Greece

Greeks are the kind of people who live and let live, let it all hang out, accept things as they are. And nowhere is this more apparent than on the beach at Agii Theodori, where we rented a cottage. Bodies of all shapes, sizes, skin color, bodies with hair in all stages of grooming from the wild and unkempt to the very well managed. Bodies—even eight-month-pregnant bodies—in two-piece bathing suits and speedos, including bodies some would say should not be in speedos and two-piece bathing suits, except we’re talking about live-and-let-live Greeks and it all seemed to somehow be exactly right.

I mean, this is a very comfortable place to have vacation after uber-fashion-conscious Italy and France and Spain. Suddenly, my modest little black bathing suit on my less-than-fit body didn’t seem like such a big social faux pas anymore. My friends and I took to leaving the house with our hair half-combed in the morning and brushing it off as “fixing our hair the way the Greeks do.” And it must have worked because very frequently people would walk up to me and begin talking in a string of very fast, very unfamiliar words and only realize I was not Greek when I turned to them a bewildered mien and shrugged my shoulders. I have never before when outside the USA been mistaken for a native or for anything other than an American tourist.

Perhaps they were telling me I really needed to do something about my hair. That’s one of the nice things about being able to say, “It’s all Greek to me!” They can be insulting, questioning, praising, informing. It’s all the same to me.

Greece is the kind of place that provokes many questions. Questions like, “How in the world did they build something so tall and beautiful?” and “Where are the instructions in English for the internet card?” and “What time do things open up again after closing down for the afternoon?” and “What do the Greeks say when a language is bewildering to them—‘it’s all English to me?’?”

I learned interesting and unexpected things about the place. Things like their word for “Good morning” sounds awfully close to “calimari”, the Italian word for fried squid. They don’t have a legal drinking age and they also don’t have a problem with drunken teenagers sneaking the ouzo out of the house for a party with their friends. And Greeks really know how to party down when it is time for a wedding. In Agii Theodori on Saturday, there was a little parade of cars circling round and round in the town, blowing their horns to celebrate the newly married couple before they went out to the beach to boogie down at a taverna with fireworks, music, and much laughter. They were still going strong when we woke up at five the next morning to head off to the airport. It seemed somehow just the right way to celebrate. And that, also, has become “all Greek to me”—the way they seem to accept the good, the bad, and the indifferent and to let life flow in one big colorful parade of celebration, banality, beauty, and simple being.

I checked the climate of Greece before we left on vacation and found that June is supposed to be very pleasant; apparently it only gets hot there in July and August. Imagine my consternation when we stepped off the plane into an oven—hot and getting hotter. It was not only hot, it was somewhat hellish and it only got worse as the week progressed. 41 degrees C … 43 … 45 … 46 … until it topped out at 48 degrees C.

Ah, I thought, perhaps “hot” is a relative term. Maybe the temperature is 50 or 60 in July and August, which would make a mere 48 seem balmy in comparison, right?

In conversation with Athenians, though, after learning we traipsed up to the Akropolis in 46-degree-Celsius heat, they could only asked “why?” Turns out the heat of last week was a fluke; June in Athens really IS balmy. Only right before we flew in, there blew in from Africa this hot wind that the Greeks affectionately call “the Libyan Express”. They say it comes along every ten to 20 years and shoots the temperatures way, way up. Turns out we were lucky enough to book our vacation during the hottest week in 25 years. After about five days of the freakish heat, the wind blew on past and the temperature dropped into their usual pleasant June weather.

Go figure.