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My holidays by Simon Kassianides |
 The actor got his Bond-villain experience in the beach bars of Nha Trang and Mykonos. Simon Kassianides, 28, was a champion kick boxer before his acting career took over. He has appeared in many television dramas, including The Fixer, The Passion, Spooks, Love Soup and Ultimate Force. His film debut was in The Edge of Love with Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller, and he is currently up against James Bond in the new movie Quantum of Solace. He lives in LondonBy Harriet Perry, Sunday Times
My parents are Greek; they moved to England before I was born, but my grandparents and uncles all still live in Greece. My dad is from Antiparos and my mum is Cypriot, so we spent a lot of time going back and visiting relatives when I was young. But in my last summer of university, when I was 22, I decided I wanted to reconnect with Greece on my own.
I went to Mykonos, because I’d heard good things about it, and arrived on a boat from Athens at dusk, just as the lights were coming on in the harbour and delicious smells were wafting out of the restaurants. It was magical. I got a job in a local bar, which beat pouring pints in the Pitcher & Piano in Wandsworth, and that summer was like an American coming-of-age movie. I fell in love with a girl from Athens who was quite well-known, very sought-after and being badly mistreated by her boyfriend.
I rescued her — and I paid the price. There were rivalries and street fights, and passions running high. It was a life-changing time. When I first arrived on the island, I thought I knew it all, but by the time I left at the end of the summer, I realised that I knew nothing.
I still go to Greece a lot and have just come back from a wedding. It was an intimate affair, in a beautiful white-domed church, but Greek weddings can be epic: when my parents got married, it was a four-day event with 2,000 guests.
When I was 18, I travelled through Southeast Asia and I had a scary experience in Vietnam. I was in a beach bar in Nha Trang and there was a group of western guys next to us being loud, obnoxious and insensitive to the locals. One of the regulars had had enough and he must have thought that I was in the same group as the loud blokes — one minute I was sipping a strawberry daiquiri, the next I was lying on the floor covered in blood, with a fractured rib, a broken nose and a cut on the back of my calf muscle. All good practice for a Bond villain, I guess.
My mate had to call a cab to get me to the hospital, and the next day he heard that the police wanted to speak to me. We didn’t want to get involved, so we decided to escape. As the police looked for us at the hotel, I discharged myself from the hospital. We paid a guy to take us to the station, then we got the overnight train to Ho Chi Minh City. It was such a relief to be out of there.
On the same trip, we did some trekking in northern Thailand. Our guide was very good and he took us right off the beaten track. One evening, we arrived at a remote village where we got a warm welcome from the chief elder. We settled in and everything was great — apart from a wild dog that was tied up at the edge of the village. It barked and howled all night and we couldn’t sleep a wink. So we got up and talked to someone about it, and soon we heard the barking getting softer as the dog was moved away. The next morning, they handed me a bowl of rice and meat for my breakfast — the guide said it was special wild boar. It was very sinewy and when I mentioned that it wasn’t how I’d imagined wild boar would taste, he admitted that actually it was the dog — slaughtered in our honour. I couldn’t eat any more after that, so I called in my mate and said, “Come and have some wild boar for breakfast . . .”
A few years ago, I got myself into a spot of bother on a last-minute package holiday in Rhodes with my Italian girlfriend. I didn’t want to have to speak to anyone, so I decided to pretend I was Italian too. When we arrived in Rhodes, there was a coach waiting to take 50 or so of us English tourists to our resort. Whenever someone spoke to me, I just said “Scusi, non parlo inglese” a lot. What I didn’t realise was that our room would be on a courtyard, surrounded by the people from the coach, and that we couldn’t avoid them. Plus, one of the English girls was desperate to practise her Italian on me. My girlfriend thought I was an idiot; she didn’t bail me out at all. Luckily, I managed to keep up the disguise for a whole week — but it wasn’t quite the relaxing holiday I’d expected.
Simon Kassianides talked to Harriet Perry
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article5056552.ece
11.11.2008
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