Blog Three

8/20/2008
2:30 p.m.
The island of Aegina

I am sitting underneath an olive tree, watching two snails lounge on a crumbling stucco wall. I am wondering how I fell in love with Greece so fast.
A man rumbles by me on a silver scooter. It was his third time around the block.

8/22/2008
1:03 p.m.
A bus from Athens to the island of Evia and the village of Vitola

The old man who sat next to me on the bus looked like a happy fish. He had smiling eyes and big lips. He spoke no English, and I speak little Greek, but we attempted communication anyway. We shared chuckles at bumps and yawns. His laughs were deep and rumbling, locked away in his chest, and mine sounded tinny and loud, and so American.
Before he got off the bus he wiped his face with his hand, pulling his jowls smooth and running his fingers through his thin hair. It looked like he had plowed it with his comb that morning; the rows of strands were so neatly spaced. He wore his exhaustion gracefully.
“Yeassus,” he said to me. His eyes were warm, and then he looked away and stepped off the bus.

8/22/2008
12:20 a.m.
Evia music festival

A man hugs his grandfather from behind, clutching him to his chest. He puts his cheek to the old man’s and whispers in his ear, running his hands up and down the man’s sides affectionately. He does this in the same way a young girl would brush her favorite horse’s flanks — with powerful love. The younger man squeezes the older one and cups his face, lifting the wrinkled cheeks and feeling the leathered skin under his palms. He repeats the process for several minutes and then releases his stoop and continues down the table. The old man blinks.

My heart is breaking at this unabashed love. I miss you all.

8/23/2008
5:45 p.m.
Taso’s cousin’s bed and breakfast
Vitola, the island of Evia

I drift in and out of sleep to the spitting of motorbikes and the singing of little girls.

Greece is a country of opposites.

There was a road in Psiri, a neighborhood of Athens, lined with cars cruising for prostitutes. One, who looked like she may have been from Southeast Asia, was trussed up in leather straps painted silver. Around the corner, a man slipped a needle into his arm and pushed the plunger. Meters beyond this were strings of incandescent lights, and people eating and drinking.

A few days after, we were met at the bus stop in Evia by our professor's cousin, an exuberant woman of perhaps forty with beautiful long dark hair and an incredible sense of hospitality. She introduced herself with happy kisses, one on each cheek, and big hugs that had love practically rolling off of them. She cooked for us, and continues to prepare us banquets, and shoos us from the kitchen when we help her clean up.

Last night we danced at the village’s music festival, some of us danced more awkwardly than others. No one seemed to mind. A dark, old man with a white mustache that stretched cheek-to-cheek smiled at his granddaughter as she climbed into the chair next to him. We drank locally made white wine from plastic water bottles and pulled at whole chickens.

We left just when the Greeks were getting started. We bounced along home in the back of a pickup truck, weary and full of the experience.

This morning we went to a beach, which is so secluded it is only accessible by 4-wheel-drive vehicle. In our case, it was a Lamborghini tractor with a trailer hitched to it. (No joke. It said "Lamborghini" on the hood.) We hopped along its rusty floor on our bottoms and squealed when our driver hit rocks and dips. He stopped the tractor for us to take pictures and pluck figs from the trees. The water at the beach was so clear that the bottom looked a lot closer than it was.

Tonight we went to the local bar, which is a stone’s throw from the town square, which is next to the market, which is a lane away from the cousin’s house. She built the bed and breakfast when Taso Lagos, our professor, first started the program, and she built it for the program’s use as well as for visitors. It was spacious and warm and beautiful.

At the bar, the bartender rationed out free drinks, while some of us played pool with the local boys, their hair slicked into mohawks. I sipped a drink and watched a 13-year-old light up a cigarette. He blew smoke rings over the table, his lips puckered into a look of suave indifference, as if purse strings had pulled them together.

Our professor’s cousin yelled at us in Greek to shoo us out of the kitchen when we were drying the night’s dishes or putting things away. She knows that we can’t understand her and tried to scare us out of helping by chattering at us in Greek. We knew she wasn’t so scary. She was a butcher, however, and very good with a big knife for such a petite woman. I could hear the bang, bang, bang upstairs and would descend to find her chopping up a rack of ribs, still glistening and bloody.

I helped her in the kitchen on the first night, drying dishes and rinsing pans so big that I could have been roasted in them. Once we were done and the industrial-sized kitchen looked well-kempt again, she gently moved me away from the sink. She smiled and hugged me as she took my place, and kissed my shoulder with a loud smack. She guffawed as I kissed her back.

“Morakeemu” she called me. It means “my love”. Then she learned my name. “Er-ee-nn,” she said, pronouncing it in her own way.

There is so much warmth here, and such love. Standing on the terrace of the house, my heart broke in my chest, dripping down through my ribs and into the pit of my stomach, as rain would into a pot — my little pan of grief.

The view was beautiful, with red-roofed houses squatting on the hills. A woman sat on another rooftop, quietly preparing figs for drying.

Evangelisa (as close as I can come to pronouncing it), me and my buddy Nicole.

The view.

8/25/2008
12 p.m.
Bus from Vitola, Evia to Athens

The sounds are what stay with me.

It was windy and the graveyard was singing. Each grave has a windowed cabinet where icons and pictures of the deceased are kept, along with glass cleaner so visitors can keep the enclosures clean. The wind was whistling through the cemetery and the glass panes rang in their tracks.

At the music festival a generator was humming near the entrance, powering the drooping strings of bare bulbs that crisscrossed the yard. That night we left early, after dancing to music performed by a local celebrity. Her picture was pasted all along our bus route.

At about four a.m. we heard the villagers come home, and at about six a.m. we heard them get up. American rap music blared in front of our house, rolling between songs.

People yell at each other at all hours, and at first you might think they are angry or arguing, but that’s just how Greek sounds. It is an emotional language. People chatter and chirp and widen their eyes and gesture wildly. It threw me for a loop during my first days here, when I thought all Greeks were angry. Now I have realized that you can’t really assume anything here, or any place else for that matter. Our program's assistant director, Stacey, told me that I've picked up the wild gesturing. When you are in Greece, do as the Greeks do.

Yassous.