Adjustments

We arrived mid-afternoon at Athens Airport. Immediately the differences to Boston are apparent. Throngs of tanned, sweating, scantily dressed people pushing, shoving, gabbling away simultaneously and vying for a better position make me feel that I have been dropped into an ancient Middle Eastern bazaar. We retrieve our bags, pass through customs and exit, then are bodily assaulted by a furious blast of hot, dry air and a shockingly brilliant sun. We find our rental car and drive into Athens where we are to pick up a second car belonging to MG's brother, who left yesterday for the house in Naxos. MG has business meetings in Athens for three days. I plan to shop for house wares so both cars are necessary.

Much of Athens is plug ugly. There is no getting around it. The architecture is the worst of 70's cement buildings and the streets are dirty, small, choked with cars, signs, graffiti, and litter. There appears to be no zoning as existing side by side one finds a pharmacy, a gas station, an apartment house with shops on the first floor and a row of dumpsters overflowing with smelly trash, followed by a dry cleaner and a coffee shop. In the future I intend to skip Athens entirely and simply take a taxi from the airport to the ferry dock at Piraeus and head straight to the nature and beauty of the island. When I wish to see the Acropolis and other important sights, I’ll spend a day doing so before departing for home.

As MG, BF and I made our way to a local taverna later that evening, it occurred to me that Greece strongly resembles the Philippines, where I lived for several years when a young woman. I see resemblances in climate, disrespect for the environment and an ability to tolerate everything happening all around one at once. All the senses are stimulated simultaneously and nothing happens in an organized fashion as I expect. Things happen through signals that I cannot read. I can say with certainty that this is NOT Switzerland. Oh, how I love Switzerland where everything is organized, in good working order, where the environment and beauty are respected. I wonder how I will fare here over time.

As soon as he sets foot in Greece, MG becomes a different person. I see the young man he was when he lived here return to him. He becomes more animated, affectionate, funny, more expansive in his speech and gestures. I love watching the changes overtake him and half expect his hair to re-grow.

To find the taverna, we drove along rutted roads, dodged stray dogs, avoided motorbikes with headlights flashing from unexpected directions, were mindful of children who ran barefooted in the streets at 10pm, avoided cars going every which way, and were assaulted by radios blaring with voices in a foreign tongue. After a few days have passed, this will seem like a party. On the first night as we finally arrive in a cloud of dust at a beach, it seems harrowing.

I understand the urge to colonize. I want to collect all the trash, clean the graffiti, round up the stray dogs, wash the children and make them sit at the table, tidy up the gardens, paint the houses, tear down the shanties, organize the drivers, build sidewalks and curbs and make and enforce rules about everything to keep life contained, neat and tidy. As it is, I will require a few days to get used to it, stop judging and wanting to change it, and just relax. It is how it is and always has been.

Here’s the improbable restaurant scene: a shack set in the middle of a pebble beach with tables and chairs ringing the gently undulating water’s edge. Diners are stationed alongside late night bathers still sitting upon their towels, shouting at their children through the darkness. We devoured delicious, fresh and locally caught and sautéed octopus, anchovies, calamari and another fish the name of which escaped me. We enjoyed a large salad and drank wine from a carafe underneath the moon and stars as we watched yachts come into the harbor and anchor for the night.

After MG is finished with work in Athens, we will take the ferry to Naxos to see the results of our decisions and the work of the laborers during the past few weeks. I am very curious to see the outcomes, especially since I heard that the workmen don't approve of any of my choices. Neither the floor or bathroom tiles, layout of the rooms, location of closets and cupboards, kitchen design and appliances, nor paint colors are traditional. They feel sorry for MG who is forced to put up with his ignorant American woman. People harboring these secret or not so secret thoughts that their way of seeing and doing is the normal, best and right way seems to know no national boundaries. They want me to be like them and I want them to be like me. We all will have to adjust and truly embrace the French way: Vive la Difference.

MG has left for work and I realize this is my first time unattended while in Greece. I am prepared to make my way to Ikea to buy pots, pans, mixing bowls, candles, place mats, sheets, towels, pillows and the like. His brother left me a cell phone and a GPS that he programmed to English. The rest is up to me. I think I will avoid this as long as possible. I can see the pool in BF's back garden from where I sit in bed. The sun has not yet found it. Right now seems like a perfect time for an avoidance swim.

A short swim completely awakened me. The pool is filled with fresh water and heated only by the sun. During the night the temperature drops enough to slightly cool the water. The morning’s combination of cool and wet are ideal to wash away the fog left from too-warm sleeping conditions overnight. We could not locate the “on switch” for the overhead fan, so spent the night with our very skin reaching out for the slightest breeze.

On the back veranda, we ate breakfast of cheeses from Naxos, bread, coffee, yoghurt and fresh fruit from the garden. Even at this early hour, the heat is too intense for my northern genes. I attempted to read after breakfast and promptly fell asleep until what I thought was 11:25 a.m. but proved to be 5 minutes to 5 p.m.! The inertia from the heat combined with the time zone difference and loss of a night’s sleep due to travel makes me long for energy. I sit in front of an open window trying to catch a breeze. The air that blows is hot and dry. My eye cavities seem like they are filled with glue and my face feels as though if I smiled, the skin would crack and split. I see no reason, fortunately, to smile. I shall jump into the pool again even though it means another complete application of sunblock when I emerge.

How do people manage to live and work in this environment in the absence of air-conditioning? BF’s wife and daughter and I drove to an upholstery factory to find fabrics for our sofas. It was so hot that the weavers periodically poured water from jugs over their heads. We found the fabric we each wanted and left before we choked to death in the dust and lint. Some birds we noticed hanging dead from their nests in the ceiling rafters were not as lucky.

I will attempt a trip to Ikea tomorrow. The best I could manage was to begin a list. I am reading a book called “Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia”. The author follows her stone-cutter husband as he moves among various marble sources. She writes of the food and lifestyles of the named areas. It is of particular interest to me because the Cycladic island where they lived is ours...and they lived in a small stone cottage that sounds similar to the former goatherd's hut on our property. Impossible to think two people lived in such a building as it consists of nothing more than thick stone walls, a packed dirt floor and a heavy earthen roof supported by beams upon which lie a mat of bamboo. The author clearly lived a close to the earth experience. Perhaps this is what inspired her to trace the culinary beginnings and practices of the areas she visited. She provides a list of a typical goatherd's cooking tools that bears no resemblance to my Ikea shopping list.

On Day 3 I discover a way to survive the heat and dryness. After a dip in the pool to awaken the senses and stir the brain, I sit in a wet bathing suit under a ceiling fan spinning at high speed. My hand and arm veins no longer rise from the surface of my skin like so many snakes trying to escape. The constant urge to sleep has passed. I am beginning to be here now.