Morning Walks

I still wake up well before daylight. No one here stirs much before 7 or 8, so I make coffee and piddle at the keyboard or read from Homer until its light enough to walk or take pictures. For a photographer this place is a target-rich environment.

The old women are out first, doing laundry or putzing in their gardens. The walk ways and alleys of the village are so narrow and twisted, it’s often hard to tell when you’ve gone from a common access lane, to someone’s private outdoor living space, especially when you are exploring. It is not uncommon for me to look up and notice a pair of eyes watching me from behind a bush. I try to smile, nod, and remind myself that the word for ‘squid’ and ‘good morning’ can sound dangerously similar, especially when they come from an Anglo-Cracker mouth. Once they figure out that my Greek is pretty much limited to just that, they usually just offer me whatever kind of fruit or vegetable that happens to be at hand and send me on my way with a polite “Kalimera.”
 

photo by Newell

One morning I had collected so much stuff I’d run out of hands to carry it all. When I indicated I could carry no more, the man gestured to my hat which he filled with peaches. When the hat was full, he went into the house and brought out a plastic grocery bag for the eggs, apricots, cucumber, and squash. I came home looking like a pack mule.

Caper bushes and fig trees grow wild here. Kathy calls them ‘Mission Figs.'  They are bigger and darker than ours and if they had a shinier skin, they could almost pass for small eggplant. We met another couple the other evening, who were out picking feral figs and raw capers. The woman explained to Kathy, in broken English, how to identify and pickle capers for table use. (We had eaten some on our salad in Athens.) Kathy is now hot to try it herself.

Birthday Party

We ran out of e-minutes, but Kathy bought more today, so you’ll get two postcards on this stamp. She’s also sending more pictures of Vourliotes, and a video of the fire jumping. As to Connie’s query about peanut butter, thanks, but I’ve got an unopened jar that I brought in my suitcase. I never leave the country without peanut butter or a fishing pole. I’ve been 13 days without peanut butter or television, and still have no ill effects to report from it, as yet. What I have missed most, ironically, has been the rain. It never rains here.We went to a birthday party for one of Kathy’s friends at a beach side café in Avlakia today. Kathy’s carpenter and his brother had been spear fishing and brought octopus and two varieties of fish I didn’t recognize and couldn’t pronounce. The restaurant cooked it. Lunch fare was sautéed octopus, shrimp pasta, and fried minnows for appetizer, Greek Salad and bread, Mediterranean Mystery Fish as the entre’, and ice cream birthday cake for dessert. They washed all of that down with liberal amounts of local white wine, rose’, and Ouzo. I drove Kathy back up the mountain. Her mantra all the way home was to wish that all of you could have been there.

Village Festival

When we went out for our evening walk, just before dusk, we noticed an unusual amount of activity in the village. Everyone was dressed nicely, and we could hear Greek music coming from a couple of streets above us. When we got up to where the music was coming from, we noticed that someone had set up a raised stage with about a hundred white plastic lawn chairs facing it. There were a couple of tables set up with food on them, and men hovering over an outdoor barbeque grill cooking souflaki (meat shish-kabobs).

A neighbor told us that tomorrow would be a Saints’ Day for St. John of the Fire, but that tonight the village traditionally celebrated a festival that involved feasting, dancing, and fire. His English was not too good, so we didn’t understand everything that was going on, but food was passed out to everyone, and the “Vourliotes Players” did some kind of reenactment skit in period costume. Young men and women in traditional Greek garb, did folk dances, and sang songs original to Samos. The grand finale, we were told, involves fire jumping.

Three small bond fires were built of these straw and grain sheaves that people have had hanging over their doors, then the neighborhood children lined up to start jumping over the flames. Very small children were helped or carried over the fire by their parents. (Don’t try this back home in the States) This wasn’t like some Don Ho luau they put on for the tourists. These were all local folks. When the fires began to dwindle, someone piled up more straw, squirted it with charcoal lighter fluid, and the kids went back to their jumping. The Greeks do not let themselves get too bogged down with health and safety issues when they’ve come to have a good time. As I’m typing this, I can hear people in small groups, walking through the streets, singing.

  Video by Skaggs

The Village

As we all know, few things can be more boring than pictures of, and endless stories about, someone else’s summer vacation, so I had resolved to spare you the gushing superlatives to which vacationing travelers are often prone. That said,… if this installment gets too windy, you know which icon to hit.

 



 


Vourliotes is a 600 yr. old Village that oozes the kind of authentic Old World Charm for which even the Greeks have become nostalgic.  The European tourists who come to Samos, usually stay along the coast and come up here for day trips. Most of them drive, but the Germans, Austrians, and the Dutch, like to hoof it up, still wet from the beach. Samians who’ve relocated to Athens, or expat Greeks who’ve moved to Australia or the U.S. for employment, like to come back here to visit the old folks, and recharge their cultural batteries. Americans are rare.

 

The village is pretty much a self contained unit, with a little over 400 year-round residents, most of whom do not own cars and rarely leave. There is a bus down the mountain once a week, and a man with a truck that brings fish up the mountain a couple times a week. Yesterday I saw a truck full of live caged chickens. You can buy local olive oil, wine, honey etc. packaged in generic or recycled containers that was made by someone’s uncle, brother, or cousin. There is a doctor’s office on the town square that’s only open on Tuesday and Thursday mornings; and there are lots of churches, tavernas, restaurants, cafés, and mini markets. The bakery is fifty steps from our house, and you can smell it in the morning. The baker opens at 8:00 A.M., and closes about mid-day. Most of his inventory is gone by 8:30.  Everything is within easy walking distance of everything.  Fruit trees, grapevines, and flowers sprout from cracks in the masonry walls and courtyard pavers.  If you express interest in someone’s fruit tree but show some shyness about picking it, they will bring it to you.  The people are extremely open and good natured.


Our Street, 3/20/2011

Tourism, agriculture, building repair, and service jobs, account for the most of the industry here. Shops that do not cater directly to the tourists are closed for a couple of hours during the mid-day, and the streets are all but empty till the sun starts to go back down. Most people do not eat their evening meal until well after dark.  Foot traffic in the streets is heaviest between dusk till dark, but it doesn’t really begin to fall off till about 9 or 10 at night. Crime is rare and many people leave their doors open until they go to bed.



Settling In

Yesterday morning was spent hardware shopping in Karlovasi. The afternoon was spent watching the rest of Kathy’s furniture arrive. Streets in the village were not laid out to accommodate automobile traffic. They resemble a spider web maze of narrow alleys with hairpin turns, steep inclines, and masonry stair steps that encroach, willy-nilly, from anywhere. To complicate things further, they have no qualms here, about placing utility poles right in the middle of an intersection. It’s the kind of place where you do not want to drive a furniture delivery truck for a living.

photo by Newell

Last night was the big soccer game between Greece and Germany. Intense national rivalries that still linger from the Second World War that render the event a local equivalent of something between Super Sunday and the Olympics, with the Greek team being 9 to 1 underdogs. Toward evening, cafés and restaurants were setting up outdoor televisions and folding chairs. We left early, but when Greece scored a goal, it sounded like New Year’s Eve, complete with cherry bombs. The final score, I was told this morning, was 2 to 4, Germany’s favor. The mood in the streets today, is somber.

Arrival

Spent 12 hr. in Pittsburg, (the plane was called back for a fuel filter malfunction light) and missed our connections, but got a free night and dinner in the Athens Airport Hotel. (My wife fixed everything.)  The rehab work on Kathy’s little 200 yr. old, two-story townhouse is still not finished, but the work they’ve done is very nice, even better than she’d hoped for.  (Pictures to follow, of course)

Yesterday, Kathy patched me through to wish my father a Happy Birthday from her favorite seaside café in Agios Konstantios.  He was surprised and glad to hear from us. I sat and talked to Mac, admiring the mountains of Turkey rising up from the mist of the Aegean Sea, and Kathy sampled a glass of Mythos beer and relaxed.  We moved on to her favorite seaside restaurant for Dinner. Looking around the restaurant, I noticed that Bill Clinton had been there. Mugging for someone’s camera, he had been immortalized with his arms around two of the waitresses. Hillary was not in the picture.



Kathy's brand new kitchen

I bought breakfast in the village bakery today, then rode to Karlovasi with Kathy. I snored in the car, while she furniture shopped, and bought house wares.  We ate dinner in the village tonight at a four-star restaurant.  We had appetizers, salad, entrees, and a carafe of local white wine from the barrel. The bill, with the tip, came to twenty two Euros.  We picked peaches, apricots, kiwi fruit, and flowers on our walk home, then had chocolate covered baklava from the bakery for dessert.  Kathy is upstairs in her new bed with a cheesy old movie blaring from her laptop computer.  It’s her turn to snore.

 

 

 

The Wedding

At the end of our summer in our new home in Vourliotes we had a chance to be part of a wedding in the town square. After the ceremony local dancers dressed in traditional Samian dress entertained the wedding party.

 

Video by Skaggs