Maxie Goes to Greece

Or, How an Itinerant Ex-Philosopher and Writer-Wannabe Tooled Around the Aegean and What He Saw There.

Chapter 2
Yes, The Water Really Is That Blue

So the day came about seven hours too early. Or, rather, the ferry came about seven hours too early. But perhaps I should back up and explain.

I'm actually here as part of a group -- not a tour package in the usual sense, I hasten to add. I'm with some film students from the University of Oklahoma. To "break the bubble" one of the professors -- Andy Horton -- takes a few dozen students each year to Greece to look at the place, talk to Greek filmmakers, see Greek films, etc. Hangers on are welcome, and through a family connection I grabbed with both hands.

It was they who arranged the travel plans, and they who allowed us only five hours of sleep after the initial trans-Atlantic fling. So I woke at 7:30am to the sound of Andy pacing the hall and shouting -- well, murmuring probably, but dang it was early -- "This is your morning wake-up call." There was a ferry to catch.

Into the shower. Oh yeah. That thing. A closet containing a toilet, a drain and a hose with a nozzle. Now, there's only two ways of approaching such thing while retaining some semblance of [i]savoir faire[/i]: like Indiana Jones -- like an adventure -- or like Inspector Clouseau -- like an intentional farce. Knowing if I tried the former I'd wind up like the latter anyway, I just said "What the hell" and put soap, lather, feet, hose and towel whereever and however the heck they would fit.
When it was all over, I was clean and the bathroom was a wreck. Which is fitting, in some way.

Down to breakfast.

Of course, everyone here knows what a "continental breakfast" in America means: Some canned fruit, a stale donut, orange juice from a carton and some reheated coffee. Served in little styrofoam bowls.

I have seen the Platonic ideal from which us Yanks have derived our feeble and shadowy copy.

I have seen hard boiled eggs and cold salami and ham and cheese; I have tasted fresh bread withbutter and honey and cream cheese and yogurt; I have had fresh fruit -- peaches and apples and kiwis -- and jellyrolls. Orange juice and coffee. Spread on linen table cloths in a vaulting atrium in an enclosed courtyard.

There's no better place to meet your new companions either. You cannot ask for the bread without asking your table-mate's name, and giving yours in return. And then you're urging the food on each other: "Is that yogurt or cream cheese?" "Try the salami." "Have you had the jelly roll?" Outside, the air was cool and a brisk breeze had sprung up, but the sun was strong.

So was the water. It was a honking big ferry that took us out to Kea, about thirty minutes around a deserted island -- used by the junta as a prison island, we were told -- and across the straits into a deep cove ringed on three sides by steep hills. The harbor water wasn't just green, but electric green, like aftershave. But out in the straits it turned blue. Not a pretty blue or a painterly blue, but a deep, savage and sinewy blue. A blue that catches and imprisons the light, intensifying it before throwing it back out. A jewelled and translucent blue. God's idea of blue.

The island of Kea is basically a giant hill rising out of the ocean, with very steep sides. Amazing that anything could perch there, but all around that cove is a town, houses stacked up madly like children's blocks. A street, wide enough to accomodate two lanes, runs around the bay between the town and water, but inside the village it is narrow and twisting alleys and staircases. The town is built like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, with houses put wherever they will fit -- on top of each other, or squeezed under another's alcove. Staircases intertwine as the spring up from different alleys and lead to different front doors, but diving and twisting around each other in the middle, and a stair that starts off broad and straight at the bottom can suddenly narrow and twist sharply into a vicious spiral before it reaches the top. Doors and windows and verandas loom from vertiginous heights.

A group of us ate lunch at one of the half-dozen open air cafes, sharing dishes of Greek salad (no lettuce, just tomatoes and cucumbers and onions and peppers, with parsley and olive oil and one huge bloc of feta cheese); tadzhiki (sp?) (yogurt and garlic and cucumber); and cold octopus in vinegar. Octopus, if you've never had it, stands to calamari as beef does to chicken -- it's denser and intenser, coming in large meaty chunks. Afterwards, some went to the beach, but I lingered at the internet cafe (one computer, all of the software in Greek). I didn't want to swim on a full stomach. Besides, we have 2 weeks.

This being a jaunt for film students, each evening a film gets shown. The first night's offering was "Never On a Sunday," by Jules Dassin, and it put everyone to sleep. Not that it was the fault of the film -- it was pleasant and entertaining romantic comedy about an American intellectual traveling in Greece, who tries to "educate" a local prostitute into abandoning her trade -- but we were all so zonked by that point that even "Raiders of the Lost Ark" would probably have seen us dozing.

But we were certainly awake for the meal that followed. By bus up a steep and winding road -- one of those tracks where the wheels are only inches from a precipace -- to the main village, where cars and buses were gridlocked inside the main avenue, causing Nikos (our driver) to start yelling and gesturing in a way that left us in no doubt about the meaning of the words. (Wish I had been taking notes.) We had to dismount and climb the rest of the way to the restaurant -- run by Nikos' son; it's a very small island -- where we had a rolling feast of salad and tadzhiki and bread and marinated pork and Greek meatballs and goat meat with french fries, washed down with carafes of white and red wine. It was served al fresco in the fading twilight, and across the plaza children and parents and teachers had their own banquet, celebrating the end of the school year.

Back down in the port, some of us went back to a cafe -- they usually stay open as long as customers are about -- and drank beer and Greek coffee and talked to an islander who had been born in California and moved to Kea when he was ten (though he went back every other Christmas to visit his mother). Some interesting observations about drinking ages. In Greece, there is no drinking age, and people as young as thirteen will start drinking. Very important, that, he said, for it means that they can ease into it, and under the guidance of their elders. In America, by contrast, underage drinking is furtive, and explodes at the "magic age" in a way that leads at best to binge drinking and at worst to the quick onset of alcoholism.

On the other hand, in Greece you are required to serve two years in the Army.

To bed, shortly afterwards.

Tomorrow: On the Beach.
More Scenes of Kea
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