Sojourn in Greece

After she got off work at 9, my friend C and I walked a bit along the beach road to Voula. At the far edge of the dark waters, you could see a string of lights from Vouliagmeni's "little crab" penninsula. During the day it is a quiet stretch of beach that has few homes, and doesn't seem to have much commercial activity. But at night, everything is lit up, the streets are full of cars and people, and it feels like an entirely different place. Many carloads were headed to wedding receptions, which generally start around 10 and go till 2 or 3 in the morning. The women were dressed to the nines (what does that mean?) in dazzling clingy draped satins of all colors, feathers, jewels, and thin strapped very high heels. "We Greeks are an elegant people", says C.

We stopped at one of the seafood restaurants that line the edge of the beach. C's aunt owns it, and her initial greeting to me was "Hello, welcome, who are you voting for?" When I gave the correct answer she was all smiles and solicitous for the rest of the evening. She has learned to ask first, she says, because she offended a few customers when she assumed that Greek Americans would have similar political views to those of local Greeks. Wrong.

I had seafood rissoto, C had a chef's experiment
(let family try first!) of crispy small fish in squid ink sauce.

We've taken tilted pictures when dining out in the past two years, so we decided to make it a tradition. I'll post C's picture here later if she lets me :-)

On a non-sequitur professional note, this week you can hear my >> podcast interview about mediation online. It's 27 minutes. Unfortunately my voice was still suffering from the asthmatic aftermath of a cold, but I very much enjoyed the conversation with the host.

So here I am in the apartment at 11am, and the apartment manager who was supposed to be here at 10 to show me how various things work, and to fix the electricity hasn't showed up yet. Now, I realize we're on a looser conception of time in these parts, but ALBA operates very much on clock time, and I would like to get to work before half the day is gone. On Tuesday, the apartment manager came too late, and I'd already left for the evening.

Just had a scare while downloading the photo here. The camera cord shorted something out in the laptop and it went dead! Great. And I thought being without internet was a problem. To my sheer luck, taking out the battery and putting it in again rejuvenated it. But I have a feeling its life is limited and everything signficant had better be on my flash drive.

11:25. Time to pack up and go upload this file at ALBA. Maybe the management will get here next week sometime.

Finally, there's hot water for the shower, though we still don't have lights in the sitting room or a working stove. But hey, this is Greece, life in progress. It feels very silent and alone in the apartment without email/news/radio/music/information/Skype -- I realize how completely I have organized my life at home and when I travel around having that portal to the wider world at my fingertips. (It isn't silent really -- a car alarm goes off once every couple hours, workmen were doing some kind of repairs around 6am this morning, and the sounds of dogs and people are nice, though I don't actually see any of them.)

At the school there is brief conviviality but mostly people are working steadily at their desks and in their offices. Except the smokers, who have to get a nicotine hit every hour and cluster outside or at cafe tables for conversations. I had forgotten about the smoking. During the breaks in my evening class the building soon fills with clouds of it that burns my lungs even when I keep a distance. That hot water is a blessing -- after the walk home, quick launder everything and shower!

The friend from Lansdowne gave me a splendid welcome today. In her little 4 cylinder, we drove up the hill where my apartment is, to the top where the funeral chapel stands, then plunging down the east side through squiggly one-way streets, we parked at the stony Varkiza beach. Look, she says, the Greeks stay out in the water for a long time, chatting with each other as if they were at a cafe. And we do. Very enjoyable.

We negotiate the supermarket -- remember to have your vegetables weighed and stickered before you get to checkout! Some veggies, PILES of fruits, and long long meat and cheese counters. Then it's 10 minutes drive up the east coast of the penninsula to the newly built house overlooking the hills and sea where she's been housesitting. The gardener is there, pouring water into the deep depressions they dig around their small fruit trees (just the opposite of our volcanos of mulch!). It's so dry, the ground so porous, that most of the water seems to vanish away. The 3 dogs are happy to be petted, and then we walk down the curved and shoulder-less road, cars whizzing by, to meet her shepherd friend and see him quietly herd his goats back to their penned area for the night. The two tiny kids trot to catch up and the cars actually slow down to pass.

Then it is a tour of her art studio and monoprint project. The house is full of late sunlight and fresh breezes, as all is open to the dramatic view below. Very much like the open feeling in the Bay Area, where they too have pleasant temperatures and few enough bugs to live without screens. We prepared a leisurely dinner -- what a treat to have good company.

Today I felt well enough to walk down to the school and to eat a bit. It's nice to kinda know the terrain, and to see people again. Everyone from the year before is still here; the boy whose parents run the cafe is thinner and taller, the dog is grizzled and limping, most of the staff and students still chain smoke, the man who works endless hours at a shipping company sits in his wheelchair at the same desk by the glass window next to my office. The half-constructed buildings across the street remain unfinished. Olives stain the sidewalks. The grounds people are still pruning all the plantings this week, which makes no sense to a gardener from Philadelphia.

The good news is that the visiting profs are being displaced from our office downstairs which means I might get a *real* office on the 3rd floor with the faculty. The windy and overcast weather has everyone exclaiming, and rains came Saturday for the first time since April.

The artist from Lansdowne who is living nearby will take me out tomorrow. Even if I'm not ready for eating out, I'm ready for a swim! She *loves* Greece and wants to introduce me to its pleasures. I think that's a great idea.

It still seems a miracle to drive 20 minutes to the Philly airport, board a waiting plane, fly 9.5 hours, drive 25 minutes by taxi to Vouliagmeni -- door-to-door service from my house to my temporary apartment. Looking far down at the ocean and then the dark landmass of western Europe, I imagined how long and tedious it would be by foot, horse, car, sailboat, merchant marine. Years, weeks.... not "travel" but a real journey. This jet-hop flies you through an earth warp, depositing you on the other side of a time/space tunnel. It doesn't feel like you've GONE somewhere, more that you've abruptly shifted location.

The airline is in trouble: At check-in they had two separate lines, no one telling you which was for what (those people didn't show up for work today, I was told), and their check-in kiosk system wasn't printing out bag checks so the agents checked us in, after all. Onboard, they ran out of meals and gave me a vegan one a no-show had ordered, which was brown rice with a few scattered limas and dead tofu with cornstarch gravy, tastless fruit cocktail, two bites of a stale roll with margarine, and a 10% juice drink. Salad dressing was included, but no salad. They harangued us with advertisements at every turn over the PA and even now on the tray tops!, and there was one toilet for 40 seats. Still, they did the most important job of getting us there ontime and safely.

We flew right over the bluegreen waters of the Vouliagmeni harbors. (And indeed a day later I am wakened by a series of planes overhead...) The smiling face of the school's taxi driver, mother of one of the program assistants here, greeted me at Arrivals. She deposited me at the somewhat dim and worn but well-located apartment the school has rented for me, and mercifully went shopping for juice, water, & bread, as I spent all day on the narrow bed, sleeping and reading and feeling unwell. A waste of a cool day in Greece, but even time warp travel is a journey of sorts, and one needs time for languid recovery.