THE LAST BLOG
The Adventure Ends, As Does Its Recording
It’s Tuesday, May 16, 2006. On Thursday we leave Granada, two years, seven moths and one week after our arrival.
We’ve sold or given away most the goods we bought here. Some items, like the microwave, toaster oven, coffee maker, we’ll leave. We shipped four boxes a week ago. The rest we’ll carry on the plane.
We had last haircuts, rented our last movie and I had my teeth cleaned for the last time in Granada. We’ve informed the local merchants that we’re leaving.
We’ve made our goodbyes to our friends.
Our landlady and rental agent came by this morning to check out the house. Our deposit was returned.
Tomorrow morning we’ll turn in the phone, terminating telephone and Internet service. Afterwards we’ll climb the hill for the last time and enjoy a last tapa in one of the neighborhood plazas.
Tomorrow night we’ll watch Barcelona play Arsenal of London in the European Champion’s League soccer final.
We had to change our travel plans. The previous plan, to bus to Malaga, fly to Frankfurt on Lufthansa, spend the night, then fly to San Francisco on United, fell apart when every flight to Frankfurt filled. Something very important must be taking place there. Instead, we’ve bought tickets on Ryan Air to London, where we’ll spend the night before flying on to San Francisco.
With luck, Friday night we’ll be sleeping in Petaluma, California.
The Last Blog now joins the list of lasts: the last dance, The Last of the Mohicans, the last hurrah, last gas for 35 miles, the last of the Red Hot Lovers, the last roundup, The Last Picture Show, last one home’s a rotten egg, The Last Waltz, the last laugh, the last drop, The Last time I saw Paris, the last chance and, last but not least, the last piece of cake.
TWO WEEKS IN ZORBA LAND
Basking in Greek Hospitality
Every successful trip offers a few surprises. Our April trip to Greece certainly did, the most pleasant being the warmth and hospitality of the Greek people.
Other than reservations for three nights at Tony’s Hotel, we arrived in Athens without a fixed itinerary. We planned to visit the islands of Naxos and Santorini, but how long we’d stay, or whether we’d get to Crete or any mainland sites, would be decided on a day-to-day basis.
Our studio at Tony’s was reasonably well equipped and had a balcony where we ate breakfast and dinner. We enjoyed Athens more than we had expected to, but the Acropolis was a bit of a disappointment; the Parthenon as well as other buildings was encased in scaffolding and bobbing on a sea of tourists. Unlike the Alhambra, admission seems unlimited.
The ferry to Naxos, which took almost six hours, was met by a line of “hotel touts.” Among the dozen or so hotel signs being held aloft, was one for Hotel Argo, which, according to our guidebook, had studios with terraces. Apostolis, who owned the hotel, offered to drive us to the hotel just to take a look. On the drive over, we told him we’d planned to stay four days and would be leaving Saturday.
“You should stay for Easter,” he said. The Greek Orthodox Easter was being celebrated a week later this year than the western Easter. “You’re invited to our Easter meal. We’ll be spit-roasting a lamb.”
The hotel was perhaps a half-mile from Hora’s waterfront cafes and 100 yards from the beach. The apartment he showed us sat on top of a two-story building; we followed him up three flights of stairs, crossed the roof and a small top bridge to a terrace and the front door. There was a living room/kitchen with fireplace, a large bedroom and two terraces. The price: € 25. Incredible! We knew we were traveling off-season, but had no idea that rooms were going for half price.
Experiencing a traditional Greek Easter meal of spit-roasted lamb sounded very tempting, but we weren’t sure we wanted to stay six days in Naxos. It took only one day to decide that we did. Although Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades Islands, only 18,000 people live on the island and only 7,000 in Hora, the port and capital. The café-lined waterfront is only a few blocks long; behind that, on incredibly narrow, twisted lanes, a handful of shops; from there to the top of the steep hill, a jumble of houses. And the walking, one of our chief attractions to the island, is terrific; we took a bus up to a small village and then walked a couple of hours to an even higher one, then walked back down.
The Orthodox Easter celebration is very different from the one we’d experienced the week before in Spain. Rather than eight days of processions, the celebration lasts three. Friday evening services are followed by candle-lit processions through the streets. The Saturday night service ends at midnight, when worshipers spill from the churches with joyful shouts of “He is risen.” Church bells ring and fireworks explode. On Sunday everyone eats lamb. We joined the Friday night procession, but Saturday’s hike sent us to bed to early.
On Sunday morning we looked down from our terrace onto the hotel courtyard where the lamb was slowly turning on a spit over charcoal. Around noon, Apostolis began a second grill and covered it with sausages. It was time to go down.
We joined Apostolis, his wife Katerina, their daughter and her fiancée, another Greek couple and their daughter and two German couples, the only guests other than ourselves in Hotel Argo’s forty plus rooms. In addition to the lamb, which Katerina informed me was three months old and weighed 12 kilos, there were the delicious sausages, roast potatoes, three-day-old cheese, salad with a tzatziki dressing, bread and an endless supply of wine, made by Apostolis. The lamb, which had been turning for five hours, was practically falling off the bone.
In Greece, it is considered impolite to drain your wine glass; when your glass is low, your host refills it. After an hour or so of feasting, everyone assumed the role of host, and the small glasses were filled again and again. And again. Katerina told Kay later that we weren’t the only ones to take siesta; apparently everyone in the hotel was asleep by four.
We left Naxos Monday morning with no idea where we’d be staying in Santorini, but we hoped that we’d get lucky again at landing. Only moments after leaving the ferry, we had three brochures thrust towards us. While I was looking at one, Kay was conversing with an old man, at least 70.
“I like this one,” she said. She showed me his brochure. It featured a large pool and attractive grounds. He has a studio, she said. How much? €30. Can’t beat that. Where is it?
“By the black sand beach,” he said. “Very beautiful. Very peaceful.” My image of Santorini was hotels clinging to the side of the volcano cauldron; the black sand beach had me a bit confused.
“Very beautiful,” he said again.
“I want this one,” Kay said. And I like the old man, she whispered.
Still confused about the black sand beach, I asked, “Is it up there?” I pointed to the top of the cliffs high above, “or down near the water?”
He pointed upward. At least I thought he did. Perhaps he had pointed inland.
He walked us to the hotel’s van and we waited while his son snagged another customer. Then off we went, up, up, up the road that switch backed along the sheer face of the cliff. At the top of the cliff the van did not turn left towards the hotel-hanging town of Fira, but to the right, then wound its way slowly to the backside of the island. As we approached the hotel, the son pointed out the supermarket, where, he said, we could get anything, and the bus stop.
“Is there anywhere we can buy bread?” Kay asked. We’d brought dinner with us from our kitchen in Naxos - pasta and sauce, along with coffee, tea, honey and olive oil - so all we needed was bread.
Unfortunately, he told us, it was Easter Monday and nothing was open.
We got out of the van and looked around. We weren’t anywhere. We were nowhere. The black sand beach was at least a half-mile away and I hadn’t seen a road headed in that direction. The sheer cliffs of the cauldron, for which Santorini is famous, was miles away.
The hotel consisted of six, garden-surrounded buildings. Our room was on the second floor of the two-story building at the rear of the property. The room was very large, had a small kitchen and a balcony, which overlooked olive trees and vineyards. I could see the sea in the distance. At least the price was right. It will be fine, Kay assured me.
The old man walked me through a large garden up to the front office - which also houses a restaurant, which, like the pool, was not yet open for the season - to check in and to meet Mama Maria, his wife. I paid for three nights, and then the old man, remembering Kay’s request for bread, took me to the restaurant’s kitchen. He gave me a loaf of bread, paused, and added four eggs. On our way back to the room, he stopped by the garden.
“Stay here,” he said. He wandered through the garden and pulled up two heads of lettuce, a cluster of green onions, a lemon and four small zucchinis. We proceeded to the room and he knocked on the door. When Kay opened the door, she found the two of us, with wide grins and an armload of food.
“I told you I liked the old man,” Kay said.
It turns out that we were about a 20-minute walk from a delightful little beach town. From there, a narrow blacktop road ran along the beach, black sand on one side, a row of open-air cafes and bars on the other. It was quite beautiful.
The next day we took the 30-minute bus ride into town. The cauldron and the cliff-hanging hotels were spectacular. The town itself, however, was the most concentrated tourist-oriented place I’ve ever seen. Granting the probable existence of at least one pharmacy, the cliff side of the town was 99.9 percent devoted to tourists, shop after shop, restaurant after restaurant, hotel stacked upon hotel. We walked the pedestrian way along the cauldron, ate lunch and bused back. The next day we returned and began a long walk along the cliff to a nearby town. After 45 minutes of walking into a strong wind, we realized that the town wasn’t as close as it had appeared, so we found a bench out of the wind and ate our picnic. While we were eating, an old lady approached and asked how we liked Santorini and where we were from. She invited us to join her at her house across the way for coffee, then she left.
Kay and I don’t take coffee after lunch. I find it interferes with my siesta. We hadn’t decided if we were going to accept her invitation or not, but just as we were finishing our meal, I felt her hand on my shoulder.
“Do you want white coffee or black coffee?” she asked.
“White,” Kay said. Black for me. She returned to her house. A few minutes later we followed.
She showed us the downstairs – she was 70 and no longer climbed the stairs – than took us to the dining room where she served us coffee, along with cookies, hardboiled colored eggs and chocolate left over from Easter. She’d lived in Australia for several years and spoke English very well. As we ate, she showed us her son’s wedding album. When we left she wrapped cookies, eggs and chocolates for us to take.
According to the schedule, the ferry back to Athens left at 7 a.m. The people at the hotel informed us that they would take us there at six. But when we bought our tickets in town the day before, we were informed that the 7 a.m. ferry didn’t operate on Thursdays. Our choice was between the 10 a.m. ferry, which took ten hours to reach Athens, and the jet ferry, which left at 9:30, took five hours and cost twice as much. We deliberated. Not wanting to arrive at the port at 8 p.m. and reach the hotel by nine. We bought tickets for the jet ferry. Back at the hotel we informed the son. No problem, he said, he’d meet us at eight.
We rose at seven and Kay showered. At 7:15 there was a knock on the door. Seven-thirty, the son said through the door. Eight o’clock, Kay, who was drying off, shouted back. Seven-thirty, he said again. I must meet the earlier ferry. He walked away.
Kay was dressed, groomed and packed in 13 minutes, establishing a new American record for time elapsed between shower and exit, and a new international record for women over 50.
Back at Tony’s, we found that our previous room, which we’d asked them to save, was occupied, so we took one downstairs with no balcony. The vacant lot next door – the building had been demolished days before our previous stay – had become an excavation site, and an enormous backhoe was digging deeper and deeper and banging against the walls of our hotel as it attempted to separate the wall of the old building from that of our hotel. Imagine the sound of this washing machine-sized shovel scrapping the walls of your room. And work had begun at 7:30. Around mid-morning we were shaken from our bed by a loud crash, followed by the sound of Tony shouting. We, along with other guests, rushed out into the entrance lobby. The shovel had knocked a basketball-size whole in the wall of the hotel, through which we could see out into the excavation.
We set out on a last walk around Athens hoping that the hotel and our possessions would be there when we returned. An hour later, overcast turned to rain. Of course, we’d left our umbrellas behind. We returned by subway to our neighborhood and walked home in the rain. The demolition continued till after three.
Our flight, we told Tony, left at 8:35. Tony, whose wife was Spanish, took the flight to Madrid often and had plenty of advice.
“An hour is plenty of time to check in,” he told us. “And take the subway. It doesn’t take more than 45 minutes.” What Tony didn’t tell us was that at the end of the subway line, we had to transfer to a train, one that ran every 30 minutes and one we missed by five minutes. Although we’d caught the subway at 6:30, we were sitting by the track at 7:25. I was not happy.
We reached the airport at quarter till eight, rushed to the check-in, quickly checked our bags, zipped through security and raced to the gate. The plane was boarding and the first bus out had already left. We looked at the sign. Departure time was 8:20, not 8:35. If I’d known that at 7:40 while still on the train, I would have drowned in perspiration. What are the chances of arriving at the airport 35 minutes before departure and making your flight?
It was a great trip. And it was great to get home to Granada. Our next trip is back to California.
