreamed of having more time in his shed playing with his lathe. Three weeks into life here and the penny has dropped that our dreams are a long way off!   Ben's lathe is still in pieces and I'm covered in paint and dust from morning til night, working and working to  uncover all the beauty in Mandala for our soon to arrive guests. Ben and I steal  glimpses of relaxation everyday in between the DIY marathons and thankfully we almost there with the work now :)     But the uncertainty we face is massive and I am realising that the o...

Ben and I are used to having a strange internet connection. You can't really have a phone line on a cruising boat and all the metal boats are composed of tend to reflect signal. So over the years we've had various different internet devices ranging from dongles, to wifi repeaters, to mobile signal... most of them worked... a bit.... some of the time.  We made it work and got on with things as and when we could.     I was kind of looking forward to being in a house- a real house that could have a real, grown up, reliable internet connection, and as I am teaching singing to many of my students in London via Skype it is essential to my work. However it has not been a straightforward process!   I started looking into it the 2nd day we were here. Thankfully we brought a tablet from the uk that we can tether from and it hasn't been too bad for internet but in order to keep up coaching from the other side of Europe I need a really good internet connection. So I aske...

1. The People :)   We had friends popping in from the very first day we arrived. Our neighbours in the village are awesome, people we met on our visits last year popped in to say hello and we got invited to a local perma-culture meetup and met even more amazing folks. Nobody does hospitality like the Greeks (and the expats who choose to stay here). 2. Our House! We can't believe we live here!!!  I keep squealing with joy so loudly that the neighbours must either think Ben is trying to murder me... or is up to 50 shades of something.     We spent the first 24 hours floating around the mansion like a pair of jellyfish doing bizarre things like just touching the walls and just smiling or calling each other over to look at the same view at different times of day :)   By day 2 we had snapped out of our state of useless awe (slightly) and had begun the marathon of DIY.   No-one has ever felt happier chipping off old plaster and painting walls! ...

There are a million reasons why Ben and I decided to come to Corfu. There are endless beautiful aspects of living here and positive qualities about this place.   Organisation is not one of them!   How things work in Corfu for someone whose friends describe her as OCD -is quirky to say the least.   One of our first questions was the mail- You know that stuff that in civilised countries just gets posted through your door each morning. Well here it doesn't work like that. There is only one postcode for the whole of Corfu and our unique address is composed simply of the name of the first resident of the villa and the village name.     We asked the previous resident of the house where to get mail sent- she has owned the property  for over 15 years but of course she didn't know where the mail gets collected- that would be too easy wouldn't it? We are learning that  Corfiat villagers apparently see the mail a bit like a sport, you can't just have i...

Ah the journey! We thought we were so organised. Having lived on a boat for over a decade we pride ourselves on having very few personal belongings. But due to Ben's work (as a builder/ creator of wooden things/ and handyman of just about everything) and my work as a musician we did have a workshop full of tools to transport and to a much lesser extent a fair few musical instruments to cart with us... But it looked good we had packed it all down into boxes and our transport man seemed confident it would all fit and that me, Ben and Shanti (aka Sosage) could accompany him in a long drive all the way through Europe to Corfu in his Van.  Read on below or watch the video....   Then the snow came.  They called it 'The Beast From The East' which we thought was rather dramatic until it was down to -6 and several inches of snow covered everything. Still the roads near us were clear. we had a fantastic leaving party (themed Pirates and Greeks) and danced the nigh...

Our first morning view from Villa Mandala Today is where it all begins.    Ben (my long suffering husband) and I had lived on the river in Hampton together for over a decade. We met when I was on my own boat and he on his and together we lived and worked on three boats before putting our beloved Barge up for sale and flogging any other superfluous belongings in order to start a brave new challenge...    To open a bed and breakfast/ yoga retreat on the gorgeous Greek island of Corfu :)   It started as most of our crazy ideas start- with a casual conversation: "It would be nice to have a garden wouldn't it?"  I said.   "Don't say that!" Ben replied "We have only just got the boat how we want it. Where would we go that we could have a garden?"    "I don't know. You are probably right... but I just have a feeling we might have a garden soon."   Ben sighed, rolled his eyes and mumbled "...Crap."   Within a mo...