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.

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.

Pictures!

View them at:
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AcMmLVo1aOGLlQ

And a quick update:
I've been in the village of Vitalo on the island of Evia, staying in a guest house/bed and breakfast built for the program by our professor's fabulous cousin. It was a wonderful experience and I will post a blog tonight after dinner back home in Athens. I have not showered for two days after having ridden in a Lambourgini tractor (seriously.) and getting sandy at a beach, so, I'm going to go do that. I love you all. And just so you know, I've fallen head over heels in love with Greece. I can't believe it's only been a week.

In Athens: Blog Two

8/17/2008
2 a.m.
Guesthouse

Words often fail me when I speak, but rarely do words fail me when I write. Tonight is an exception. For once, words do not suffice.

Tonight we dined in the glow of the lit Acropolis. A musician with dark, sad eyes serenaded us in Greek for hours, his voice getting rougher with use as the dishes kept coming. An elegant woman with wispy grey hair danced, stepping purposefully with her arms outstretched and fingers clicking. She sang along softly in Greek. Kneeling before her was a young man, who clapped in time with her soft steps.

I received a lesson on Greece and its burgeoning civil society while sipping a cold, sweet frappe through a straw in Syntagma Square.

A swift-footed stray dog followed us from the café in the square to the restaurant. He ran up and down the group, nearly taking off a passerby’s arm. The man had slinked too close to us, and was obviously a threat, in the dog’s eyes, that warranted a bark and a nip. We were the protector pooch’s pack, Stacey said. We were a strange one. A roaming herd of well-dressed American girls and guys in skirts and slacks, rustling to dinner.

The full moon hung between the evanescent pillars of the Temple of Zeus Panhellenios, completed in 131 A.D. The Parthenon glowed from within nearby, golden in the close, moist night air.

These words are absurdly simple reflections of the experience; just a simple scaffolding that can’t possibly hold the whole beautiful truth. I am blessedly overwhelmed.

8/18/2008
8:09 a.m.
Guesthouse

This morning Athens is the rectangle between the bars of the gate and the wall of the guesthouse. I sat with a cup of weak coffee and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched a sparse-haired old man bob into view and tourists climb out of a taxi. The city was, at last, cut to a bite-sized chunk, and I chewed on it quietly, in between nibbles of the crust of my PB&J.

In Athens: Blog One

8/15/2008
4:15 a.m.
SEA-TAC airport

The moon was setting when I left my apartment for the airport. It was yellow and gauzy, wrapped in dark clouds. The city looked like one of those pop-up postcards, cut sharply against a muted sky.
Seattle was as sleepy as I was. The few places operating seemed almost embarrassed to be up so early, like children trying so hard to be quiet in the wee hours of Christmas morning.
I checked and rechecked my passport and wallet as if they would disappear on me. Panic seized me for a moment. I am going somewhere far away for a long time. Then I patted my bag down once again.

8/15/2008
9 a.m.
A plane to Philadelphia

Arla and I traced the path of my flight last night. Our fingers ran across time zones and borders, from Seattle to Philadelphia and then over the Atlantic Ocean to Greece. To cross the world in a few hours seems unnatural, and the thought unsettles me. When you can go so many places, disappear into so many cities after paying a sum, where is home? What is the word’s definition anymore?

It was only 150 years ago or so when human beings could only travel comfortably for maybe 20 miles. Africa was still the “dark continent” and to go to Europe was cosmopolitan. I don’t think our minds have quite caught up with our technology. Adjusting to foreign places is difficult, and can be traumatic for both the visitor and visited.
And yet globalization has brought the comforts of home to far-flung places, stunting Americans’ growth and domesticating our sense of adventure and the exhilarating terror of being a foreigner. With Pizza Huts in Mexico and Prada in Saudi Arabia, Americans’ comfort zones have expanded, and that sense of vulnerability that forces us to grow and connect to others as simple human beings is muted — drowning in the fruits of the globalized world.

8/16/2008
10 p.m.
The Norwegian Institute of Athens Guesthouse

The air is hot and still, and the city is buzzing. Voices bounce off the buildings around me. A motor scooter’s engine pops below. I am in Athens.

For someplace that, in my mind, had seemed so exotic, it is welcoming and cozy in the dark and solitude of the night. I am sitting on our rooftop terrace, writing by the lone operating flood lamp. My pen’s shadow reaches long across the page.

The moon looks like it was hole punched from the sky. There’s a portion missing though, a fuzzy oval. It’s a lunar eclipse.

We live a block from the Acropolis, none of which I can see, as the monuments are blocked by layers of balconies, patios and roof peaks. There’s someone out on a balcony across the way, watching television. If he or she looked across right now, into the pool of light here on this roof, they’d never guess I wasn’t Greek.

When I first arrived, the city didn’t feel as welcoming as it does now. It’s rough around the edges, urban and baked hard in the Mediterranean sun. The Greek language is completely foreign, and so are we. This gaggle of girls (and two guys) sticks out, with our confident strut and bold laughter. We also travel in a pack, blocking grocery store aisles in our befuddlement and bobbing in a protective circle in the warm, green sea, circling the wagons against a group of persistent, hairy men.

I still can’t quite pronounce yassous, or remember how to say thank you, but my muteness has forced me to understand miscommunication, as strange as that sounds. In Ireland there was no such language barrier. I gave myself away when I opened my mouth, as well as when I walked and gestured. Here, in Greece, I am a child. I feel meek and vulnerable, and my only saving grace is a genuine smile. But I do still struggle on with my badly pronounced hellos. My tongue trips and halts on the syllables. Earlier, we were getting on the tram to go to the beach. Two people in line behind us were speaking Spanish, bits and pieces of which I could understand. I was relieved.

I had expected Athens to be more overtly gritty, and for the dangers to be less subtle and cunning. Sarah got her wallet stolen today during the tram ride. Someone desperate or lazy (or both) lifted it during the 40-minute crush of sweaty bodies. The pickpocket made off with her Euros and dollars, credit cards and ID. And her bags were stuck at Heathrow Airport too.

During that tram ride there was an argument between an older woman and a dark-skinned man. It was in Greek, but the anger was as obvious as if it had been in English. After it had simmered down, another man started to speak. In mellow tones reminiscent of a California surfer dude (but with a heavy Greek accent), he intoned, “Don’t worry, be happy.”
The car laughed. It was a poignant reminder.

The guesthouse was dark and warm when I reentered from my quiet time on the roof. I pulled the heavy door closed and didn’t bother to turn on the lights. Judy tried to plug in her hairdryer into my adapter earlier and blew the wiring. Now our security alarm beeps intermittently and we have no light, though the outlets are working. No one has yet figured out how to get everything back to normal again.

During this, I took a shower in the dark. It was inky black in the bathroom, the only light bleeding through a lofty window. While rinsing my hair in the cold water, I realized that I could get used to anything. My home can be anywhere, because I carry it around with me, like a hermit crab. My sturdy conch shell is on the inside. It is a steadiness, a stillness, a sense that no matter what, everything will be okay. You could call it my essence, or my strength of will. I revolve around it, sometimes awkwardly and off-kilter and resistant to whatever adaptations need to be made. But it is always there, guiding me and centering me, and kicking my butt when it needs to. My home may change, members of my family pass on, but this essence remains. For this, I am grateful. Who knew a cold, dark shower away from home could bring me such an epiphany.

How to reach me and all that jazz

Yahsu! (That's hello in greek, or at least how it's pronounced.)

I leave for the hot and sunny country of Greece on Friday, after just getting back from the hot and sunny country of Mexico and the hot and sunny state of California, so this dreary weather in Seattle is actually a welcome change.

Getting there...

Here's my US Airways flight information for all those concerned relatives and friends:

Leave Seattle on Friday, August 15 at 6:30 am
Arrive in Philadelphia on August 15 at 2:41 pm

(chill for an hour or so)

Leave Philadelphia on August 15 at 4:30 pm
Arrives Athens, Greece on August 16 at 9:25 am

(navigate metro, call nail-biting parents, sleep, do graduate-level research, have a great time)

Leave Athens, Greece on September 21 at 11:30 am

(cry with happiness or grief, it depends)

Arrive Philadelphia on September 21 at 3:45 pm

(curl up in airport seats, eat American food, pine for Greek food)

Leave Philadelphia on September 21 at 5:55 pm
Arrive Seattle (home sweet home) on September 21 at 8:53 pm

(sleep, sleep, sleep, go back to work and school, show off tan)

Once there...

I will not have a cell phone when I first arrive. Please do not try to call me on my cell, because I will be getting a pre-paid phone for use in Greece. I will post the number when I get it.

I will have my computer and will have access to this blog and to e-mail.

I am staying at the Norwegian Guesthouse, located a block south of the Acropolis (ahh, yes). We can receive mail, it just takes a little longer...about 2-3 weeks.
The address is:

Norwegian Institute of Athens
Tsami Karatasou 5
Athens, Greece
GR-117 42

If there is an emergency...

The group will be well taken care of. Fires and earthquakes are a part of life in Greece, and last year students did have to be evacuated from the island of Euboea when fires broke out. We are all bringing cell phones and flashlights wherever we go, and if something happens I will call my family in Burlingame and my grandparents in San Dimas, but only after the group gets to safety. Please do not call the study abroad office at the University of Washington. Chances are they do not have the information necessary. Taso Lagos is the professor on the trip and he will be sure that all the relatives have the proper information. So, just sit tight and breathe. We are all big girls and boys and can handle ourselves.

So, adio, and next time I write I'll be in Greece!