Archive for the 'Greece' Category

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.

Blood On the Dance Floor

On June 29, 2009 from Greece. 1 Comment.

My word, how mortals take the gods to task!
All their afflictions come from us, we hear.
And what of their own failings? Greed and folly
double the suffering in the lot of man.
—Homer

On Friday morning Ivan burst onto the hostel balcony where we were eating breakfast with the news that the King of Pop was dead. The global response was just as unbelievable as the hasy obituary. Moonwalking in the Liverpool Tube station; spontaneous concerts in Leicester Square, Copenhagen, and under the Eiffel Tower — if you didn’t know what a joke Wacko Jacko was two weeks ago, you would have thought by such international veneration that he was still a respected cultural icon.

Ivan saw the news in between his comprehensive survey of the security camera footage from the morning before. A man had walked in, past the camera in the entry hall, up the outdoor stairs, and under the surveilance of the second camera in the lounge, where he grabbed a British girl’s half-charged iPod off the shelf next to one of the hostel’s few outlets, and fled with the same confident urgency that carried him knowlingly to the electronic sanctuary. Ivan was confident that he would uncover the thief, and one-track Serbian obstinancy pursued his certainty.

“He is French-Algerian who stayed here before,” said Ivan. “He did same thing, stole an iPod, and they got it back on ferry to Athens. I don’t know, these French-Algerians.”

Kati and I started later that day on another hitchhiking venture to the southern coast, to Matala. The first to pick us up was an venerable Greek man on the last leg of his seven-hour drive from Igoumenitsa near Albania, to visit his 96-year-old relative on the island. The Greeks have a habit of living to ripe old ages of lucid independence, and will tell you it is because of the olive oil and wine. We had to stop at two stores to get supplies for the hermit, and at the second, in a gesture of Greek philoxenia, the man brought out two Fantas and straws for us.

He dropped us off near the old Venetian fountain of sixteen lion heads in Spili, a town on a long shelf of Mount Kedros. A French couple in a Kia drove us past their turnoff with a map on their steering wheel, and then we walked a ways on a road that curved willfully to avoid the spacious folds of the scrubby and shadeless landscape, until an unshaven and laconic farmer picked us up in his dirty car. We disembarked in an amphitheater-shaped town called Agios Galini, where the Libyan Sea constituted an uneventful stage, with a rocky trap room under the waves’ refracting glass. Next came a talkative painter and a half-lost Czech, and then we were in Malata.

Great sandstone steps angle down into the beating surf from both sides of the bay. Within the climbable right-hand ledges, Romans tunneled funerary caves, with niches for remains and offerings, which hippies providentially discovered and unfortunately inhabited in the 1980s. A few of their pasty, long-haired race remain on the sandy beach between the climbable bluffs, hawking necklaces from wooden chests and sitting on blankets in the sun, near the invitations of the water. A painted sign of bloated blue letters on a white wall under the Hakuna Matata café reads: “Today is life. Tomorrow never comes.” We climbed on the cliffs and in a cafe on the beach had frappes and sliced watermelon, newly in season.

Odyssey complete, we turned back to the road. A shirtless gangouri in a truck with a surfboard in the back drove us to Moires, a big and bland highway nexus northeast of the beach, and then squealed off into the late afternoon. Another truck stopped, this one full, and we climbed in the back next to a washing machine and a refrigerator, and enjoyed the aromatic breeze that blew over the olive fields on the rare plain between the dry Cretan hills, until some police waved the drivers over. They asked the Greeks, “What is this in your truck?” but let us be after checking the registration. Next came a taciturn Englishman, enjoying his retirement in a caravan on Crete, and I shared the back seat with an old hound; then a truck to Spili, and another, who thankfully picked us up as we held out our thumbs under the last streetlight in the town, since by then night had fallen and we were still twenty miles from home.

At the hostel we met another retired Englishman: an autoworker who, before his employment at a GM plant, smuggled money and papers between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He saw the Cretans as a New Money people, struggling to maintain the old traditions while they drove fancy German cars, wore new American clothes, and sold grandpa’s goat ranch for millions of dollars with grandma still lying in a bed upstairs saying apologetically, “Don’t worry, boys, I’ll be dead soon.”

Still, some things never change. A Greek told us of the Greeks, “The wife is in charge inside the house, the husband outside. The man goes to work for the family and comes home at eight, tired and in trouble. ‘Where were you? You are so late!’ “

When you’re traveling, ask the traveler for advice,
Not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.
—Rumi

Sunday I boarded a very early bus to Hania, and south from there to Samaria Gorge, through the simple mountain villages where stony men in grey mustachios and black shirts and pants swagger to their seats in the kafeneon. The bus parked at the Gorge when the morning was still cool, in the shade of a high eastern peak and opposite the roots of the canyon from another, which stuck out above the sloping forest like a thumbnail of pitted granite. The parking lot and the scenic overlooks with tourists and their busses, and all the Greeks were shouting at each other. Kati had told me that this just the way Greeks talk casually, and they aren’t usually as insulting or argumentative as they sound. The walls of Samaria echoed their bandied words, which may be why they love the place, and I hussled down the gravel steps into the wild to escape the cavalcade of a shouting party.

The trail went down in switchbacks lined with Calabrian pines and the flying buttresses of their roots, and with fallen trees, nettles, and pine cones around little patches of sunlight where grass and green scrub grew. Trekkers hunched ovber against heat and exhaustion at tables set by fountains, bearded with moss and lichen, but the Teutonic visitors always charged by these in a flurry of knee-socks and metal skipoles. At the bottom, the path crossed a riverbed of rocks of every size, all bleached by the sun and worn smooth by the water of the river, now dry. The peaks had already shed the icy mantle of winter, and loomed bare, cracked, and clean over the wooded climbs. A thousand thankful cairns of smaller rocks stood piled on the boulders, waiting to be washed away when the river returned. I made one quickly since the cries of the Greeks were fast approaching.

After a few miles a spring joined the rocky water-bed, and the banks grew green with grass and thirsty scrub and fragrant with marjoram and thyme wherever the sun could get through the thicker cover of pine. Peony bloomed pink and alone. In early spring, the hills turn spectral with anemones, white asphodel, yellow phlomis, forboding iris, and the stygian violet hoods of dragon arum. The stream had shrunk since then, and drew a silty yellow line of water down the white riverbed, which turned sapphire blue when it was deep and made more noise than it had any right to.

The stream ran for some miles, and then disappeared in a series of tiered pools ringed with flowering stalks. The dusty trail continued along dryly, uneven with roots and rocks that prevented natural observation. Where the deepening ravine narrowed, the trail climbed up one of the slopes, to rejoin its guide later. Eventually it crossed the grey ditch to the Samaria village in the contours of the hill: an abandoned ruin of rocks from the time before the gorge was a wilderness park, when it sheltered stubborn Cretan resistance to Doge, Sultan, and Fuhrer, and furnished fortresses and chapels and terraced olive groves. Now the place is full of benches and captive Kri-Kri goats. A black hose runs through it, propped up by walls and tile roofs and branches, and all the way along the trail as it follows the water-bed, under high walls and higher ridges like castles.

At the Sidoportes, the Iron Gates, the granite walls, 500 meters high, crashed down into a narrow chasm, and shrank the gorge from 200 meters in width to thirty, and later to three. A yellow sign warns of falling rocks and read, “GREAT DANGER !! WALK QUICKLY.”

It was a place that makes humans feel small. The shale and granite walls were lined by their long creation and again by the passing of time, so that their whorling patterns read like the ages of the world. Trees and bushes sprout rebelliously from niches, shelves, and crenellations all the way to the forest at the rounded top. Chasms spun off to the side, and in some places steep ramps of scree rested against the Samarian walls. In others, huge boulders had fallen to the gloomy floor, and on the level faces of these, humbled trespassers had piled cairns of rocks from the riverbed. I rebuilt one which had collapsed and added one of my own.

The river re-emerged and contributed its roar to the funneled wind’s howling din. For a while, the banks were green again, but then the gorge constricted too much for anything but stone to endure. The trail crossed back and forth over the river on spartan bridges of short-cut logs, and hugged one or another of the walls when only three meters seperated them, until finally the gorge opened onto a wide plain of gravel and pine with a few cafés at the end before another pass that led to Agios Roumeli on the seaside, where water from the Samaria fountains costs a Euro and the packed ferry to Hora Sfaktio leaves at 5:30, early enough to hitchhike home from the familiar harbor.

On Candian Shores

On June 25, 2009 from Greece. 0 Comments.

I got a long way to go, I’m getting further away.
— Elliott Smith, “I Better Be Quite Now”

I spent a few days recuperating and reintegrating in Athens, and again visited my favorite place. From the Areopagus hill at sunset, the grid of the city is lost in a disordered mass of cubic concrete, linear windows, stale white blocks, and the twinkle of hasty street lights. The families and lovers and tourists seated on the smooth, uneven marble steps watch the Acropolis redden with the dying star’s farewell light. The squeaking bats come out from pits on the hill to harvest.

One morning, when I was rebooking my bed, I heard this speech from a tour guide: “We only have a limited time at each site, and you need to limit yourself to that time frame. Some of the sites close at different times than others, and if we want to see them all today we have to follow the schedule. If you need two to three minutes to take a photo, that’s fine, but any longer and the tour group will have to move on. Second: Sometimes people go in the sites and they look like tourists but they are pickpocketers. Now, I’ve never had a problem with this…” He knocked on the wall.

“That’s not wood,” called Eduardo, the portly deskman, in his vaguely French-sounding accent. I laughed and said maybe plaster would work.

I hung out with many strange characters in Athens, including no less a celebrity than Spain’s former number three DotA player (I didn’t even know there was a ladder), an atheist anarchist from Boise. I also observed an Orange County girl, successfully identified by her explosive exuberance and pointless monologues, and found out that New Zealanders and most people are diminished and discouraged by the attitude of California girls. I learned more about Brazilian culture and expectations from a student named Mauricio:

“The women of Slovakia are beautiful. I went into a club, and all the women there were beautiful, except this one girl, who was fat. But still there were fifty women there who I wouldn’t mind… How you say?… They were beautiful!” he told Nick and me. “I checked into the hostel and there was one bed left, in a room, and they tell me there is a couple and a single girl in there, and I said, ‘Very nice.’ So I go up and there is no one there, but there is a bra hanging on the bed post, a big bra.” Mauricio demonstrated the size. “And I think, this woman is either very beautiful or very fat. She was very fat.”

Anyway, I was going to head north to Thessaloniki in Macedon, but some Greek told me, “Thessaloniki is just a big city. My advice: Pick an island and go there.” So on Saturday I took a late ferry from Piraeus to Heraklion on Crete. (Sorry Aunt Pat!)

The ferry, the Kriti I, was much larger than the one I took to Ithaca, with a belly full of cabins and two belching smokestacks that thrummed with a primal drum beat. I sat in the Distinguished Class Lounge, hoping they would kick me out, and then went looking for a place to sleep for the rest of the eight-hour voyage. I curled up behind some chairs in the corner of a dimly lit Internet room. A man was already asleep under a sheet in another corner near the door, and pretty soon a half-dozen other people came in and passed out on the carpet.

Crete is shaped like a comb, with a narrow east, a bulging center, and a western third that bears three peninsulae pointed north towards the Hellenic mainland. Heraklion, at the center of the island’s north coast, was originally called Rabd al-Kandaq when the Saracens founded the port, and rechristened Kandakhos by the Byzantines who took it over. The Venetians called it Candia along with the rest of the island. Under this title it suffered a Turkish siege lasting 22 years, and the bloodied victors had no heart to change its name any further than linguistics demanded, to Kandiye. The modern Greek nation, ever looking wistfully over her shoulder, changed the city’s name to Heraklion for no apparent reason.

The Kriti I debarked there at 5:30 a.m. I walked straight south from the port a few miles to the ruins of Knossos, the Minoan capital of pre-historic Cretan palace civilization, and fell in with a mixed group from the Aegean Pearl for a free guided tour of the 20-acre palace of Minos, led by a Greek who pronounced “Why” as “Wah-hiy.” The stoney bluepring was reconstructed in places by Arthur Evans (as Heinrich Scheimann was previously engaged), so you can get a better idea of how it looked in the time of Cretan dominance. However you can no longer step on any of hte palace rooms due to the daily damage of 5000 pairs of shuffling feet.

When the tour ended, I went back to explore Heraklion, and took great joy in seeing the Morosini Fountain, founded by Venetian governor and Morean-conqueror Francesco Morosini. The joy was derived from my guidebook, which said, “Morosini means lion,” since I’m that guy who likes to correct people, especially people with influence. As I entered the Venetian fortress on the cornice, some combination of lighting, tourists, and flagstones made me feel as if I was entering the queue for a Disneyland ride.

I took a bus west from Heraklion to Rethymnon at the end of Crete’s central balloon. The Rethymnon Youth Hostel is fronted by a soft- and strangely-spoken Serbian named Ivan, and there I met an Estonian journalist named Kati, something of a philhellene and fluent in Greek. This was her fifth visit to the country, after studying abroad in Hania. From her, I learned much about the vagaries of Greek culture and about my most serious interest: Walking Time.

To add to my previous disection of the Volta: the Walkers and the Watchers are separate groups and never switch places; the only place the Walkers sit are on benches, and the Watchers never leave the café. If you do Walking Time, you don’t go to the clubs later. If you do go to the clubs, you have to watch out for the cool guys who wear all black and spend four hours drinking a Corona, and then announce at 6 that it’s time to get serious. They drink two more beers and start smashing bottles. The Gangouri stick their hair up and drive up and down the avenues in souped up red cars, which are their only topics of discussion. I also learned that the beads all the Greek men clack together are not rosaries but worry beads, which are a stress relief toy like the squeeze ball, and might be shaped like rosaries as a jest.

Monday I spent too much time arguing with hostelers about Iran. I found the elections last week fascinating, and followed the currently-cooking revolution as best as I could. Iran interests because it is a modern, industrial, democratic state which is striving for religious rather than secular governance. When democrats revolted in France, the monarchies called them heathens, athiests, and anarchists. Whenever Islamists take power in a Muslim country, democratic Westerners irrationally say the same thing, and often prefer a bloody despot to a freely-elected religious party. I see the Iranian government as an experiment with a new form of rule, and I don’t like the notion that we’ve achieved stasis and perfect government and should maintain the secular status quo.

Without international allies or approval, the Persians are attempting to figure out a new way of managing a modern state, and are doing so with as much violence and oppression as accompanied the birth of any Western one. They are working towards nationhood on their own terms. A tolerant, unobtrusive, non-proselytizing religion gives people a moral and spiritual framework, in addition to the political and economic structure provided by secular democracy. People in the West find our consumerist lifestile empty and unfulfilling. They have no reason to be moral, only lawful. Maybe communal spirituality is what is missing. (These ideas were found equally abhorrent by an atheist anarchist, a secular Dane, and a cynical Welshman.)

On Tuesday, Kati and I hitchhiked (auto-stopped) south to Preveli Monastary. The first drivers to pick us up were an old Greek couple who told us they were on vacation, and so could take their time and do what they wanted. The old man turned up the Greek music and sang along, but dialed it down when his wife’s phone rang. Someone wanted to meet them somewhere, but they were noncommital: “We are on vacation,” said the man. “We’ll do what we want. Maybe we’ll go, maybe we won’t.”

Being on a strict schedule, we turned down their invitation to see some sort of field and drink raki, and a Dutch couple drove us up closer to the monastary. The rebuilt sections of the Preveli Monastary stand out in red and white against the castellated grey stone of the original structure. A strange zoo below holds peacocks and goats.

East of the monastary and down a long, winding stair is a beach of coarse, grey sand at the outlet of a deep gorge carved through the granite by a stream’s long effort. The walls guard against the arid Cretan temperment, and allow a thick jungle along the riverbanks, which are explored by families in pedalboats. The water off the rocky shore is cold and salty, so that floating on your back is easy.

In the afternoon we walked back up the stairs and rode with a French couple to the crossroads, then went west along the coastal highway to Plakias with two concerned Greeks. (The people who pick up hitchhikers are generally either hospitable locals worried for your trip, or well-traveled tourists with open eyes.) The highways in that part of Crete circle without intersecting Imbros Gorge, which in Plakias was exactly between us and Rethymnon. We had taken the eastern road south, and despite the deepening lateness of the day resolved to take the longer western road back, trusting in fate with unthinking stubbornness.

It was a long and rarely-riven walk through the crumbling crags that divide Plakias from Hora Sphakion, ringed by ridges and reefs of limestone, granite, and shale that are patched over with highland scrub. The long cultivation of olives has drained Crete’s soil where it is not rock or scree, and leaves little shade for travelers. Finally, an Austrian and an Irishwoman stopped for us and drove us, with many questions, to a point near Phrangokastello: A Venetian fortress at the center of the coastal flatflands under the mountains, which by legend is the haunt of the spirits of Cretan rebels. Cretans have a long history of resisting foreign rule, from Venetians to Turks to Germans, and their traditional clothes are martial in design.

Kati and I walked west along the coast, back to the highway. The next car to pick us up was a Honda sedan without discernable color. In the front sat two teenage brothers, and in the back their plump mother, who had to scoot over to let us in since only one of the back doors worked. The back seat was covered in sand, and the front with plastic-wrapped croissants, which the Greek in the passenger seat offered to us.

Once we were settled, the driver wasted no time in accelerating to 100 kilometers an hour on the winding two-lane highway. “Siga siga — Slowly slowly,” his mother urged quietly. “Siga malaka!” shouted his brother, but the driver ignored both. All three of them crossed themselves continually, although the driver sometimes had to hold his hand up against the setting star. The sunglasses were buried under croissant wrappers.

“I told you we needed to clean these up.” “Shut up, malaka!” “Here, pull over so I can throw them in a bin.” “No! Just throw them out the window!” “Pull over malaka!” “Fine!” “Siga malaka, I can’t reach it!” “Go out the window.” “Malaka!”

Finally, the cab was clean, but the younger Cretan in the passenger seat kept climbing halfway out the window so he could insult the names and professions of the old men seated at the side of the road. “You can’t say that,” they said. “I’ll say what I want,” he shouted as we sped off. In Komitades, the mother climbed out with her purse, but told her sons to take us on to our destination at Hora Sphakion. They readily agreed. The engine groaned under the weight on the pedal. “Siga malaka!” When we finally made it, and after the Cretans drove off, Kati told me, “I never want a Greek son.”

Hora Sphakion is a coastal town based around a cobblestone esplanade that caresses the bay under the canopies of stores and restaurants, between the hills and a rocky jetty. It was dark, and we had a long way to go. A Drunk Welshman of Rethymnon told me that the greatest Christian sin is despair. Regardless, Kati and I were on the verge of it when the sunset caught us on the road two miles east of Hora Sphaktion and forty miles south of the Rethymnon hostel. Luckily, and entirely unexpected by myself, a German made his girlfriend pull over and pick us up, and together we drove back over the mountains that span Crete’s length like the meat of a sandwich. Clouds blanketed the dusky peaks, and mountain goats crowded the road.

June 23rd was the longest day of the year, which in Estonia is a day of unceasing sun, a white night celebrated by bonfires and with vodka. In its honor, we went out to a bar with a few hostelers: John and Tanya of America, Helen of England, Laura of Canada, and Sandra of Spain.

John, a recently released Marine who would bleed stars and stripes, started singing country songs and shouting, and Tanya told him to not use his Marine voice. Tanya was another Hawaiian Mormon, the daughter of an Air Force pilot, who, if you ask him about his service, will rank all the chow halls of the Middle-East, and the wife of an Army aviator. Her thousand-year-old great grandmother is a wrinkled Filipina who lives alone in the island mountains and speaks neither Tgallic or English. When a python ate her chickens, the woman killed the snake and cooked it along with the predigested birds. She had her visiting great-grandaughter hold a chicken while she sawed it to death with a rusted machete.

Anyway, Marine John’s full-blooded American spirit, along with other tourists I’ve seen, got me thinking about my own strange and indefinite race. Americans are a stupidly simple and carelessly honest people. (They say every criticism should start and end with a complement, but I believe in bluntness.) We say exactly what we are thinking, with little barrier between mind and mouth, and by our unmoderated countenance show blatantly our own emotions, passions, and thoughtlessness, which borders on rude, though this is unintended.

Our minds aren’t made for intrigue or finesse, and in taking action we prefer the hammer to the stiletto. As a result of our incontinence, we are better built to invent and fulfill our own ambitions and enterprises, not because of arrogance, but because of an unawareness of and unaquaintance with control. We operate in most capacities like constant drunks, unrestrained and uninhibited, and others treat us as the sober would. This appears self-deprecating, but it’s not, because as heavy as our hands can be they are dependable and good-natured, with an intolerant abhorrence for politics, injustice, and exploitation. At least for most of us.

“Americans are naive, with all the good and bad connotations. We believe that we can change anything, and we believe that we can change anything,” said Eli Pariser, an executive director of Move-On.org, who has sent me a lot of emails without having ever met me, and happened to be in Rethymnon long enough to give me a quote. “A lot of people tell me, ‘Haven’t I heard that name before?’”

The Things They Carried

On June 16, 2009 from Greece. 4 Comments.

If you don’t want it, we’ll take it;
If you don’t want to give it to us, we keep walking by.
Keep going, we’re not tired. Got plenty of places to go,
Lots of homes we ain’t been to yet.
West Side, Southwest Side, Middle-East,
Rich house, dog house, outhouse, old folks house,
House for unwed mothers, halfway homes,
Catacombs, twilight zones,
Looking for techniques, turntables to gramophones.
—The White Stripes, “Rag & Bone”

For my twenty-third birthday, I thought I’d look at how my inventory has changed since I first left home four-and-a-half months ago. To lose items when you change residence every day is inevitable; to accrue new one when you’re halfway around the world is also to be expected. But really, there’s nothing extra that I wish I had brought, except maybe a good pair of walking sandals for the Mediterranean, or an extra pair of light socks.

I lost the chain to lock up my backpack in Cologne, my clothesline in Vienna, a pair of underwear in Sarajevo, and my jacket in Budapest, to theft by some stoner. I’ve largely replaced the essential items: the jacket with a shit-brown sweater from a secondhand store in Kotor, and the underwear with two pairs from a Montenegrin market hall, bringing my total pairs to four (I hope this resolves the general anxiety over my Underwear Situation). I’ve been replacing soap with bars from hotels. I lost my pack towel when I put it in the overhead rack of a bus in Croatia to dry and forgot about it, then lost my hand towel in a similar manner in Laconia, and am now using a pristine white one appropriated from a deserving hotel.

To my clothing, I’ve added my Albania T-shirt, now famous in Athens, and a cheap pair of Albanian swim trunks, along with the sweater and the underwear. I sometimes wish I had a pair of shorts, but those aren’t really feasible for hiking around in the brush, or for Muslim countries where shorts are a Western disgrace.

My camera screen malfunctioned on Ithaca. Luckily I got a model with a viewfinder, so I can still take pictures. However, the first few attempts were marred into unfocused blurs by some setting I had to turn off blindly, so my photographic coverage of the island is a little sparse.

I am on pen number eleven, notebook six, and notepad three. By the time I reached Athens, I had nine paperbacks weighing me down, acquired from used book stores or from the hostel grab bag. Now I only have three: T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and two Greek guide books (thanks Mom!).

Other than Greece, I haven’t used guide books much. I got one for the Western Balkans from two Americans in Sarajevo, and had a map when I was in London and a discount guidebook for Paris, which was definitely worthwhile. For most of the big European metropolises, though, the hostels or tourist agencies pass out maps with all the good sights on them, which are much easier to carry, and I’ve collected a good pile of them along with other brochures. I figure if I collect something it might as well be free maps of towns, museums, and archaeological sites. I mailed most of these home from Greece.

My most treasured belonging is my pair of LOWA boots, which use has darkened from the light gray of the stock item to a metallic coal color spotted with brown. Good footwear is more important than any other item, except maybe water, on any trip anywhere, and is worth any price.

Anyway, so that’s my equipment.

Athens (276)

In Greece you only celebrate your birthday for a few years. After that, the annual holiday to honor the achievement of staying alive for 365 days is held on the sacred day of the saint who shares your name. The Greeks hold a party, exchange gifts, and share out food and drink to passing friends.

It’s strange to think I’ve been away from home for close to five months, and will be even stranger when the Fourth of July comes around, and Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I have to track down Americans for fireworks and turkey. But you get used to anything. I don’t usually regret traveling alone. I enjoy the freedom of solitude, and have seen enough of other travelers to know that the intimate compromise of travel, which is really only a ceremonial and sexual step away from marriage in its loss of privacy and self-reliance, wears down friendship like a gale and renders a companion’s once endearing ticks fulsome and abrasive, and their faults unbearable.

This blog has become kind of cumbersome, especially with that last post aspiring to 7000 words. It doesn’t really matter if no one except my mom reads the walls of unedited text I distribute; I write as much for selfish reasons, to process and inscribe all that I’ve seen, as to inform others of where I am.

In any case, I’ll never forget you, no matter how outcast my wayfaring corpulence becomes; and whether I am contemplating the antiquity of this country or the weirdness of the next, you are ever in my thoughts and my fond remembrance, and I pray your most undeserved companionship will rechristen my eventual return. I miss you all, and I hope the occasional stories of my experience flare a cigarette’s ember in a dark place, a glare which fades other trans-Oceanic fears, and looks towards an eternal and feline curiosity of our ancient origin.