Friday, January 30, 2004
We get to watch the Super Bowl! We're heading to the American Embassy 6:30 Monday morning, getting body searched, and then we get to settle in with the Marines to watch the game. I'm very excited about this. I haven't been inside the Embassy, so that'll be cool too, and I haven't seen any sports since . . . you know . . . some it'll be great. I heard there will be beer, but I'm not sure about this. I'll let you know. Semper Fi.
I thought of a few more interesting Greek things on the way to work. I'm writing a piece for the Athen's News about a concert Kirsten and I saw last week. It was Andras Schiff and his chamber group playing Mozart, and it was amazing. I'll send you a link to the article when it gets published. But more things about Athens:
There's much conservation here, but the conservation is mostly due to frugality rather than eco-driven concerns. The hot-water heater is above our tub. It holds about 25 gallons or so, and most people here who live in apartments--which is about everyone--use these only when they need them, so when we get up in the morning, we turn on the coffee pot and click the breaker for the water heater. It heats quickly and makes just enough for two baths.
Taxi drivers here don't usually stop for a fare. The person wanting to go somewhere holds there arm out at their side and the taxi slows down. As the taxi passes the possible fare, the person yells the part of town where they want to go, and if the driver deems it worthy, he'll stop the car. So, think of this and remember back to when we got here with our eight bags of stuff. Horrible.
There's much conservation here, but the conservation is mostly due to frugality rather than eco-driven concerns. The hot-water heater is above our tub. It holds about 25 gallons or so, and most people here who live in apartments--which is about everyone--use these only when they need them, so when we get up in the morning, we turn on the coffee pot and click the breaker for the water heater. It heats quickly and makes just enough for two baths.
Taxi drivers here don't usually stop for a fare. The person wanting to go somewhere holds there arm out at their side and the taxi slows down. As the taxi passes the possible fare, the person yells the part of town where they want to go, and if the driver deems it worthy, he'll stop the car. So, think of this and remember back to when we got here with our eight bags of stuff. Horrible.
Friday, January 23, 2004
I'm just going to ramble for a bit since I think this may be my last day here at the Athens News (http://athensnews.gr) and I thought I'd take final advantage of my wonderful connection to the net. Yesterday it snowed and I was thinking how lovely the snow was against the orange trees, and then I got to thinking that I never even mentioned the trees on this site. So, I decided to make a huge list of various interesting things about Athens and Greece. Here it is:
There are orange trees on almost every street and they have had oranges on them since we arrived. I don't think anyone would eat these however.
Everyone parks everywhere. There are no parking meters and seem to be few tickets, so people will park on the sidewalks, right in front of doors and on corners, so often it's much easier to just walk in the street since the sidewalks are covered with cars and motorcycles.
We are right now having a New Year's party with wine and cake. The cake had a coin in it, and whoever gets it, gets a prize. It's kind of like King Cake in New Orleans.
You can't put anything in the toilets here--I mean no paper. If you need more information about this, email me.
There's almost no sliced bread. It's very unusual. We buy all our bread half a block away.
Something called Tost is very popular here, and I don't mean the poet. It's like a small submarine sandwich, and you tell the maker what you want in it: cheese, egg, ham etc. and then it's put into a little two sided toasterpress kind of thing and it's done in a minute. I never see toasters however.
Most of the bottles are returnable, but there seems to be no recycling.
People cross themselves whenever they see a church, so on the bus when we speed by one, almost everyone from old ladies to students stop what they're doing and cross themselves. There are many many churches in Athens, so this happens several times.
Very few of the doors have doorknobs. They usually just open with a key. Sometimes doors have one big knob in the middle of the door, but it doesn't turn.
They call the Elgin Marbles the Parthenon Marbles here which makes sense.
Every other person here has a cell phone. It's against the law to drive while talking on one, but I've seen many bus drivers talking on them while taking 50 people around town.
There's a siesta here which happens about 2 till 5 and the shops close down.
Old people stay up till two here. They look at us funny when we have to leave to go to bed.
Mothers and daughters walk arm and arm often and no one hurries when they walk.
Instead of a tree to decorate at Christmas, many here decorate small boats.
I have a plastic dinosaur on my desk. She tells me things. All right, that's about all. Hope you're all well.
There are orange trees on almost every street and they have had oranges on them since we arrived. I don't think anyone would eat these however.
Everyone parks everywhere. There are no parking meters and seem to be few tickets, so people will park on the sidewalks, right in front of doors and on corners, so often it's much easier to just walk in the street since the sidewalks are covered with cars and motorcycles.
We are right now having a New Year's party with wine and cake. The cake had a coin in it, and whoever gets it, gets a prize. It's kind of like King Cake in New Orleans.
You can't put anything in the toilets here--I mean no paper. If you need more information about this, email me.
There's almost no sliced bread. It's very unusual. We buy all our bread half a block away.
Something called Tost is very popular here, and I don't mean the poet. It's like a small submarine sandwich, and you tell the maker what you want in it: cheese, egg, ham etc. and then it's put into a little two sided toasterpress kind of thing and it's done in a minute. I never see toasters however.
Most of the bottles are returnable, but there seems to be no recycling.
People cross themselves whenever they see a church, so on the bus when we speed by one, almost everyone from old ladies to students stop what they're doing and cross themselves. There are many many churches in Athens, so this happens several times.
Very few of the doors have doorknobs. They usually just open with a key. Sometimes doors have one big knob in the middle of the door, but it doesn't turn.
They call the Elgin Marbles the Parthenon Marbles here which makes sense.
Every other person here has a cell phone. It's against the law to drive while talking on one, but I've seen many bus drivers talking on them while taking 50 people around town.
There's a siesta here which happens about 2 till 5 and the shops close down.
Old people stay up till two here. They look at us funny when we have to leave to go to bed.
Mothers and daughters walk arm and arm often and no one hurries when they walk.
Instead of a tree to decorate at Christmas, many here decorate small boats.
I have a plastic dinosaur on my desk. She tells me things. All right, that's about all. Hope you're all well.
Friday, January 09, 2004
While I'm being a tout for our links to the right, let me say that if you haven't spent some time with Mary's site, Fly in the Honey, you're a fool. It's not another, "why-am-I-reading-about-a-stranger's-life" site . . . well, it is, but it's so well written that many times, reading about say, me, I've felt a swelling in my throat. I mean it. You should read her stuff. It's funny and sad and all those other things.
She's my sister, so I'm a little biased. I'll get that out of the way. But damn, you should check out the paintings. I don't know why it took me so long to update the links to the right to include her site, but take some time and click over there and look at the paintings. I always thought they were good, but lately she seems to be taking off in a much more confident and comfortable style, taking risks with new work, but the images and colors seem to have always been there, to have been trapped in other paintings. I really like "Incandesence" and "Within" two works that must have just been painted or just added to the website at least. In any case, I haven't seen them. If you go to her site, but sure to check out Whalelane--there's a link to it from her site under "online exhibitions." Once you're there, click on something like "see it on the wall." I love this--it's a virtual living room (one that looks a bit too germ-free to me, but this site is trying to sell paintings to folks in nice houses). Anyway, once you're there, you can move her paintings around on the wall. It's like playing virtual interior designer or something. So, I just wanted to give some props to my sister. Props out.
Monday, January 05, 2004
We just got back from a trip to The Mani, and I wanted to write about it and a bunch of other things since I’ve been remiss of late as Mark Cherry has pointed out. I’ve seen this arc of activity in various travel diaries before. You get all caught up in the excitement and activity of the first few months, and then, no matter if you’re in Jamaica, Egypt or Greece, you start spending your time doing other things.
I’ve been working more these days for one thing. And Kirsten is home more, and I have less time alone to stare at the walls and write, which is a good thing. Work has been interesting still. I’ve been doing a lot of stage directions for MM publishing. This takes me back to Mrs. Collier’s drama class, and I’m in 10th grade again, wanting to be an actor. It’s no wonder acting appealed to me then. The chance to be me but to have someone else feed me my clever lines still sounds good sometimes. But I was too nervous at everything really. My bow bounced on my strings when I had to perform the cello, and I would seriously consider sneaking into dark rooms before performances and sleeping until they were over. But music had nothing on drama for fear for me. I never threw up before a show, but I came close a few times, and I was a professional pacer a few minutes before that curtain rose, and then when my entrance came, I felt so jittery and forgetful. So I turned to the backstage and became a techie. I loved working lights which in 1980 consisted of an over-heated homemade panel of dimmer switches which we had to roll with the flat of our arm over all six to dim the lights.
So, it’s been fun thinking of me back stage when I’m writing lighting cues for Gulliver and, of course for my darling, Jasper’s Pot of Gold. I also got to remember where upstage right is and how to stand actors so they’ll look out at the right angle to the audience. I get to come up with the costumes as well. When Jasper is finally performed, kids in Peru will be reading my cues, following my blocking and singing my song at the end, and you don’t have to tell me. I know I’ve finally made it. Ma, look at me now. It is strange to be really upset flipping through my notes trying to figure out where Chef Cream is standing in relation to the rainbow. I feel insane some evenings. That, and the fact that when Kirsten and I were in this beautiful place in southern Greece called The Mani, and we saw a rainbow I didn’t think of anything else but Jasper and Mrs. Wig and Mr. Copper and where they were, makes me glad that I’m starting a new job today at The Athens News.
I’ll be proofreading for seven hours a day through the month of January. The Athens News I’ve mentioned before. All my jobs came from the back pages of that magazine. The editor is married to Alicia Stallings, an excellent poet who has gone out of her way to make Kirsten and me feel welcome here in Athens. Her book Archaic Smile is really well done and works several classical themes beautifully, but my favorite poems are usually about things around her: her sister, a lost umbrella, a train. She’s really a classicist from University of Georgia and Oxford, but she’s one of these maddening poets who didn’t go to school for it and just does it. Really well.
The Mani is an area in the southern Peloponnese. Kirsten woke up Friday morning and said that we were by damn getting out of Athens, so we packed up our bags, took the subway to the bus, took the bus to the bus station and there we were standing in a room full of choices. We took out a map and picked the town Gythio. You should be able to find it on a map. If that big island-looking thing to the left of Athens looks like a hand to you, follow the middle finger down a bit and you’ll find it. It’s south of Sparta about 50 miles or so, and the story is that the little island off the coast of Gythio is where Helen and Paris consummated their illicit relationship. It would be a nice place to do such a thing. There’s now an 18th century tower out there, and many locals go out to fish. The wind through the evergreens shushed and the ocean whispered all around us. The sun was out. The town itself is a sea town with octopi drying in the sun and fresh fish everywhere. As with almost all ocean towns in Greece, there’s a tourist trade, and after fifteen minutes of looking we found a place with a balcony looking over the bay for $50 for two nights. And a TV. I miss TV sometimes, and then I get to see it and watch a movie about Prancer’s baby reindeer with that guy from Northern Exposure, and I think god. When you look across the bay and up into the clouds you can see snow peaked mountains in the distance, so it’s not too hard to fight the easy move for the remote. That’s not to say that I don’t know that Prancer (or his son or something, I never quite got that) didn’t hook back up with Santa I think in time for Christmas. Santa was alerted to the whole sorry affair via email by the way. Did anyone else suffer, open mouthed, through this thing? Why did I? Where was It’s a Wonderful Life?
Here’s one last little note. It’s interesting living here, like living in New York too for that matter, that there’s some built in nostalgia walking around the town. In New York, it’s from seeing all the little corner groceries which rise up to keep the neighborhood supplied with bread and cheese. One of the things I love about New York is how much it feels like a small town if you keep your head down. You see the same folks walking from the grocers to the vegetable market and then later at the local movie house. Here in Greece it’s like that. Sometimes it actually goes back to a past that I didn’t experience. I suspect it’s more my parents’. There’s a butcher around every corner here. Every store slices cheese in blocks and cuts your chicken how you want. I had to buy some pre-shredded cheese (which was hard to find) for a casserole because I was running late a month or so ago, and a woman actually stopped me in the checkout line to ask if I was indeed buying that box of cheese. I couldn’t explain about my hurry etc., but I think she saw it clearly. American.
But the thing that really made me reminisce about my childhood this weekend were all the coke bottles lined up outside the stores. The first job my brother and I had was finding coke bottles and selling them to the IGA for money for ice cream. We got to keep 10 percent of the money from the bottles. Just kidding. Ha ha. We kept it all, but for only about four blocks till we got to the Minute Man on the way to the Park where we’d put down our dimes for soft serve. So, it’s nice here and surreal in some ways, thinking you see yourself at ten walking to the store with a bottle in your hand.
In other surreal news, 80s fashion is really big here right now. So, I’m torn between being a marching, ground-focused ten-year-old to being an uncomfortable teen checking out Lisa Frye in that hot pink knit number with the matching leg warmers. And then I look up and I’m in Greece for some reason.
Here’s what Sofia Loren says about friends and food according to a menu we read in Gythio:
“The most important material for a good homemade cooking is the love for those you are cooking.” I never knew what a sick woman she was, but I still like her. I hope all are well. We missed home over the holidays of course, but we missed you all more. And football.
I’ve been working more these days for one thing. And Kirsten is home more, and I have less time alone to stare at the walls and write, which is a good thing. Work has been interesting still. I’ve been doing a lot of stage directions for MM publishing. This takes me back to Mrs. Collier’s drama class, and I’m in 10th grade again, wanting to be an actor. It’s no wonder acting appealed to me then. The chance to be me but to have someone else feed me my clever lines still sounds good sometimes. But I was too nervous at everything really. My bow bounced on my strings when I had to perform the cello, and I would seriously consider sneaking into dark rooms before performances and sleeping until they were over. But music had nothing on drama for fear for me. I never threw up before a show, but I came close a few times, and I was a professional pacer a few minutes before that curtain rose, and then when my entrance came, I felt so jittery and forgetful. So I turned to the backstage and became a techie. I loved working lights which in 1980 consisted of an over-heated homemade panel of dimmer switches which we had to roll with the flat of our arm over all six to dim the lights.
So, it’s been fun thinking of me back stage when I’m writing lighting cues for Gulliver and, of course for my darling, Jasper’s Pot of Gold. I also got to remember where upstage right is and how to stand actors so they’ll look out at the right angle to the audience. I get to come up with the costumes as well. When Jasper is finally performed, kids in Peru will be reading my cues, following my blocking and singing my song at the end, and you don’t have to tell me. I know I’ve finally made it. Ma, look at me now. It is strange to be really upset flipping through my notes trying to figure out where Chef Cream is standing in relation to the rainbow. I feel insane some evenings. That, and the fact that when Kirsten and I were in this beautiful place in southern Greece called The Mani, and we saw a rainbow I didn’t think of anything else but Jasper and Mrs. Wig and Mr. Copper and where they were, makes me glad that I’m starting a new job today at The Athens News.
I’ll be proofreading for seven hours a day through the month of January. The Athens News I’ve mentioned before. All my jobs came from the back pages of that magazine. The editor is married to Alicia Stallings, an excellent poet who has gone out of her way to make Kirsten and me feel welcome here in Athens. Her book Archaic Smile is really well done and works several classical themes beautifully, but my favorite poems are usually about things around her: her sister, a lost umbrella, a train. She’s really a classicist from University of Georgia and Oxford, but she’s one of these maddening poets who didn’t go to school for it and just does it. Really well.
The Mani is an area in the southern Peloponnese. Kirsten woke up Friday morning and said that we were by damn getting out of Athens, so we packed up our bags, took the subway to the bus, took the bus to the bus station and there we were standing in a room full of choices. We took out a map and picked the town Gythio. You should be able to find it on a map. If that big island-looking thing to the left of Athens looks like a hand to you, follow the middle finger down a bit and you’ll find it. It’s south of Sparta about 50 miles or so, and the story is that the little island off the coast of Gythio is where Helen and Paris consummated their illicit relationship. It would be a nice place to do such a thing. There’s now an 18th century tower out there, and many locals go out to fish. The wind through the evergreens shushed and the ocean whispered all around us. The sun was out. The town itself is a sea town with octopi drying in the sun and fresh fish everywhere. As with almost all ocean towns in Greece, there’s a tourist trade, and after fifteen minutes of looking we found a place with a balcony looking over the bay for $50 for two nights. And a TV. I miss TV sometimes, and then I get to see it and watch a movie about Prancer’s baby reindeer with that guy from Northern Exposure, and I think god. When you look across the bay and up into the clouds you can see snow peaked mountains in the distance, so it’s not too hard to fight the easy move for the remote. That’s not to say that I don’t know that Prancer (or his son or something, I never quite got that) didn’t hook back up with Santa I think in time for Christmas. Santa was alerted to the whole sorry affair via email by the way. Did anyone else suffer, open mouthed, through this thing? Why did I? Where was It’s a Wonderful Life?
Here’s one last little note. It’s interesting living here, like living in New York too for that matter, that there’s some built in nostalgia walking around the town. In New York, it’s from seeing all the little corner groceries which rise up to keep the neighborhood supplied with bread and cheese. One of the things I love about New York is how much it feels like a small town if you keep your head down. You see the same folks walking from the grocers to the vegetable market and then later at the local movie house. Here in Greece it’s like that. Sometimes it actually goes back to a past that I didn’t experience. I suspect it’s more my parents’. There’s a butcher around every corner here. Every store slices cheese in blocks and cuts your chicken how you want. I had to buy some pre-shredded cheese (which was hard to find) for a casserole because I was running late a month or so ago, and a woman actually stopped me in the checkout line to ask if I was indeed buying that box of cheese. I couldn’t explain about my hurry etc., but I think she saw it clearly. American.
But the thing that really made me reminisce about my childhood this weekend were all the coke bottles lined up outside the stores. The first job my brother and I had was finding coke bottles and selling them to the IGA for money for ice cream. We got to keep 10 percent of the money from the bottles. Just kidding. Ha ha. We kept it all, but for only about four blocks till we got to the Minute Man on the way to the Park where we’d put down our dimes for soft serve. So, it’s nice here and surreal in some ways, thinking you see yourself at ten walking to the store with a bottle in your hand.
In other surreal news, 80s fashion is really big here right now. So, I’m torn between being a marching, ground-focused ten-year-old to being an uncomfortable teen checking out Lisa Frye in that hot pink knit number with the matching leg warmers. And then I look up and I’m in Greece for some reason.
Here’s what Sofia Loren says about friends and food according to a menu we read in Gythio:
“The most important material for a good homemade cooking is the love for those you are cooking.” I never knew what a sick woman she was, but I still like her. I hope all are well. We missed home over the holidays of course, but we missed you all more. And football.
