Blog Three and Goodbye

8/31/2008
11:23 a.m.
Ferry to Hydra

We are docked off Poros, offloading passengers. The ship bobs next to a little brick street crowded with cafes selling waffles and ice cream. A clean-cut Cypress waves goodbye as the ferry churns the water cerulean.

The water darkens to teal as we pull away—the same blue as my t-shirt.

A tinny-voiced Greek pop star, poser-Aphrodite shrieks on the ferry’s television. Her hair is big and her clothes are much too small. I put on my iPod and attempt to drown her out with Radiohead.

We continue past neat little houses, the blue windows and doors matching the Greek flags waving above.

There’s a modest-looking whitewashed church—with a ten-foot cross at its entrance that is lined with incandescent light bulbs. All I can think is, “That’s so Greek.”

11:44 a.m.

Men point out the bow-facing windows. There is smoke on the horizon. It is frozen above the water, clinging to the waves.

11:50 a.m.

From this far away the stream of water being expelled from the fireboat looks frozen. The smoke keeps rising and obscuring whatever was on fire. It looks like the waves are burning.

2 p.m.
The island of Hydra

I am so full of images my fingers tingle. I am almost hyperventilating. But once I put my pen to the page, no words come out.

A woman is laughing as she scrambles up the painfully rocky shore.

We followed a cobblestone path past round-cornered houses and forts with barred windows from the 1700s. Everyone is laughing. Judy lets out raucous giggles while on her hands and knees, crawling up the beach. JR hoots quietly next to me, as if he swallowed the overwhelming beauty and he has the hiccups. People bob along the waves, tan-lined specks in a great expanse of brown and blue.

Stacey piles rocks on Isla’s back. It’s a hot rock massage.

I picked my way to the ocean and plunged in. I beat the water with my legs, treading water and bobbing along with the waves.

I turn towards the mountains and see it. There is a fire on the Pellopenese. The smoke is sitting thickly over the land, and I am reminded of the people we have interviewed for our research here. They told us of corruption, of developers burning to be able to build, of cigarettes flicked lazily out of car windows. All of these actions, and more, result in what sits before my eyes, the burning of some of the most beautiful land I have ever seen. Sometimes it seems that all of Greece is burning and no one cares.

9/01/2008
1:55 p.m.
Island of Hydra,
Café

I am watching, as I often do, small events of humanness.

A blonde woman in a short dress and big sunglasses steps unsteadily from a fishing boat, and two leathery seamen point her towards some destination. She weaves away and the men look after her, leering but in an amused, and not altogether unpleasant way.

I sip my Freddo cappuccino. It is cold and sweet, staying on my tongue long after the swallow. That is the mark of a quality Freddo cappuccino, I think. It came in a tall glass, with the foam sitting thickly on top, as it should, and the coffee is the color of burnt sugar. I stir it and take another sip.

I am sitting, looking out to disembarking boats and up to the red-tiled, whitewashed buildings. Flags whip about in the fresh breeze. It is so different than Athens, with its stuffiness and sewage smells, and so different than the village, with the low density of tourists (only us, really) and the fig trees. Here it is difficult to find the locals. I worked my way inland this morning, and away from the tourist hustle and bustle.

There was an old woman yelling at someone in a shop. She hobbled towards her bags and I, trying to be polite, got out of her way and called out “yassous” to her. Her angry façade dropped and she clutched my shoulder, talking to me in rapid Greek. All I could do was smile and say, over and over, Americana, Americana. Her shoulder was so thin between my fingers and my thumb I could grasp the bone. So, there we were, shoulder to shoulder, our arms intertwined in the middle of a cobblestone street. We made quite a pair, a smiling American girl and a stooped, sun-hewn, old Greek woman, chattering to one another in different languages. Finally I squeezed her shoulder and pronounced a final “yassous” (the formal version of “yassou”, which means hello and goodbye, kind of like “Aloha”). I dragged my fingers along the thin cloth of her dress and away, back down the street.

I was lost in remembering. Now my glass has watermarks on it, little white stripes of burst milk bubbles, showing how far the foam has deflated.

Yesterday I was overwhelmed with the beauty of Hydra (Doilies on balcony railings looked too well placed, and rust spots on gates were just too perfectly asymmetrical to be natural.) and so sleep deprived that I would put my pen to paper and nothing would come out. My writer’s block scared me, but I gave the island props for so overwhelming me that I was in fear of losing my gift. After that crisis of faith, I woke up in the middle of the night, homesick.

This morning, however, my faith was restored, and since I forgot my notebook, I resorted to scribbling everything down on a receipt and a stack of napkins from a bakery. This is what I wrote:

I am sitting on a bench, pushed into the farthest corner by the overpowering sun. Though I have browned like a little pastry, the sun and I are acquaintances, and not yet good friends. There is a herd of burros and horses flipping their tails in the sun. Their handlers are smoking and waiting for customers. On Hydra, an island that prohibits cars, these sweaty, miserable-looking animals are the only taxis.

One of the horses makes a break for it, tugging along another that is attached by its reins to the saddle. The fugitives clip clop their way slowly down the cobblestones, and towards freedom. They are soon put back in their places next to a resigned-looking burro. His bowed head seems to say, “I told you so.”

A tourist walks by the bench where I’m sitting, in bright, flowered shorts, and is toting a giant pink butterfly balloon. A toddler clambers up next to me, shoving her pink clogs off her feet. Her mother clucks after her. They are French, but the mother speaks to me in elegantly accented English.

“A thousand times a day she kicks them off,” she says, scooping up the discarded shoes.

The curly-haired girl picks up her foot with chubby hands and lifts it to my eyes. She babbles sadly and her mother shakes her head. She has a splinter just below her big toe. She clambers back off the bench after I utter my sympathies. The mother wrangles her to their table at a nearby café. There is the giant, pink butterfly balloon, strung to the little girl’s stroller.


9/20/2008
8:10 p.m.
Athens, Greece

Athens cries. The rain fills the gutters and strips the dirt from the streets. I am crying too. It is my last day in Greece. Tomorrow I leave and go back home, to Seattle, to school and to work, to my friends and family too. It is bittersweet. Greece has been that for me. Bittersweet, like those sour Gummi candies that I love so much, tart and sugary all at the same time.
There is the pollution and the noise and the insanity of Athens that makes me want to crawl away, back to America, and the honking and yelling, and then the papers and presentations and grades of the study abroad program.

Then there is the old woman, a painter in Plaka, who gently put up my hood and patted my head before I ducked from her tiny shop back into the rainy street. And a man, who was walking down an alley on a cool morning, playing the accordion. He smiled and waved at me. I waved back. And once again, I was in love.