Monthly Archive for July, 2009

The Black Sea

On July 29, 2009 from Bulgaria. 1 Comment

Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.
—Robert Thomas Allen

For me the Black Sea has always been the most remote, forbidding, and enchanted of seas, a fabled and unconquerable territory of Amazons, Argonauts, Scythian savages, sea monsters, and Tatar pirates, all around a moorland of pitch waves, black with sediments. After Hellenes colonized the barbaric shore the Greeks called her the Hospitable Sea, and Varna surely is: an easy and uneventful place, where the only culture is topless tanning, beach volleyball, and drinking to various electronic music.

I received a long lecture on this subject from a dedicated English raver, and it is from that dreary island that 90% of dance music originates. From what I can remember, Trance is the most elemental electronic music, without a solid bass-line; House adds the bass, Techno adds more Pop-style composition, Electro adds strange sounds, and Drum and Bass reduces the genre to the most simple beats. Then there are complications: Deep House, Trance-Step, and the most recently popular subgenre among the ravers of London: Dub-Step, which takes Drum and Bass and slows it down. Some new variant adds Electro’s strange sounds to the lethargic beats, and might be called Electro-Dub-Step — I can’t remember. (This same learned man of the 808 the next day, listening to some British Alternative band, commented that all that rock music sounds the same to him.)

I arrived Sunday at eight from Sofia on a sleepless overnight train, as every two hours the ticketers insisted on repeating their duties. A sudden storm had rolled in off the sea in a wave of static and drenched the streets as soon as I debarked, but I ran down to the hostel anyway, which was locked, since the reception had moved to a different building without changing their address. There at the door I met two young Americans, Gavin and Nellie, from Reno and Seattle, who were on a vacation from their jobs in Istanbul teaching English, and went out with them to a restaurant for an early morning beer, which felt like a late night beer.

Varna is a resort town which makes its way by the mostly Bulgarian tourists, who flock in during the hot summer months. Despite the bustle of the city center the sandy beach remains pleasant, rimmed by bars and cafés and a wooded park instead of the condominiums that blight the Spanish and Western Balkan coastlines. Most hostels are along chaster beaches outside the port, but I stayed at the Flag Hostel in the city, when we finally found its entrance.

The hostel was founded by an Australian who traded his yacht for the apartments, and is run by an unsettled Englishman named Dave, who invests his attention wildly in each of the business’ many problems while struggling to involve everyone in his orchestrated fun, so that in the end he seems consistently puzzled and nearly deranged with imprecise effort. “Ice cream, anyone?” he cries at breakfast, and, “Beer, anyone?” after dinner. The ice cream is what made Flag stand out, in addition to the morning funnel shot of vodka, although this practice was recently abolished when a hostel staffer downed half a bottle with his toast and had to go to the hospital.

According to Dave, the Mafia runs Varna, and allowed him to open the original hostel in an apartment building in expectation of new Western blood and wallets filtering into their bars and clubs. They demanded that the other residents of the building ignore the noisy revelry, and everyone compliantly became deaf. When the bosses made a tour of the hostel, however, and found out how much money Dave must be making, they doubled the rent. Dave refused; so they said he must halve the number of beds there, and Dave relocated to a building across town, with one shower for eighteen beds, from which he is being evicted for noise complaints, and left only a few sandy mattresses on the floors of the original rooms. For €10 I received one of these.

A ship full of Americans on their Semester At Sea was moored in the port for the first few days I was there, and its debarked students evinced that same ignorance I mentioned from Sofia. One girl, seeing an Englander’s Oxford student card, asked him, “Oxford, isn’t that the school from Harry Potter?” Otherwise they chattered obnoxiously on the beach, which is really Varna’s only attraction.

On Monday afternoon I met Gavin and Nellie on the beach, and after a few hours we went to a bar under a great canvas tent on the strand, where we met an Australian named Pete who we quickly named Uncle Pete, for he was 38 and 21 at the same time. We went to a fish restaurant and shared appetizers and rakia, and I got a Danube Herring with a beer, the whole bill not amounting to more than $10 a person. Then the two Istanbuli Americans led the way to a strip club. It is a strange trip where two days after staying in the most holy Thracian monastery I can find myself among Bulgarian strippers.

The next day we met Pete and his three Lithuanian friends on the beach for relaxed swimming and drinking. The shallow sea was warm and fine, and dirty until you crossed over a thick strand of seaweed. “Once in a while you get a good cigarette,” said Gavin. “Most of the time it’s the dirtiest habit ever, but this is a good fucking cigarette.” We Americans went up a few blocks into the city to a Chinese restaurant that Gavin and Nellie had found — not some fake restaurant, but a real Chinese place, run by some of the Chinese who have made their way to the Black Sea coast. There, we got glorious helpings of Sechuan chicken, pork ribs, chicken and noodle stir fry, and MSG.

Back on the beach, Uncle Pete became savage. He constantly added nicknames to everyone, and called me Scribe, St. John the Baptist, Man of Letters and Numbers, and Moby Dick. He invented words, including acumenical and venement, and also employed many slogans — strange ones like, “Slap a mullet uphill!” and obscene ones like, “Suck a fart out of a low-flying seagull!”

We relocated to one of the beach bars with beanbags and roofless pavilions, one of which Pete climbed up to do Olympic backflips. Some other Australians heard his accent and introduced themselves, and soon Pete inspired one of them to try tricks off the ten-foot wooden frame. The Aussie jogged back and forth on the sand to warm up, then climbed to the top and paced back and forth on the beams with his hands pressed together zen-like in front of him, breathing deeply, and finally jumped off and did a sort of roll after he hit the ground in the most anticlimactic display of acrobatics; yet the effort, and the Australian custom of meeting and doing schoolyard stunts, was entertaining enough.

The following morning, as I ate a slice of pizza in the piazza, a gypsy woman came up to me with a cane, a plastic cup, and a pleading look and lingered there a long time while I ignored her. I felt bad, though, and when I finished my snack looked around for her, but as slow as she walked she was already gone — though the look she gave me I still felt. I changed in the hostel and went down to the beach, leaving my bag packed against the wall, and on the way back stopped at the train station to get a ticket for Sofia and at an Internet café to prepare to visit Bucharest.

Arriving back at the hostel around 6, some Danes there told me that Dave had moved my bag to the reception building. I went there, and after some effort, derived this story from the lethargic staff: At around noon, Dave and some of the hostel workers had gone to move mattresses from the new building into the old apartment where I was staying, and Dave had moved my bag into the common room, a small area with a kitchen sink, a fridge, and two benches around a television.

One of the three Danes slept drunkenly on one of the benches through all this commotion, and Dave put my bag, my shoes, and my pants in the corner among his tumbled gear, thinking it belonged to another of that party. The Dane woke soon after, when the only other people to stay in that part of the hostel, three from France, were about to leave, and reported no one snooping around in the room, and no sight of the bag — though the Danes had left the hostel for ten minutes to eat, and during that time the French suspects were alone with the baggage!

I rapidly searched all three divisions of the hostelry, interrogated the staff, visited police station and train station, peered into dumpsters where a thief might have dumped the ravaged bag once divested of its rewards and dirty clothes, and I looked steadily around the crowded streets of Varna, as if my sheer awareness would pick out the missing pack; but it was barren. The lot was gone.

(To kill any suspense, friend, I had with me all along my passport, ID, debit card, camera, iPod, and Moby Dick, so it’s not the end of the world, or even its eleventh hour.)

Among the Bulgars

On July 25, 2009 from Bulgaria. 2 Comments

So we will share this road we walk,
And mind our mouths and beware our talk.
‘Till peace we find tell you what I’ll do,
All the things I own I will share with you.
If I feel tomorrow like I feel today,
We’ll take what we want and give the rest away.
Strangers on this road we are on,
We are not two, we are one.
—The Kinks, “Strangers”

The six hour bus ride to Sofia would have been restful if I had not been roused at the Bulgarian border to hand over my passport, and if I had not lost an hour due to time zones.

Walking in the early morning, I found a hostel, dropped off my bag and began to wander the city. Perhaps because of its boring reputation, my own low expectations, or the little time I spent there, I really liked Sofia. It seemed a Western European city, something born between Germany and France which had immigrated to Thrace after the fall of the Soviets and mostly survived that leveling of culture and the ensuing meltdowns, so that Bulgaria is today a prosperous confederate of the European Union.

Bulgarian women are willowy and bird-like, and the men are proud and stolid. When they don’t understand you, even if they are a taxi driver and you tell them a street or are a waitress hearing the name of some menu item, they look at you with a dour and stony face and give the most dismissive shrug, as if you roused them early in the morning with foreign yammering. They lack Nutella, but use on toast a sort of cold relish made from tomatoes and red peppers. Their food is very Turkish, very Slavic, and very Greek, and they serve each dish when ready and not all politely together.

A sign of Sofia’s modern stature, McDonalds mark every 200 meters like mile posts on Roman highways, with signs pointing to the nearest of the chain at most street corners — although in Cyrillic, the name is Makgoнaлgc. Cyrillic is very close to the Greek alphabet I’d already learned and easy to decrypt. Novo, meaning new, in Cyrillic is rendered Hoвo. I found this endlessly entertaining. Bookstores had Hoвo books, theaters Hoвo movies, restaurants Hoвo items and menus, banks Hoвo branches; some towns were Hoвo towns; some places just had signs which declared Hoвo!

In the center of Sofia are many historic churches, and being boring I engaged in the tedious business of touring them. Under pointed minarets, the Russian Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Maker tapers into gloomy depths, as if stained with ash from long-burning fires. The Church of St. Sofia is a brick warehouse, grand in size but modest in architecture.

The Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, Sofia’s emblematic centerpiece, deserves its place on the mantle. It’s three tiered sets of domes, culminating in a great gilded Neo-Byzantine cap, contain an atmosphere unaffected by the hottest or coldest days and dimly lit by yellow-tinted windows and six gold chandeliers. White-haired and white-bearded God bursts forth on the highest roof of the cavernous chamber of marble-patterned floors and wall frescoes, uncluttered, compared to other cathedrals, by iconography or seats or votive tablets or noisy harangues from the pulpit. At the back of the nave, the altar rests under another gilt dome on an ivory white structure as large as most Orthodox chapels.

The Art Hostel had a reputation for being a fun and low-key place with happy symposia in the garden or the basement bar, and the old building was everywhere decorated with strange graffiti or sketches. I sat outside with some Brits whom I had met before in Ohrid and then with some Australians and Scots at the bar, who explained to me in the meandering conversation the different legends they tell the ignorant and naive Tourists of America:

In the Australian Outback, the dangerous Drop Bear, a deadly brand of arboreal koala, plummets from eucalyptus branches onto the heads of passing Americans, and with its climbing claws bared, in the words of the Australian, fucks them up. “Watch out for Drop Bears,” the Aussies warn any tourists vectored towards the wild. A similarly dangerous creature, the Hoop Snake bites its own tail to form a deadly wheel and rolls down slopes at incredible speeds, only to uncoil its looped contortion that it might spring venomously at its victim.

The Scots tell people that, Yes, Haggis is a wild animal. Being used to walking along highland slopes, the right leg of the male Haggis is shorter than the left, and the poor beast runs in circles, while the female Haggis has the opposite impediment, her left leg being shorter than her right; and sometimes in their swirling movements they meet and clumsily mate — not a bad metaphor for romance, I think.

Some Canadians told me this story: They said to a few New England girls that they came from Vancouver, above Washington. “Washington DC?” asked the Americans, who had never heard of a state sharing that name. The Canadians immediately told them of their arctic city, how they had to rise early in the chill of their igloo to hook up the dogs, and of the polar bears they passed on the sled ride to town to catch a rare flight to Europe. The gullible Yankees accepted this amazing fiction, but refused to believe that Canada had a two dollar coin called the tooney.

Thursday I set out to visit the Rila Monastery, suggested to me by some Dutch bikers at the Monastery of Treskavec, and made it within 15 miles of the millennium-old place before I had to stop for the night in Rila Town. A man on the bus there introduced himself, told me that there were no more buses up to the Monastery, and offered to rent a room to me for about $10, although in a much more slapstick method than here suggested.

Vasko, a venerable music teacher, led me to his house a few blocks from the bus station and told me all the ways it was perfect: cheap, close to the 7:40 morning bus up to the Monastery, and there is breakfast, bread and marmalade. He showed me pictures of himself taken with other guests, with his music students, and for the cover of his handmade album, and a guestbook full of compliments, and a copy of a French guidebook where his name appeared, and all sorts of other endorsements for his establishment, and then he opened up his piano. “You like rap? Like jazz? Eric Clapton!” And then he crooned, howled, and yodeled:

I feel wonderfool
Be-caws I see the love lit in your eye-es,
And the wondor of it all
Is that you just don’t re-lize
How much I love you.

I quickly began to suspect that Vasko was insane. “C’mon!” he exclaimed, leading me through the sparse rooms on his second floor. “Here is the bathroom. The sink. The toilet. Douche.”—that’s the shower—”Moment. Understand?” He showed me how each of these apparati worked, and then took me downstairs to his own apartments to show me his personal furniture, with the same proud imperative that compels a child to parade all worldly possessions before a guest. “My rooms very nice. When full upstairs, I stay here. Understand? Yes, it is perfect.”

Vasko thought that my name was Chan, and kept saying, “Jackie—,” and waiting for me to say Chan. This went on until I wrote down my name on a piece of paper, on which he had been scrawling different Bulgarian salutes, when he said, “Oh Jon. John Wayne!”

Finally I stored my bag in my room and went to walk around town, but Vasko stopped me by shouting, “My friend! My best friend. You my new best friend. You my teacher. My English no good.” Even though he had no shoes on, Vasko insisted on leading me out to the small town’s broadway — “C’mon!” He pointed out a restaurant that served a good shopsko salad and stopped a poor farmer in a horse-drawn cart full of hay, demanding that I get a picture, before leaving me in peace. There was not much to see, so after I got a famed shopsko salad with chicken kavarma, a sort of rice and chicken stew in a clay pot, I went back to Vasko’s and found him accosting some French couple, who gave me meaningful looks when our host was looking away.

I followed Vasko’s advice and took the 7:40 am bus up to the Monastery, founded by St. John the Rilski Miracle-Maker, and a Bulgarian Jerusalem and Mecca. Within the four stone walls, open on the inside with four stories of rooms and balconies behind a thousand white arches painted with checkers and lines of red and black, gather among the dozens of monks day-trippers and pilgrims and backpackers on treks through the Thracian hinterland; among those wooded peaks and roaring rivers, the Monastery seems only a fearful outpost of men, though even the high walls cannot block out the sight of them, nor can the gilded domes of the church or the Tower of Hrelyu’s masonry match the grandeur of nature.

At 5 a monk in the fullest attire — high black hat and cowl, black robe, black cloak — walked around the church while hammering on a wooden kayak paddle, and stopped at each side to pray. He went inside to the altar, recessed in a great gilded templon so cluttered with columns that bore eagle pediments, with sacral crests, with intricate palms, flowers, acanthus, and grape vines carved from wood and painted gold, with painted portraits of saints crowned by silver halos, and with frescoes of evangelical events, that the cumbrous display looked almost baroque. All the room’s walls and columns are adorned in this way or colored with frescoes and murals of Christ and the un-canonical stories of saints, less open than the churches of the West, with less light and less abstraction.

The monk began to chant a peripatetic prayer, and then retreated to the pulpit. A priest took his place before the altar, a purple ribbon over his mantled shoulder, which women sometimes put over their heads when they pray to him. He himself was bald under his black-dyed klobuk, removed as he prayed to the closed saloon doors of the altar, accompanied by a choir of monks in the corner. This choir continued as the priest visited each of the chapel’s holy steps with a censer jangling on a chain.

The Rilski Monastery was not as pleasant a home as Prilep, for the camera crews, the tourist throngs, the restaurants and ATMs, the bus-filled parking lot, the security guards, and the registration forms made it more of an attraction and detracted from its character. (The monk in reception thought my name was Zor, due to bad handwriting). I left early on Saturday morning, and luck with the busses brought me back to Sofia just after noon.

The Last Homely House

On July 21, 2009 from Macedonia. 0 Comments

Holy man and holy priest,
This love of life makes me weak at my knees,
And when we get there make your play,
‘Cos soon I feel you’re gonna carry us away.
In a promised lie you made us believe.
For many men there is so much grief,
And my mind is proud, but it aches with rage,
And if I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die.
—The Kinks, “Strangers”

Of the British in Arabia, T.E. Lawrence saw two types: “Class one; subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner… In such a frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed.”

“Class two,” he continues, “the John Bull of the books, became more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that , on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddled self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through his armoured certainty, he was a rounded sample of our traits.”

I hover in Lawrence’s first category — as much as I can without a shared language — but even Lawrence, under that bloom of the desert, must digress to reminisce over England’s dreary skies; and there is something about Oregon which experience abroad brings into focus. It was developed so late in the history of American and human migration, by hands experienced in the craft of civilization or at least with a Midwestern model, and linked to a greater nation, so that it has cities without the need for a fully supportive agriculture. You can drive an hour from the center of Portland and find yourself not in farms but rainforest. It’s special: not better, just different: and because I was born there Oregon’s peculiarities will always be, in my mind, Home.

I had finished reading Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and his depiction of the Bedouin, who consider it effeminate to carry food on journeys of only 100 miles, and who ride for days with maybe a few hours of rest under their cloaks in a sandy hole, made me feel like a wimp for my presumptuous daily requirement of a shower and a bed. This in mind, I took a bus east to Prilep in mountainous Pelagonia to seek something more ascetic.

An Irishman told me about the little Macedonian town and the Monastery of Treskavec in the hills above, where, if you are willing to hike up to it, you can stay for free. Before leaving, not wanting to carry food, I gorged myself cheaply at a Macedonian restaurant, where random pointing yielded a Scopsco beer, a salad of tomatoes and cucumber, and a Macedonian pljeskavica, which is a large hamburger patty with cheese melted in the center, served with chili-paprika powder and a spicy chili-pepper fried in oil.

A taxi took me through the Roma gypsy slums until the paved road bled into dirt, and halfway to Dabnica I set off into the eastern foothills of Mount Zlato on foot. I toiled up an old pathway — here ruggedly paved with stones from the hill, here a sand track, and here just parallel ruts running and intersecting, as if the trail were losing a war of attrition with erosion — into the scrubby highland, and sometimes lost myself in the big clusters of smoothed stones that emerged from the hill like barnacles, or when the trail crossed an expanse of unbroken rock. The track became more verdant near the crest, thick with bushes and pines around the sparse springs, eternal in that land of seasons: cold winters, melting springs, dry summers, and humid autumns.

At the top, along the mountain’s long, hogbacked spine, which twisted south toward Prilep, were three high pillars of corrugated rock painted sea-green with moss, and wedged between two of these, the monastery. The trail passes around one pillar, called the Lion’s Head for its animalian face and regal mane of stone, where at a crossroads is a post with signs for the capitals of the world (10,500 kilometers to Los Angeles, 2000 to London, where I started my journey, and 9500 to Tokyo, where I intend to finish), and then winds up past a walled vegetable garden to the front door.

The monastery’s six wings are shaped like a G, with the domed roofs of the chapel encircled within: an old building with colorful frescoes but no lights, yet exploring the darkened corners with a candle makes them more mystical and alien. Once the priest was sermonizing from his high pulpit when a Turkish assassin tried to shoot him. The rifle missed, despite the close range, and crippled a wooden pigeon carved on the front of the pulpit, which still bears one wing. The rifle barrel hangs over the pulpit, and the body of the infidel Turk, turned to stone, can be seen under an eve in the inner wall of the narthex. The monks of Treskavec suffered further attacks, and found themselves massacred when they would not grant entrance to the Christian wife of a Turkish Bey. Repopulated after the liberation, but burned in 1990, there is now only one monk to tend the remote site — but I’ll get to that.

Travelers enter the monastery from the west side through a door in a tower that divides two two-storied wings. The outer wall is stone, and sheer on the eastern facade where it drops into a crevice; the inside white plaster and darkly-stained wood. On the southern side the building opens and leaves only a stone fence shrouded in grape vines. Because the wings are dissimilar in height and unevenly placed on the hillside, stairs connect the wide wooden balconies to one another. Doorways lead to kitchens and Spartan rooms, with metal beds piled with blankets on the dusty wood floors and pictures of Christ and the Saints on the wall. Each room has a wood-burning stove, and the chimneys turret the red-tiled roof.

Through small windows or lattices of glass, the inner wall faces the chapel in a courtyard of stone only drizzled with overgrowth, where there stands an oak, and under the oak a chained St. Bernard — defender of travelers — named Bruno, who defends the gate with a full third of Cerberus’ fury. A scratch on the neck renders the sentinel docile as a pup, but until then he barks savagely at all comers, including Father Sofrajni, the quirky proprietor and sole resident monk, in the beard and black robe of the order. He mildly asks no payment of his guests, who nonetheless feel obliged to leave donations in the chapel. The other lodgers were a motley crew of pilgrims, escape artists, and Dutch travelers. One was a Macedonian night club manager, bored with the daily similitude of drink, women, and planning events, who came to the monastery regularly, seeking mental clarity in its serene solitude. This time he sold his Honda, since the policia were after him.

In the archaic kitchen I met two Dutch families, traveling together, who did not so much invite me to eat with them as simply serve me food, with wine bought from the monastery. A French girl named Selene and her two Macedonian companions, Boris and Irana, got caught up in unflinching Hollander hospitality as well, and we scoured the dishes when through. It was dark after dinner, so I walked outside the monastery to look around. On the plain below glittered eddies and currents amid a sea of shadows; above, the white of the Milky Way. Something shone in the grass: bending close I saw a little crescent cocoon, lighted neon green at the tip like a Christmas tree light, and marked more in the lawn and under the rocks. It would have been silent if not for Dutch revelry, which persisted in spite of sobriety and parenthood, without losing any of its graces.

The next morning I went out to the Lion’s Head with Selene, Boris, Irana, and two urchins living in the monastery. Although one of them was in a cast to her elbow, we managed to climb up the south side of the Lion’s face to the rocky summit, not the highest point of Mount Zlato, but close. I saw Dabnica in a dale to the east; Krushevo in the crook of a ridge to the west, the highest town in the Balkans, where the locals threw rocks at the Turks after they ran out of bullets; and across the scoliotic spine of Zlato, six miles as the bird flies, the white and red expanse of Prilep. Looking north over the monastery I saw a red cross with letters underneath. Once the full slogan stated, “We are Tito’s, and Tito is ours,” but weather erased it down to the existential claim, “We are.” Climbing down the lion was more unsettling than climbing up.

We went into the chapel and looked over the cartoons. In the narthex were six brass stands, with one dish at the top and another half-way up filled with sand for candles. To pray for someone, you take a candle for each person — and many buy bundles — and deposit it lighted in the top tier if you pray for the living, or in the lower if you pray for the dead. An attendant comes around regularly to remove the low-burning prayers and put them in a bucket to be melted down in the candle factory that exists below each Orthodox chapel, made into new petitions, and recycled to the chapel for the next batch of pilgrims to burn. This makes the Orthodox candles either the holiest of wax or the filthiest of supplications, being marked and erased with as many names as a blackboard in a history classroom, so that even St. Peter might have trouble reading such transmissions.

At around 1, we started walking south along the ridge, a different and more consistent path than I had taken up. In some places we had to climb up or down steep rock faces by rope cables bolted to the stone, and at the end, after a steady descent, we marched back up some switchbacks to the Towers of Marko. According to the legend, the 14th century Serbian Prince Marko, who crossed lakes in a step, who wielded against the Turks a great Heraclean mace bigger than anything Braveheart could heft, who chose to die when guns were invented, that Prince Marko desired towers, and since all the men of Prilep were off fighting, he sent the women and children up the hill to haul stone until they perished of exhaustion. The walls and towers are still there, but bigger by far is a great fifty-foot metal cross that lights up at night.

On the way back to town, we passed another Macedonian monument: a twenty-foot rock which looks like an elephant from one side and a pterodactyl from the other. This is no small thing in Prilep. A construction crew busied about the final mortared shingles of a pathway around the rock, to a little circle of benched stones, taking care not to mess up the lights that illuminate the pachyderm at dusk. Beyond the town started, streets lined with racks of drying tobacco leaves to be sold to cigarette companies.

The 7:30 train to Skopje was another old workhorse with Hogwarts Express compartments and a restaurant car, which took almost three hours to travel the 120 kilometers as it stopped at every small town and in some random clearings. I wanted to take another train to Sofia, but unfortunately the track is incomplete, even after 20 years of mishandled construction. (The Balkans are like California in this respect and in others: elected celebrity leaders who seem an international punchline, anachronistic prejudice against and discrimination of minorities, IOU’s as state policy, asphalt cities that add 20 degrees to the temperature, and where is the Los Angeles to Las Vegas express? It’s taken as long to build as a railway in ex-Soviet countries). Anyway, I said goodbye to my friends at the station and went to get an overnight bus.

Under Another Argead Sun

On July 18, 2009 from Macedonia. 2 Comments

So where are you going to? I don’t mind.
If I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die.
So I will follow you wherever you go,
If your offered hand is still open to me.
Strangers on this road we are on,
We are not two, we are one.
—The Kinks, “Strangers”

The Greeks insist on calling this country the Former Yugoslavia Republic of Macedonia, or Fyrom, being covetous of the name of their northernmost province, the birthplace of Alexander and a Byzantine fatherland. So jealous are they that they barred the Fyromites from using the old sixteen-pointed star of the Argead House on their national flag, and which instead bears an Oriental sun with eight rays.

The train to Skopje was an old one with cabins of six seats, packed with Macedonians, or with Serbs on their way further north to the Exit Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, which attracts the same zealous pilgrims as Coachella. The track left the drained marshes of the south, ragged with grassy thickets, for the dry, yellowed plains in Northern Macedonia, and followed the muddy River Axios, bloated by unseasonable rain, until it crossed the border and became the Vardar, driving under and between curdled marble crags among the wooded Paionian hills.

I arrived in the Escape From New York-themed train station, under a steel quilt of cloud that reminded me of home after the bright skies of the Aegean. I had thought coming in that the city looked green, but it was really just overgrown, most of it run-down and ill-cared for, the Soviet architecture made to emphasize the sameness of the oppressed. In the center, the Macedonians tore down these monuments to evened ambition, and erected a few European blocks around cobblestone streets and squares. A stone footbridge crossed the Vardar into the narrow alleys of the Albanian quarter under the walls of the Citadel, and beyond that was a busy Turkish market.

I stayed in the Hostel-Hostel, one of the small, family-owned lodgings where everyone knows eachother, and where a strange community would have developed if Skopje had more magnetism to keep impetuous travelers occupied. Every morning until noon they put out a huge breakfast — bread and butter and jam, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, loaves of feta cheese, hard-boiled eggs, coffee and tea — and every night at six served vegetable soup from a big stock pot.

Outside the brightly-painted single story stood two tents on platforms carpeted with Astroturf worn bald, with walls of hung tarps that opened onto the dirty yard like the reception tents of some hippy Sheikh of Araby. They held couches and cushioned lawn chairs around wood tables splattered with paint, under the faceted spheres of disco lamps.

There I sat with three Brits, a long-haired German on his state-mandated service excursion, a pretty Dutch girl, and a wordly young couple: Joanna from Slovakia, and Etienne, a Frenchman from the Pyrenees, born in a pair of skis, who was learning Slovak so they could share some secret language other than English. We played Uno with some strange new rule added each round by the German until no one could remember them all, but we had to rely on a collective prosecution, the law parceled among eight judges and colored toward longevity by self-interest.

A while after the increasingly-polemic game ended, two Bulgarians stumbled into the yard from the Carlos Santana concert, held concurrently with the Patti Smith one, and sat down among the four remnants of Uno, to argue over a nearly-depleted bottle of Famous Grouse. “Please man, give me some,” begged the skinny Bulgar. The fat one remarked casually, “It’s very soft, I don’t like soft whisky.” “So don’t drink it, please!”

Their names were Ocho and Kamon. They were both vegetarians and martial artists, and both had their long hair in ponytails, but lanky Ocho played the guitar, and fat Kamon the flute. “Our instruments are like women,” said Ocho. “We need to take them everywhere.”

Kamon lit a cigarette. “I quit smoking five years ago, but today is special day. It is Santana Day.”

“If I were woman, I would fuck Santana,” said Ocho dreamily.

Kamon studied his friend closely, and objected: “I don’t think you are pretty enough for Santana.”

Ocho waved around the empty water bottle, and Kamon said, “You get it.” “Let’s play the game: stone, paper, sheesers.” “No.” “Come on man!” “You’re closer!”

Ocho yielded and went off to get water, and then left again to retrieve their instruments from the car, which pealed in alarm at his drunken attempts to open the door. Finally they began the concert, for a French, German, Dutch, and American audience. Ocho’s fingers tore clumsily at complex chords, which turned wavy, clunky, and fervently harsh, accompanied by an erratic pounding on the guitar, a soft and almost wordless song, and by Kamon’s modest flute.

The next morning the sky thundered and poured, so I stayed under the tent to enjoy it. Nothing much was happening in Skopje, but it was Saturday night, so after exploring the town I drank with a few Brits and later with some Czechs, who had brought their own plum brandy in a plastic water bottle.

Neither Santana nor Patti Smith interested me, but when I saw a poster for a performance by Ennio Morricone (and after I verified that the great Italian composer was still alive, and it was not some posthumous tribute), I took a bus to Ohrid, site of the Ohrid Summer Festival, which Morricone’s symphony ushered in.

The concert was held in an ancient Roman theater, installed in a hillside, with white Turkish buildings layered behind, and then the lake, ringed with hills that turned hazy in the distance, a dark blue line between the light blue of lake and sky.

I avoided the €40 ticket price by sitting on the grass behind the highest seats of the amphitheater among the massed bodies of the plebeian audience, but showed up early enough to get a good seat, since my clock was still on Greek time and one hour ahead. Below in the stands sat the Balkan elite and the Presidents of Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo. The Macedonian premier, Dr. Gjorge Ivanov, gave an awkward proclamation from a notecard calling Ohrid an ancient seat of art lovers and declaring, on the Hour of the Dragon when Alexander was born, the forty-day Festival open.

The choir and orchestra preceeded the conductor, and also torch-bearers: a priest in cloth-of-gold and a dozen Roman legionaries with girls in white on their arm. Then came Ennio, 80-years-old and frail and mild with genius; short, but not one of those diminutive men who compensate for a poverty of stature with outstanding activity. He seemed coiled and compressed energy, with a nobility of control over his musical passion.

His band played suites from The Untouchables and The Good The Bad & The Ugly. A woman in trailing red came out to howl the Ecstasy of Gold, and Ennio, an incorrigible Latin gentleman, kissed her hand and walked her off the stage before returning to conduct the militant marches of The Battle of Algiers and the contemplative melodies of Cinema Paradiso.

The Mission followed, led by a woman who played Gabriel’s Oboe with full-bodied gyrations like a snake charmer. She returned for one of the three encores. Ennio also played the Ecstasy of Gold and the Untouchables one more time. There were fireworks, and everyone filed home. Men whistled the songs of the Guarini and tuned their chattering teeth into themes, for it had grown chilly.

I stayed in the Sunny Beach Hostel, up on the cobblestoned slope of Ohrid, between buildings like stone fortresses on the ground floor and white stucco on all upper levels, which jut out over the street incrementally. I found it with only a little help from the locals.

“Where are you going? You need direction? Oh, the hostel. Do you have a reservation? Well it is full. Come, I have rooms for rent, they are very nice. It is like hostel: there is Russian there. Hey wait! Where you from? America! I was in New Jersey once. Hey stop, let me show you the room! I have picture here. Hey!”

Macedonians are stern — not as giddy or playful as the Greeks. They don’t respond to goading with the same vapid rage, nor are they experts at the art of verbal harassment. They are as proud of Macedonia’s ancient exploits as the lowlanders, and indignant over their greedy theft, yet very different from the ancient nation: wedged between Albania, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia, in cartography, language, and culture. Sun-baked as Bedouin they are, but with the girth of hearty highland meals. They play the Balkan bagpipes and flutes and drums, and live music generally means a few old folk tunes accompanied by a Casio. Pizza comes on edible plates of ice cream cone waffle, and is drizzled with ketchup and mayonnaise.

The day after the concert, I walked around and liked what I saw. Ohrid was small and cheap and ancient, with many new and lively places, and many old and quiet ones, and was ringed with mountains and forests that kept it cool. The Anatolian heartland and Syrian steppe would be intolerably hot until September, so I had no reason to hurry. I declared I would stay a while, and turned contentedly lazy: reading and writing and thinking, eating and drinking, walking and hiking and swimming in the lake, with hostelers or locals or in solitude.

Once upon a time in Montenegro, a Macedonian named Lemon told me to come in high summer to his bar in Ohrid, called the Cafe Nemo, and to ask for him. He told me, “You will get laid ever-ee night. Ever-ee night.” With such promise, how could I refuse?

I went to the bar Tuesday with two Hollanders and an Australian, but Lemon, who they called a regular, was not there, nor was he on Friday’s attempt, made alongside one gang of the English rockers who had poured into Ohrid by the dozen in the wake of Exit Festival and sprinted immediately to a store to get beer before the 7 o’clock prohibition cast all aspiring drunks to the bars.

Their Southern English language, unfettered by attempts to make it intelligible to foreigners, was a marvel of slang and dialect, something stereotypical and Hollywood. “I’m gonna jet,” they would say, and “It was fair cheap.” “Those blokes are from North London so watch out, they’ll nick your stuff. Nah, only joking, they seem like posh chaps.” I learned the difference between a yob and a zoot and felt much enlightened.

We ordered rakia and did not realize that we were supposed to sip from the tumblers, or want to, raki being the foulest drink. It tastes like it has three times as much alcohol as it really does. We quaffed it quickly, and two of the Brits were violently and immediately ill there in the corner of the Jazz Inn.

The inmates of the familial hostelry were ninety per-cent English, with an insular Dutch couple, three extrovert Swedes, and the occasional Irishman and Australian mixed in for good measure, along with the Macedonian staff. While trying to figure a card game for four of us, one which could be played with one deck of cards and was simple enough for drunks, I astonished the Swedes by describing Egyptian Ratscrew, which was known by that name to natives of England and to the Swedes as Club the Seal. Swedish rules only differed slightly: The pile was not immediately yours on slapping a pair of cards, but had to be won from other claimants in a vilent grabbing contest.

Daylight hours were much more comfortable: “sublime uneventfulness”. I discovered beyond St Jovan Kaneo a cove called Labino on the cool, clear water of the lake where, at the bottom of a dusty stair, plum trees shade a narrow and rocky strand, less crowded and more peaceful than the other beaches by its remote virtue, with stones perfect for skipping. With Ivanhoe and a few beers, it was like Paradise. At night the sun set over Albania and sprawled a gradient across the firmament: lined amber, lavender, and azure, yielding steadily before eastern star-strewn black.

Saturday I met some Yale law students from the hostel on the beach. There was a swimming marathon that day, and canopied skiffs crowded the bay, escorting or observing the long-distance swimmers. Under the sun flag and in such numbers they made Ohrid look like a Cantonese port.

On Thursday I hitchiked out to Struga on the lake’s other side, and then into the wooded mountains to Dobar on a dam-formed lake. The scenery was beautiful. I looked around and then followed the highway out of town until it came to the dam. A man was sitting there on a guardrail, and I asked him with hands and place-names if the bus to Struga stopped there. It did, so I sat down to wait. A beaten old car pulled up and let out three men. They talked with the seated man, and then one of them told me, “No auto! No bus!” Another started pawing at my bag. I asked him what he was doing. “He wants to see what’s in your bag.”

“Well, he can’t. I’ll just auto-stop. Hey cut it out,” I said, stepping back from clutching hands. “What do you mean what’s in my bag?” I looked the highwayman over: old with white in his thick black beard, but brawny. He had the sleeves of his denim shirt rolled back to show tatoos. A scowl turned the crow’s feet around his glare-proof eyes into spiderwebs. He looked like a Nantucket whaling captain, and not at all like anyone who should be checking my bag.

I remembered a story of T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence was crossing the desert with a few bodyguards and a load of British gold for the Arab cause when a gang of Bedu tribesmen sprang from the dunes and surrounded his small company. They made small talk, but their formation, wandering eyes, and cocked rifles made obvious their illicit intent. Lawrence acted promptly, sticking his camel prod in the leader’s face and asking him if his name was an obscenity. So taken aback was the robber-sheikh by this brazen display that he barely moved as Lawrence rode off.

I didn’t know any Macedonian insults, but I knew a few in English. “I don’t have anything. I have a book,” and I pulled it halfway out of the pouch to prove it. “You want Moby Dick you illiterate asshole?” With that I spun around and walked across the dam, with an even pace and proud posture. I was very angry at such a bold attempt to steal my property. Up until then, I had never thought of wearing the money belt I brought, and walked around with my passport and iPod hanging out of my pocket, height and caution my only security. In Macedonia, that suddenly changed.

At the end of the dam, I looked back. Though his gang had dispersed, Captain Ahab was still standing there in the road with his hands on his hips, a sillhoutte of rage, as angry as I was that his attempted intimidation had been rebuffed. I continued up the road as it circled the lake until a man picked me up. We stopped at a roadside fountain for water, and I felt better. But still hungry.

Let’s Get Out of Here

On July 10, 2009 from Greece. 2 Comments

Autobots, let’s roll.
—Optimus Prime

After leaving Crete, I was sorrily anxious to leave Greece entirely. I planned the following days  with selfish efficiency. For the Fourth of July, I went to the new Acropolis museum, got a newspaper, and feasted at the Amerikaniki Agora. The market hall’s high roof echoed with chopping cleavers and the butchers’ rabid peddling. On learning of his death, I mourned quietly David Carradine, who passed a month ago without fanfare, hung naked in a Bangkok wardrobe.

At the hostel, I met two Americans from California: one an ROTC cadet from the University of San Francisco studying in Germany for two semesters (and refusing to shave for the eight-month duration, just to enrage his commander back home), and the other an Orange County stoner with a Jewish grandmother, who used that connection to move to Israel, near the Syrian border, four months ago. We talked about beer, and I realized how much I missed hops, for there is no pale ale on the Mediterranean. After a few of the mild Greek lagers, we went to bed at 11.

It did not feel like the Fourth of July, sitting among the polyglot frivolity of a hostel bar, with Palestinian immigrants shouting at each other in the streets outside. It rained, too, even though Greece is normally dry from May to October, and continued to rain occasionally for three days after that. I had abandoned my umbrella in Crete the day before, not seeing any need for it, which by Murphy’s Law explains the phenomena.

On my way to Thessaloniki, capital and chief city of the northern regions, I passed by the Persian War battlefield of Plataea: By Thermodon and Asopus, where the grass grows soft, shall be gathering of Greece and sounds of strange tongues; and there beyond lot and portion many Medes shall fall, armed with the bow, when the day of doom comes. —Herodotus

Anyway, I didn’t want to waste time trekking out to the out-of-the-way site on foot, so I walked north of Thebes and across the shadeless Boeotian plain, a checkerboard of yellow, green, and brown. I stayed off the street, fearing the Greek drivers who substitute the horn for caution, until I got to the National Road, where I installed myself at an on-ramp with a thumb out.

Many cars and trucks drove past. I was entertained when the driver of one sedan ignored me firmly, while his wife shooed his hands like flies and almost grabbed the steering wheel trying to get him to change lanes, as if I might leap at them. In the back, a one-year-old girl with a pacifier met my eyes and waved cheerfully. Eventually a police car pulled over, with two officers in the front, and the passenger rolled down his window.

“Hi,” I said.

“What are you doing?”

“Auto-stop.”

“No, it is forbidden.”

“Since when?”

“It is forbidden!”

“Well I’ll just walk then.”

I stood there waiting for them to leave, and they waited, too.

“Go!” said the officer. “No waiting! It is forbidden! Start walking!” The old mustachioed driver did a walk with two fingers.

“How far is it to the bus stop?” I asked. They talked to each other for a while, then told me to get in, and drove me to a diner where the owner lectured about something for thirty minutes until the bus arrived. He spoke English, but I only understood a few words, which made no sense when taken out of context.

I went to Lamia, and from there took a bus through the pass at Thermopylae, wider than it once was, with the end of the long island of Euboea in sight across the straights. A plain spreads out where once there was only a road, but the steep mountains of central Greece still rise in defense, and under them lie cracked stones that I guessed from the bus to be the Phocian Wall, and a great bronze statue of Leonidas where the Three Hundred fell, along with five-hundred rarely remembered and never memorialized Thespians.

In the space between the high mountains and Euboea, the grey clouds opened and let in slanting pillars of sunlight against a burning screen. Then the star set, and we navigated the wide Thessalian plain in the dark.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
—Simonides of Ceos

I arrived late in Trikala and found out that the budget hotel from my Lonely Planet had gone out of business. Luckily, I saw a clueless German in the nearby square with a backpack, and after talking to him for a while, asked if he wanted to split a hotel room for the night. The next day I went to the topographic miracle and monastic redoubt at Meteora.

Ten million years had washed the towers clean of sand and shale and left them solitary and magnificent: not walls but buildings of a city, some solemn and others wide and riotous, pockmarked with caves like windows where crosses and dyed sheets hung. The sediment was not monotonous, but shaded and lined with patterns of limestone, marble, serpentinite, and metamorphic rock. The domed caps, like the roofs of Orthodox chapels, bore garments of pine and brush, and monastaries crouched crustacean-like, established as refuge against Jihadi and Crusader by bearded abbots who could not help but be cowed by the divinity of design in those silent, indomitable anomalies of tectonic and geologic drafts.

I walked up from the town of Kalampaka to a path through the noisy jungle in the crevices between the towers, which led up to the first monastery I wanted to visit. There are a dozen monasteries at Meteora, and despite my habitual indecision I had no trouble choosing Agia Trias as one of the few I had time for, since it was the vertiginous location for the denouement of For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore’s best attempt at James Bond.

The climbing was steep, and the noontime temperature 100 degrees; when I got to the entrance, I looked like I was going through heroine withdrawal, and earned weird stares from the families who had sensibly driven there. Bridges and stairs had replaced the old cranes and bird cages as routes to the monastic fortress. The path carved up the precipice through tunnels, closed or open to the view, to the pinnacle and the low, red-roofed structure there.

Agia Trias smelled like candles — like an old church — like the same air had been circulating inside for 500 years. The plastered stone and unstained wood looked ancient but clean. Gilded portraits of Christ were the only decoration, and they covered the walls of the monastic chapel. In Rousanu, the second monastery I saw, the chapel displayed scenes of a river of blood and timeless oppressors torturing and killing Christian saints, their faces rubbed away by some offended heathen, though a woman scoffed when I asked if the sabre-wielding executioners were Turks.

I walked the roads and stairs to Varlaam, and then to the Grand Meteoro monastery, two-storied and the largest there, wide with character and medieval halls. Satisfied, I took a game trail down the hill, slid down a dry riverbed, and followed old paths through the jungle at the roots of the pillars, laden with self-conscious awe but happy enough to scrabble around on the rocks.

Back in Trikala, I investigated train times for Thessaloniki. None of the Northern Greeks spoke English, but an Australian woman translated for me. She had been living in Greece for 15 years and was losing her accent. Outside, a woman managed a broom like it was a leash with a small and overly-active dog tethered at the end.

The train left to-morrow, but the lively hometown of Asklepios was a cheerful and charming riverfront village on the Litheos, locked in the foothills of the northern range that encircles Thessaly’s landward side. I did not mind staying another night.

Meteora 051

Of the unseasonable storms that followed my shedding my umbrella, the one in Trikala that night was the most sudden and violent. I went out to get a gyro, and while I was sitting there the grey clouds that had been looming since late afternoon burst open in a torrent like a waterfall. Gutterless, the streets flooded to dirty glass and reflected lights in patches of color. Besieged Greeks came out of their stores or stopped on their way home and huddled under canopies to ruminate over the remarkable weather. After having a coffee, I hobbled back toward my hotel like Deckard in the beginning of Blade Runner, only I was protecting my newspaper instead of the other way around, since I still wanted to read it.

The next morning I took an early bus to Thessaloniki, a modern city, if Applebee’s and Starbucks are the ribbons awarded to metropolitan modernity, but one that retains the touch of Hellas: the ruins that obstruct construction, the omnipresent sight of Byzantine churches and legendary spots, the old men in black seated at kafeterions, and the strange Greek song-and-dance performances called bazouki — all attractive, but on Thursday I wanted to see Up.

For a long time I had been trying to see the new Pixar movie, and in Thessaloniki I learned that the Greek release was not until late August, to provide time for dubbing. Dubbing? I forgot that they dub all cartoons here. I count Up as the hardest thing I’ll have to miss overseas, except maybe Christmas (and apparently my Great Aunt’s birthday party). In frenzy of stubborn rage, I decided to see an American movie anyway, and picked Transformers: Rise of the Fallen. What a mistake.

The ten minutes with Optimus Prime are great, but the other 140-minute abortion, the part that is either a noxious teen romance or an ad for the US Military, is fucking horrible. The whole story is either contrived by an idiot (Michael Bay) or ripped off from StarGate and The Last Crusade, everything just a slapstick excuse for painfully unfunny comedy and over-budgeted action sequences where Shia LaBeouf runs around and screams in slow motion under a hail of excessive CGI, and where Optimus is usually absent.

How hard is it to make a giant robot movie about giant robots, Michael Bay? And who keeps giving you all this money? And why did you replace Ratchet and Ironhide with two unfunny and vaguely racist Jar Jar Binks clones? And what’s with the rock song about Jesus in the credits? Why can’t it just be something awesome, like Stan Bush’s You Got the Touch from the 1986 Transformers? Actually, why can’t the whole movie be like the campy ’80s one?

I don’t know why Optimus Prime signed on for this mess. He’ll probably end up found dead in Thailand like David Carradine, another star-studded suicide, or a failed attempt at auto-erotic asphyxiation.

You got the touch, you got the power!
When all hell’s breakin’ loose,
You’ll be riding the eye of the storm.
You got the heart, you got the motion;
You know that when things get too tough…
You got the touch!
—Stan Bush, from Transformers: The Movie

I stayed a few nights in the Hotel Bill, near the city center, and explored the moldy churches and fortress walls of Thessaloniki, and the cobblestone streets and crowded alleys. Thursday I took a day trip to the old Argead capital of Pella, and to Vergina.

At Vergina is the tomb of Philip II, which remarkably escaped pillaging until 20th century archaeologists could set up a ticket booth. A dim and sterile chamber under the dissected mound displayed the one-eyed, crippled king’s stash: weapons and armor, plates and bowls for food, tripods, and the gold box that held his cremated remains. His panoply and his swords and spearheads were crusted with age, except the golden trim, still gleaming. Wooden stairs led to the tomb, behind a segmented pane of glass: a great marble door crossed with supports, and flanked by Doric columns. A line of blue bars decorates the entablature, under a detailed hunting frieze. I said the only prayers I could conjure: “Holy shit.”

On discovering the tomb, Manolis Andronikos wrote, “I felt an electric shock run up my spine. That I held the bones of Philip in my hands? Too astounding to take in.” Philip is one of those colossal characters of history: so unbelievable in traits and exploits that he sounds fictitious. To see his armor, his sword, and the theater where he met the dagger of a spurned lover, where Alexander was named king, is incredible proof that he really lived.

Farewell to Kriti

On July 3, 2009 from Greece. 1 Comment

Anywhere I lay my head, that place I call my home.
—Tom Waits

The city of Rethymno strikes east from a triangular peninsula, which ends in the walls of the Fortrezza. Canopied restaurants encircle the old Venetian harbor on the peninsular flank, defined by a limestone jetty and lighthouse, which flashes green at night. There is little room to maneuver down this promenade, and the proselytizing maitre d’s block the only route with desperate appeals to fill their empty tables.

“You want rest and drink?” ”Look at these fish. You can have any of them for eat.” “You know Frommer’s? Well, I have a Frommer’s guide right here — and look, we are in it!” “Why are you wearing that Albania shirt? Don’t you have any other shirts to wear? You wear it every day!” (I’d never worn it before!)

The Greeks are incorrigible schemers, who are constantly and inexpertly considering possible enterprises, and who follow through with a single-minded determination to create something which at leasts looks like their dream. One manager bought ten leather-backed massage chairs and lined them up around a pair of fans next to his café, then charged €6 for their use.

Beside the Venetian harbor is the old town of narrow cobblestone streets, with walls of white stone and unpainted wood and pastel stucco. The few domed Turkish mosques, made of sandstone, look like buildings from Tatooine. The main street, which is also the arcade circuit for Rethymno’s popular Walking Time, runs out from the old town and splits the cafés and boutiques of the modern city from a crowded swath of sandy beach. The city is not as large or as congested as Heraklion or Hania, as ferries run there only very rarely.

Monday: The hostel was packed, including eight kids. When the gas ran out, the well-prepared families brought out camping stoves of multiple designs and fuel-types, and Ivan had to run around to stop them from burning anything down. “You see now why I am manager,” he told us on a break. “I work twenty-four hours!” He stopped long enough to show us some Serbian torture technique. “You put your thumbs here, and lift. Two seconds. Two seconds and he will tell you everything you want to know.”

Later, some of us were drinking in the hostel lounge and considering a game, but Ivan told us to be quiet. Some guests had complained after I taught Kati, a Canadian, and a Brit to play Egyptian Ratscrew, when our frenzied table-slapping kept them awake. Ten of us in a band strolled down to the beach, where floodlights illuminated the neat rows of beach chairs. On the way we bought beer, wine, raki, and a local honey-flavored brandy called Rakomelo from a 24-hour supermarket on the palmy esplanade, and planted the mostly plastic bottles in the sand at the center of a beach chair circle.

The game we played was 21, wherein the circle counted to 21 and the 21st person added a rule to one of the numbers. On my successive turns, I made number four drink three swigs of rakia, and number two sing their national anthem. This would have been embarrassing, as I struggled to mentally recall the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, but the number always seemed to fall on one of the four Scots present, who sang together with egalitarian gusto. Other rules were stranger and more dangerous: crawl like a dog, kangaroo hop over three chairs, demonstrate a Michael Jackson dance move, hop on one foot until the end of the round. The last of these tumbled an unfortunate Colombian and knocked his contact lens back into his ocular recesses, ending the game.

Rethymno suffered from blackouts that night, along with the merry revelers. From the beach we could see the power outages darken blocks of the seaside city. When ours went under, the floodlights clapped off, and the mighty din of the stars sprang out in full. We went down to the surf and found the water as warm as the day had been hot. “You should go swim,” someone said to me. I did not need convincing, but left my shirt and jeans on the dry sand while I waded out into the shallow and temperate bay. The rest took a little more convincing, but after I shouted at them enough, they swam out to join.

We ran starlit races along the line of yellow bouies, and floated easily on our backs with our ears underwater. I wished the blackout would return to reignite the glorious heavens, and couldn’t stop thinking about the first scene in Jaws. The others had to call me in repeatedly from the shore, as I stubbornly wanted to swim more. They called both Jon and America, since we had not all bothered to learn everyone’s names as well as their countries. Denmark and Colombia wanted to leave, but several Scotlands made them stay until I beached myself. Then we went and got gyros.

Wednesday was the first of July, and all the Greeks wished each other “Kali mina!“ — Have a good month. It was also the day when a European Union-directed smoking ban turned its hypochondriacal eye on the Hellenes, fining any who dare smoke indoors or outdoors at a café or bar. A similar ban implemented in England two years ago kills three pubs a day, according to the Drunk Welshman of Rethymno. In the bars of Berlin, it is the only rule the obedient Germans ignore. The Greeks, who smoke more than even the French, and are used to ignoring authority, took the first week siga siga. Coffee shop owners watched their neighbors to make sure of a united front, resulting in universal ambiguity. Ashtrays stayed out, and patrons asking about their cigarettes were answered with shrugs.

In the hostel, I joined a Scottish-Canadian named Alana trying to recruit three California girls into a car-renting trip to the rainbow-sand beaches at Elafonisi. This failed, so Alana and I hitchhiked to Hania, the westernmost of the great Venetian ports on the northern coast of Crete, with a larger old town than Rethymno and less of the modern concrete blight that infests Heraklion. A young woman picked us up near the highway, and left us at the Hanian offramp with a bag of fruit. We rode into the city alongside bags of cement in the dusty back of a four-cylinder truck.

We explored the port, then went to the Etz Hayyim Synagogue, tucked away in an alley accessible only through the the backs of cafés. A lecherous old Sephardi Jew with skin stretched tight over his skull led us around the empty temple. He was one of its two residents, and one of Crete’s ten Jews, all the rest having been exterminated in World War Two — delivered from the horrors of Auschwitz by an Allied submarine that unwittingly sank their transport.

“When the woman makes the sex, she must go to the bath here and pray until she is clean,” he told us. The 500-year-old synagogue follows the old building pattern, with benches for the men and a secluded balcony for the Jewesses. “When there is a beautiful woman in the prayers, I cannot pay attention. She must go away upstairs. You know, it’s for the women, too, because now I am old, but years ago I was very handsome.” He smiled with all six of his yellowed front teeth.

After we got back, and with greater sobriety than the first time, I went night-swimming with Kati, Alana, and a Dutch diving instructor with the unpronouncible name of Roel. Friday was my last day. I had a grand time with the people from the hostel, now as close as family, under our weird uncle Ivan. It’s strange how quickly a place becomes a home when you are traveling for a long time, how immediately an aquaintance becomes a close friend, and how ephemeral these vagabond relationships really are.

With a heavy heart, I took a midnight ferry to Athens the following day and restored myself to the capital once more, at the end of another Hellenic circuit. I turned north toward Boeotia, Thessaly, Macedonia, FYROM, and cooler Thracian lands.