Curtain Calls

Curtain Call: Ride to the Airport

A good entertainer knows when to get off the stage, and I had really meant to,  but there is still an episode or two left to do yet.

A late dinner party at Christos'

There was a farewell dinner party for us up at Christos', and while we had planned to make an early night of it, we didn't.  There may have been people from the party still sitting at the table as we were waking up to leave, I don't know.  The morning was unusually cool, crisp, and clear.  As we headed down the mountain, the stars were still out and the sky was just showing a faint pink glow.  A string of lights between the sea and the mountains indicated the shore line of Turkey in the distance.
 

Giannis was waiting  in Kokkari to drive us to the airport and I suspected that it had been a late night for him too.  There wasn't any traffic on the road, but his mood seemed a little too expansive for that hour of the morning.  He alternatively hummed a tune that was still playing in his head from the night before, and enlightened us on the historical derivation of place names for settlements on Samos and "Tourkai" (Turkey) that still lingered from Ottoman times.  I tried not to notice the 100 kph that was registering on the speedometer, after all it was still his car, but when he braked for a cat in on a blind curve, I was glad that in our own haste, we'd skipped our customary pot of coffee that morning.

 

Curtain Call: Baked Goods

Inside the neighborhood bakery

 

The trip back was brutal, twenty five hours of sleep deprivation punctuated with moments of sheer panic as we sweated for an hour and a half to get past molasses paced TSA attendants in Philadelphia, to make a tight connecting flight to Jacksonville.  The capper came just inches from the finish line, when a chatty customs agent leveled a saccharine smile at me and asked if I was bringing anything back anything "to eat" in my carryon bag.  Kathy, who knows how I hate to buy anything in airports, was aware that I had stocked up on breakfast pastries and cheese pies from Nikos, the village baker the day before, and that this could be a fly or die moment for us if I faltered.  Kathy intervened by handing the man our declaration cards and  added warmly, "It's all right here, and thank you so much for everything!"

photos by Newell

I woke up at 4:00 AM this morning, right back here in Mayport just like I have done thousands of times before, but with the oddest sensation that the whole trip had all just been some kind of weird hangover dream; but I'm sitting at the keyboard drinking American coffee and munching on an ever so slightly stale cheese pie thinking, "this really ain't too bad."

Nikos, the village baker

 

The Blog

This year’s trip has been a delightful adventure, and the experience has far exceeded any of the expectations I had of what retirement would be like; but looking back the real odyssey has not been in living this adventure, but in documenting it.  I had been aware of things like computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet for some time, the people around me were using them every hour; but initially I had come to regard them as clever techno gadgetry for cutting edge consumers with the resources to buy, and the leisure time to play with them.  I was still living with a rotary telephone in the bedroom.

Just before last year’s trip my father’s health took a turn for the worse.  Suddenly I had grave reservations about pulling the trigger on, what for me was, an extravagant three week vacation which had been in the elaborate planning stages for the best part of a year.  My father was a man who loved a well turned phrase and had a great sense of humor; he was also an endlessly positive man who wanted to see me make the trip.  I knew that with satellites and cell phones I could talk directly to him several times a week and monitor his situation.  My bargain to myself at the time was that I would email him short entertaining accounts of where we were, what we were doing, and when possible, attach digital pictures to the text.  It would be an instantly deliverable version of the postcards people used to send in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and I knew he would enjoy them.  An unanticipated boon to the process was that I could get 24 hr. feedback from them as well, so I began to attach a regular group of family members and friends to the address headings.

A couple of weeks into this year’s trip Kathy set me up a blog site from which to publish “Postcards from Samos.”  The initial effect was that I all but stopped hearing from the folks back home.  I didn’t know if they just didn’t know how to access the stories from the link, or if they were just no longer responding to them.  When the postman comes only once a day, I don’t sweat the mail, but when email could come any minute of the day, I catch myself checking it more often than I do my watch, which is an amazing transformation from when I would go for months at a time without looking at it.   I used to spend more time deleting emails than I did reading them. 

The second thing I noticed was that “Postcards” was being read by more people globally, than by the folks back home for whom it was being written.  There were more people in Greece alone reading the blog on a daily basis, than there were in the U.S., with additional hits coming from Russia, Turkey, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, the U.K., Hong Kong, Iraq, Estonia, Latvia, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland, Australia, and South Africa.  The compulsion went from checking the email to tracking blog hits from the time of a posting to see how it was being followed from country to country as the Earth turned and the time zones changed.  It has been fun and I have enjoyed writing the stories, but I think it’s time to give it a rest, at least until next year.  When I step onto that plane tomorrow, I’ll be ready to get back home to Mayport.

 

Adio

Leg of Lamb

Like the obligatory snap shots tourists to Egypt have taken of themselves standing in front of the sphinx, or astride a camel in front of the pyramids, most travelers have an agenda.  Mine was to cook a leg of lamb on the grill before we left, a Greek thing, in the finest traditions of Homer’s Epic Heroes and Zorba, it was still an unchecked box on my “to do” list and we were into the last week of the trip.

I had acquired a meat thermometer, made inquiries as to which woods might be suitable to the task, and had pretested the grill on less ambitious cuts of meat, but the most consistent advice I kept getting from the locals was to forget it, “Your grill is too small…it could take four hours or more…. it is too difficult a thing to cook outside of an oven….after smelling it cook on the grill all day, you won’t want to eat it….etc.”  Not even the butchers were too encouraging, they advised chicken, pork, or steak, but a when a leg of lamb for the grill was mentioned, it was usually met with a non committal shrug.  I’m a pro on the grill, an ace on the smoker, but like a field goal kicker during the closing minutes of the game who looks up to see the opposing coach call a time out, I was getting performance anxiety.



Collecting wild rosemary

Despite the expert odds makers’ gloomy predictions, I bought a leg of lamb in Vathi and spent the next day picking rosemary, gathering dry branches of olive wood, collecting lemons, and grinding garlic with a mortar and a pestle.  Kathy started asking if I wouldn’t like to invite company over for a dinner party and share the lamb with a few friends.  I drug my heels until she got the message, I was not anxious to be in the spotlight if this thing went badly.

Sunday came, the fire was built, and the project went off without a hitch.  I concocted an herbal, lemon, olive oil, marinade and basting solution for the lamb, and Kathy sliced up some fresh tomatoes, put some our neighbor’s golf ball sized onions on bamboo skewers, and cut up some zucchini for the grill. The meal wasn’t good, it was spectacular, end zone dancing delicious.  I wish now that I’d cooked for the whole village, but I’d hedged my bets.  If I wanted to be carried off the field on the shoulders of appreciative dinner guests, I would have  to wait.  As they say in Gator Football…..”Next year.”

 

photos by Newell and Skaggs

Marble Musings

 

There was a formal service for Vagelis’ parents in the cemetery chapel this morning.  The hand full of attendees who were there for the beginning of the service, had swelled to about 50 by the services’ conclusion almost two hours later.  There was an outdoor reception following the service with a serving table that bore bread, cake, orange juice, Metaxa Brandy, and cups of a wheat meal dish called Kolyva that is the traditional accompaniment for any ceremony commemorating departed souls.

The chapel will hold 20-25 people, so as people filed in I eased myself outside to where there was a cluster of men smoking and exchanging an occasional brief comment to one another.  During the course of the service I had plenty of time to muse idly on the marble crypts, the consistent thickness of their milled slabs, the unique marbling patterns in the raw stone, the differences in the shapes of their crosses, and how the marble flower vases had once been carefully turned on a lathe.  I also noticed disturbed places in the paved walkways between the graves that seem to have been repaired with broken sections of what had once been nicely milled recycled marble.

Thinking back, I remember noticing some buildings around the village with door thresholds, porches, and step facings of a similar marble that did not bear the usual wear marks you would expect to find in buildings of their age.

photos by Newell

I stopped by the bakery after the service, then headed home to enjoy the cool respite of the two foot thick stone walls and tiled floors of our newly renovated 200 year old house.  Settling down to the keyboard, I happened to notice the wide polished slabs of our newly installed marble window sills, and wondered……… well, part of me would like to know.

 

Food, the International Language

The lines between what are public and private venues are a little fuzzy here, but our standing in the community has moved from public acceptance to a more private one.  We were recently included in an invitation to a family dinner party hosted in the village, and later, approached by Effie while we were up at the restaurant, and asked if she could drop by some morning to see the house.  We of course, assented to both offers immediately.

Like Mayport, most people in the village are related, if not by blood, then by marriage, and if not by marriage, then by proxy.  Our house originally belonged to Dimitris’ cousin, who had inherited it from Demetris’ grandfather, and since we now occupy an ancestral home with the family’s blessing, that makes us some kind of adoptive kin by proxy.  The cousin’s niece Teta, and her mother Sonya, who speaks no English at all, had planned a big family dinner party and invited us.  At times the table looked and sounded like it could have been the set from a movie.  Whatever table talk was lost in translation, was more than compensated for by the food which included: stuffed lamb, goat cheese, pasta, beans, greens, escargot, chick pea balls, bread, potato salad, sweet wine, Ouzo, ice cream and Coca-Cola, which someone called, “The Greek National Drink.”

For Effie’s visit we decided to throw together a little last minute coffee brunch.  Effie speaks little more English than we speak Greek, but taking our cues from Sonya, we figured that a little food could go a long way in bridging the language barrier, and so it did.   I scrambled down to the bakery and picked up some cookies, croissants, and phyllo dough pastries, to serve with fruit and coffee.  Effie arrived with a granddaughter in tow and a dish of homemade marmalade; and after a necessarily brief tour of our 325 sq. ft. house, we sat down for a bite to eat and about an hour’s worth of conversation that included a recipe for dolmades, and a practical demonstration as to how they are properly rolled.   It was a nice party.

 

photos by Newell

 

The Exumation

 

Barbara Tzanenis and her husband Vagelis own a little store just steps from the house that I will usually pass several times during a single day.  It is a handy place to pick up fruit, vegetables, cheese, wine, yogurt, soap, or olive oil.  As often as not, I find things to purchase there as an excuse for a short visit or to ask about some curious custom or unfamiliar observance that I have just encountered.
 Yesterday word came to us that the customary 5 yr. burial period had just elapsed for Vagelis’ parents, who had died within 6 mo. of each other; and it was now time for their bones to exhumed and transferred to the ossuary.  Would we like to see it?  We had no cultural touchstone for this experience, did not know what to expect, and in light of our own cultural taboos, had strong reservations at the prospect of attending.  What should we wear, how should we act, what kind of ceremony will they have, etc. etc.?  Dimitris told us, “Just wear what you’ve got on.  I’m going up to the cemetery to put flowers on my Grandmother’s grave.  Follow us up there and just be yourselves.”

 

By the time we arrived, the heavy work had already been done. There were two spades, a forked agricultural pick ax in the back of Vagelis’ puckup truck.  There were also and four or five black plastic garbage bags which I later learned, held what remained of the coffins.  Vagelis and another man were sitting in the shade of a fig tree, mopping sweat from their faces.  Marble slabs from the dismantled crypts were stacked off to the side, the graves had been filled back in, and the nicely made polished metal box, that would hold the combined bones of Vagelis’ parents, was sitting on the marble crypt of a neighboring gravesite.

There was some conversation between Dimitris and Vagelis that was conducted entirely in Greek, but nothing more.   No ceremony, no mourners, nothing, just Vagelis and a helper or “crow,” whose profession it is to assist family members in rendering this service for a relative who has passed on.  The bones, as is the custom here, had been washed in a solution of vinegar and water and were lying in a basket, drying in the shade of the building that would soon be their next resting place.  The cemetery plots would be returned for the communal use of the village, and the process would continue as it has for generations.

 

“Removing what’s left of the clothes,” we were later told, “is the hardest part.  They still hold so many memories.”  

photo by Newell

 

Guests of the House

We received word several nights ago that Christo and his mother Effie would enjoy having us and another Greek American family, Susan, Dimitris, and their daughter Popie, up to their Restaurant for dinner as guests of the house.  We were shocked, flattered, and excited at the prospect.  They knew that Kathy and I love seafood, so they wanted to give us a taste of it from a local perspective.  Effie had not only prepared and served the meal, she sat down with us to eat, leaving  Christo to attend the restaurant’s other guests by himself.


The food was remarkable.  We had fried sardines, Greek Salad with Effie’s own pickled capers, sautéed octopus, shrimp and rice, with the rice steamed in shrimp water, pickled sardines, red and white wines, bakery bread for sopping octopus sauce, and for dessert, Neapolitan ice cream dressed with some fruit preserves Effie had made herself.  Ice cream here is a pricy treat, so after everyone at our table had been served, she called her grandchildren over to the table to polish off the remainders.  During the whole meal, Efi kept a sharp eye on my plate and made sure it got refilled before I could empty it.  I think I was the only adult at the table offered seconds on even the ice cream; and naturally reluctant to cause any breach of etiquette, I could not refuse.


Christo has a little outdoor sound system that pipes in traditional Greek music to set the mood for his dinner guests.  With the wine glasses liberally recharged and the meal winding down.  Effie began to sing along with some of her favorite songs.  At some point the woman who sells Christo vegetables from her garden, sat down at our table, ordered a Gyro Sandwich, French Fries, and a Coke, and began to sing too.  Eventually, anyone at the table familiar with the music was singing along, in some cases helping each other with the words.  It was a remarkable night, and an experience we’ll never forget. 

 

photos by Newell

 

The Road to Karlovasi

photos by Newell

There are two commercial towns on the island, Samos Town and Karlovasi.  They both sit on the north coast of the island with Samos Town at the east end and Karlovasi to toward the west, with Vourliotes perched at roughly the midway point, overlooking the road that connects them.  On the map that road is depicted with a heavy read line, indicating that it is one of the Island’s main thoroughfares.  Karlovasi is slightly closer and has a more of an industrial, no-nonsense feel to it.  We make the trip several times a week, or whenever we have to shop for anything more than groceries.  We generally prefer it to Samos Town, except for the road.

There is a section of that road just beyond Agios Konstantinos, that is still marked with a 60 kph speed limit sign, but I have only once ever seen a traffic cop on the entire island, and speed limits, like bottled water, are for the tourists.   That section has actually been improved and even widened in some places since the first time I drove it almost twenty years ago, but it’s still an ugly place to meet a wide oncoming truck, especially if there is an impatient Greek driver who is tailgating you for doing only  the speed limit.  In the worst places there is only a short crenellated concrete curb between a distracted driver and a 30 ft. plunge into the rocks and the sea directly below. 

Whenever we make the trip I am reminded of Lady Macbeth’s terse imperative to her wavering husband, “Screw your courage to the sticking place, and we will not fail.”  Eventually you get used to it.

Video  by Alec Newell and Kathy Skaggs

Table Fare

If I were a Travel Channel food guru who hosted globe hopping, gastro safaris for a living, this place would be a no brainer for a target destination. The restaurants here are small.  They serve fresh local fare, expertly prepared and attractively presented in open air settings that Anthony Bourdain’s film crew would kill for.  The prices are very reasonable with a complimentary dessert or a glass of free sweet wine that is usually served after the check is called for.  Tipping, while not unheard of, is not expected, and certainly not the obligatory 10 to 20% waiters in the U.S. have come to expect.  A Euro or two, on a big dinner for four people with drinks, or a little pocket change on the table, is more than adequate.  Most wines served are of a local variety or “barrel wines” served in a carafe’, your choices are red or white.  The water here is excellent, served in a sweaty glass pitcher which your waiter just filled from a continuous free flow, spring fed, outdoor fountain.  Bottled water is for tourists.

There is very little prepackaged or processed food here, so food preparation is more labor intensive, but you are compensated in taste and quality.  All of the meat, poultry, eggs, wine, oil, honey, fruits and vegetables are produced and marketed locally in small shops, from roadside stands or out of covered pickup trucks.  Your meat is cut to order in immaculate butcher shops by the man waiting on you.  Cooking herbs like rosemary and oregano grow like weeds along the side of the road.  Local eggs might sometimes need a little cleaning, but the yokes are the color of cheddar cheese, and the whites stick up half an inch in the pan.  You don’t need to be a television food critic to tell the difference in taste between a garden grown tomato and the ones sold in supermarket chains back home.  We have a nice can opener we brought from home last year that has never been used.

Bourdain and his crew did visit the Greek Islands a couple of years ago, but his tepid attitude toward the food and culture were not lost on his audience.  The restaurants and cafés in coastal towns like Kokkari and Pithagorio depend heavily on a brisk tourist trade to stay healthy, but with the current economy tourism has fallen off, and things are not good.  I would like to see them survive and prosper; and a little good publicity would not hurt, but do I really need to see Vourliotes featured in the next episode of “No Reservations?”  There is a biblical admonition about “hiding (one’s) light under a bushel,” that said, the food here is great, just keep it under your hat.

  

photos by Newell

Terra Incognita

 

photo by Newell

 

 

photo by Newell

Most road maps of Samos have three color coded road designations.  A heavy red line is the designation for major transportation routes, these roads are challenging for even seasoned drivers.  Fine red lines designate secondary roads which are poorly paved, cliff hanging donkey trails, not for the faint of heart.  Fine yellow lines, indicate unpaved jeep trails.  On secondary roads safety improvements for night driving are limited to a little white paint slopped onto tree trunks or jutting rocks.  A winding mountain road with a sheer rock face on one side, and no guard rail on the other, could have a little ridge of earth mounded up along the outside lane to indicate some erosion problems that the Greek NTSB hasn’t had the funds to address yet.  These things take some getting used to by Western drivers.




photo by Newell

There is a thin squiggly red line on the road map that runs along the south western coast line of the island, then arcs up along a steep mountain range at the island’s western edge, and dead ends in a little village called Drakei.  Neither one of us had seen the West End of Samos so we decided to take full advantage of our rental car and go exploring.  Kathy prefers to do the driving here now, but that has not always been the case.  The roads are as poorly marked as they are maintained, so there were some dead ends and back tracking, but the scenery was spectacular by even Samian standards.  At one point the little red line led us straight through a village with streets so narrow we folded the rear view mirrors flat against the car to squeak past the buildings.  Another place required a three point turn to make a 90-degree bend in the road.



photo by Newell

We stopped for a frappe’ and snapped a few pictures of the boatyard in Drakei, then headed back by a different route.  Kathy approaches driving with the same goal oriented focus with which she attacks all of the tasks that she sets for herself, worrying about the obstacles only when she encounters them.  Accelerating toward our next agreed upon destination with the self-confidence of a native driver, she provides her passenger with a less focused perspective from which to appreciate the full range of possibilities posed by the scenery passing sometimes inches from his nose or hundreds of feet below the flimsy side panels of their rented car.  Once Kathy has put her hand to the steering wheel, she doesn’t look back, or down.



photo by Newell






Kathy’s Toll Booth

Since Kathy’s turned the alley into our patio we cook out and play cards most nights, so we’re eating out less.  I had gotten in the habit of carrying an empty plastic grocery bag in my pocket so that I would have a way to carry home the fruit and vegetables we’d pick or have presented to us during the course of an evening walk, or on the way home from a restaurant, I called it my “swag bag.”  It still comes in handy on morning walks.

Annexing the alley for outdoor living space hasn’t diminished the flow of foot traffic through it.  Passing neighbors, many of whom speak little to no English at all, often feel compelled to stop and chat, many of them just happen to be carrying plastic grocery bags full of their own swag.  As often as not, the visitor will reach into their bag and lay something from it on the table as a parting gift.  I have taken to calling our little table and chairs, “Kathy’s toll booth.”  Tonight we tried to tally up all of stuff she’d collected since setting up shop in the alley.  We used the score pad from the card game.  The list included: cucumbers, zucchinis, egg plants, figs, capers, apricots, eggs, peaches, cinnamon bread, a bag of blackberries, a bottle of home made wine that came in a 1.5 liter plastic Coke bottle, and a bouquet of dried chamomile.

”What about that bottle of olive oil?”  Kathy asked. 

photos by Newell and Skaggs

“Doesn’t count,” was my reply.

“Why not?” she rejoined.

“Because no one brought it to us,
 we collected that ourselves.”

 

Evening Walks to the Vronta Monastery

One of our favorite evening walks is from the village up to the Vronta Monastery.  It’s about a 2 kilometer hike from Vourliotes, and it sits about 1,575 ft. above sea level, just off of the winding  road that leads up to it.  The amount of spectacular scenery in such a short walk beggars description: mountain ranges, vistas of Asia Minor, old stone cottages, chapels, and livestock shelters, exotic flowering plants, wild herbs, gardens, terraces, fragrant rosemary bushes and fig trees the that have sprouted from stone retaining walls, curious rock formations, roadside shrines, a farmer pruning his grape vines with a hand sickle, or dusting them with a stick and a pillow case. I could go on, but won’t.

 

 

The destination is no less spectacular.  The monastery is the oldest on the island.  The most consistent date given for its’ founding is 1566, but some sources give 1425 as the date for an earlier order founded there.  There is supposed to be a cave associated with the earlier site that we haven’t seen yet.  There are very few monks living there now.  The order is self sustained, growing all of its’ own food, but it accepts donations for votive candles and building repair funds.  The monks are cordial, but do not initiate conversation with visitors.   A large part of the monastery looks like the ruins of an abandoned military barracks, but the church and the relics inside it, are pristine.  There is a sign at the entrance asking that people be “decently dressed” before entering.  Like restaurants that require sport coats for men, there are wall pegs bearing wrap around “loaner” skirts for women to cover their bare legs with.  Like the fort in St. Augustine, Florida it would be well worth a drive of several hours to see.  By good fortune, it is within easy walking distance for us.

photos by Newell