A Short Greek Getaway

There is something special about being on an island.

Not a big island, like Ireland, Britain or Sicily, but a small island where you can see water all around you and feel the smallness of it against the vastness of the ocean or sea. Sao Miguel was special in that way. Guam was special in that way (and in many other ways).

Small coastal islands like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, don’t exude the same feeling. You know you are only a short ferry ride from the mainland, so you don’t get that same sensation of an oasis in the midst of watery vastness.

Islands and mountains are my favorite places to get away, to experience some degree of soothing, cleansing isolation. To be honest, I have always found more isolation, more peace, and more spiritual connection in the high country. But islands have something that mountains lack: the power of the sea.

In lieu of that powerful spiritual experience of being in a high mountain valley, a small island surrounded by a sea or ocean will do just fine.

Santorini

As I started this post, I was on a short vacation on the Greek island of Santorini (I finished it back home in Kharkiv). Santorini is part of a vast archipelago stretching across the Aegean Sea from mainland Greece to Turkey. The island is sort of unique in that it was the site of a devastating volcanic eruption somewhere around 1660 BC that sent much of the original island into the sea. There are some legends that claim the lost city of Atlantis was on Santorini and was destroyed in the eruption.

Now the main island is sort of curved around the caldera of the sunken portion, with a still-active volcanic portion in the center of the caldera and another piece located just northwest of the “volcano island.” There was another significant earthquake there in 1956, so people there have to a bit “on their toes” with regard to Mother Nature.

Santorini is one of the more developed islands in the archipelago, which makes it a real tourist trap from April to October, and especially during the summer. But I arrived in early March when the temperatures are pleasant, if not particularly warm, and there are very few tourists.

Just the way I like it: not hot, and not a lot of people. I was able to enjoy my time in T-shirts and shorts and without a lot of people invading my calm space.

So this post is about my four days on Santorini. I honestly don’t know where this post will go; it might be something of a travelogue, like my posts about my 2016 Portugal trip, or it might wander off into something else entirely. The point is to get writing again, something that I let slide very badly in 2018.

A Few Rants

I’ll get a couple of negative points off my chest first and be done with them.

Are there any more obnoxious and annoying tourists today than the Chinese? You’re in some relatively quiet, natural place and then you hear someone yakking loudly into a phone. You turn around and, sure enough, he is Chinese.

On my first full day, I wanted to take a photo of a small monastery building that was framed by red rock behind it. It would have been a perfect picture if some Chinese tourists hadn’t suddenly pulled up and parked their car in front the building, right in the center of my photo. Everyone else had parked in another area across from the building. They got out of the car, looked right at me holding my camera, then got their stuff from the car and walked away, leaving the car right there to ruin the shot.

Yes, there are words for such people, but this is a family blog.

The owner of the place I stayed at overnight near the Athens airport before I want to Santorini told me that of all the guests he has had to deal with over the years from almost every country imaginable, the Chinese have been the most arrogant and condescending. “They expect you to carry their bags for them, like a servant,” he told me.

I wasn’t surprised.

Windrose Airlines sucks. That about says it all.

Why is it that the so-called “smart cars,” the smallest cars on the road, can’t seem to stay on their own side of the street? It’s weird that the cars I met coming the other way that were most likely to be taking up part of my lane were these mini-midgetmobiles.

Greeks smoke a lot, and they often do it in restaurants and cafes. Believe it or not, Ukraine is actually ahead of the curve on limiting smoking in public buildings by comparison. I really hate cigarette smoke!

The Offseason

Touring a place like Santorini in the offseason is really a treat – unless you actually like crowds, traffic and long waits. I was able to enjoy driving on the island, especially in the south, because the traffic was light to nonexistent. But I did experience a bit of traffic in and around the main towns of Fira and Oia, so I can imagine what it must be like in the high season when this popular resort destination is choked with throngs of visitors.

At the tourist spots, there were few tourists and sometimes none at all. There were those occasional Chinese, however. I saw many huge tour buses parked in a few places on the island, but I only encountered a couple of them on the road. I can imagine what it must be like trying to drive around the island in the high season with exponentially more rental cars and lots of those huge buses on the narrow roads. No thank you!

Sure, it’s not so warm, and swimming was out of the question, but that’s fine for me. I prefer it to be a bit warm but not hot; 15-18 degrees Celsius in the daytime is perfect.

I had lunch one day in a tavern near the famous Red Beach, and for most of that time, I was the only customer. There was a family there when I arrived (from Virginia), and we chatted just a bit. But otherwise, I had the place to myself. Similarly, in the restaurant at the hotel I stayed at, I was the only customer for breakfast or dinner each day.

In the offseason, you get a better sense of how people really live. Locals are more open, and because they have fewer guests to deal with, they can take a little more time with you. And they do. I had some really interesting chats with the owners of the place I was staying at, Villa Michalis, and a few other places I stopped at.

At one little beachside café, the host asked me where I was from, and when I told him I had come from Ukraine, he started speaking Russian. He wanted to practice, and it was sort of funny to have two people trying to communicate in quite poor Russian. But at least for me it was enjoyable to speak Russian with someone who made my level seemed pretty good by comparison.

Life on Santonini in the offseason seems devoted largely to repairing and freshening up the facilities in preparation for the tourist season. In many places I saw workers renovating verandas and other structures that will be filled with tourists in just a few short months. And not all of the restaurants and cafes were even open. There was one Greek restaurant that I had read about and was looking forward to trying, a place called “Salt and Pepper” in Fira, but it was closed until April.

A popular, developed island like Santorini is never going to give you that feeling of isolation and quiet, but at least in the offseason you can find some quiet spots to get away and find some peace. I suspect this simply is not true in the high season.

The Sun Comes Up – The Sun Goes Down

Only on an island can you catch the sunrise and sunset over the sea on the same day. Of the two, the sunrise might be more inspiring You have to make the effort to get up early if you want to catch it, and it’s the birth of a new day, the beginning of your day, rather than the end.

But I like them both.

Very often in Colorado in the summer, we get gorgeous bursts of color as the sun drops down behind the mountain peaks, and those are some of the most beautiful sunsets I can recall. But when the sun sets into the sea or ocean, and there is just the right combination of clear sky with just a few clouds toward the horizon, it is magnificent.

I managed to catch a stunning sunset on my first evening. It was from a lighthouse on the southwest corner of the island. The next morning was completely cloudy, so I didn’t bother getting up for the sunrise, but I did go to a nearby beach on the southeast side for the next morning’s sunrise. It was a perfect sunrise, but my pictures came out much less than perfect for some reason. I was very disappointed. But I rectified that a few days later by catching a beautiful sunrise from my hotel balcony in the mainland port of Rafina.

Anata-wa Nihon-jin Desu Ka?

I mentioned earlier about the rather abrasive Chinese tourists. In contrast, however, I was delighted on a couple of occasions to run into some Japanese visitors. Of course, I lived in Japan for six years, so I have a great appreciation for the Japanese people, and I consider the Japanese language to be one of the world’s more beautiful languages – much more so than Chinese.

On my last full day on Santorini, I decided to have lunch in a little pizzeria, and I chose a table by a window with a nice view of the caldera. Shortly after I sat down, two girls came in and sat behind me. They seemed polite and were talking quietly with each other. But after a few minutes, I realized they were speaking Japanese.

After a while, I decided to ask them – in Japanese – if they were from Japan. They were quite surprised – and pleased – to hear someone speak to them in their own language, and we had a brief conversation (in English, of course, because my Japanese is far worse even than my Russian). Then I left them to enjoy their lunch together, but made a point to say goodbye and wish them well in Japanese when I left.

To add to the Japan-related coincidences, the person sitting next to me on my return flight from Santorini to Athens was a young guy from Japan. We had a very nice conversation during the short flight (in English).

The Joy of Driving

One of the things I enjoyed most about my time on the island was driving around. I rented a small Peugeot to get around and enjoyed it a lot. It was a very simple car without all the bells and whistles that my rentals in Portugal or the UK had, but on a tiny island where no place is more than a 40-minute drive from anyplace else, you don’t need a GPS or advanced audio system.

Driving is one ofthe greatest joys of my life, but in Ukraine, I don’t drive at all. So for the past 10 years or so, the only chances to drive have been when I’ve been on vacation, and during my UK vacation in July I left most of the driving to my daughter. So it was a real pleasure to be behind the wheel, especially in a place where there was almost no traffic and no stress.

Not Really My Kind of Place

I enjoyed my four short days on Santorini, but it’s not a place I would pine to return to. It’s an arid island, as are most of the islands in the Aegean, I guess, which just makes it less attractive. And it’s quite developed, meaning there are not so many places where you can just get away from people and enjoy a natural environment. I managed to find a few spots, but during the high season, I imagine that even these would have tourists swarming about.

My favorite island getaway, thus far, remains Sao Miguel. It’s one place I might like to return to someday, and it would be interesting to check out some of the smaller islands in the Azores. Although Sao Miguel does get a fair amount of tourists in the high season, you can still find plenty of lush, beautiful places. I imagine that the other islands would also be very green, but with fewer people. Santorini, on the other hand, seems like the kind of place that is never really lush or green.

Still, Santorini is a nice place, and I really liked the people. For those who like warm water, sunny beaches, good food, and some ancient history, it can be a great destination – as long as you don’t mind sharing with a few thousand other tourists in the high season.

But I won’t be going back. It’s time to start thinking about a totally different summer vacation.

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Driving in Chicago (well, sort of)

This is a piece I wrote sometime around 2003 when I was working as a project manager for an environmental cleanup project outside of Chicago and losing my mind trying to deal with the many loony personalities in the local community of Oak Park. I had totally forgotten about it until I found it on a storage disk, and it made me laugh to remember everything my colleagues and I had to go through on that awful project. I was playing around with a sort of a Dave Barry writing style back then, so I thought it would be fun to post here.

If you are planning a fun-filled driving tour of a lawless third-world country where all the local drivers are self-taught, licenses and insurance are considered silly frills, lane markings are just suggestions, and the rules of the road are analogous with the rules of the jungle, you might want to consider spending a week in preparation by driving around Chicago.

Although I have experienced the joy of driving on a wide variety of roads and conditions in and around Chicago, most of my daily Chicago driving experiences have actually been in Oak Park, a small, rectangular suburb just west of the city. Chicago area suburbs are required to use some combination of seven words – oak, elm, forest, river, park, hurst, and brook – or else they cannot receive matching funds from the state of Illinois for maintenance of their many fine roads. This is why one avoids driving in Berwyn or Cicero.

“Suburb” is really a misnomer because Oak Park is quite urbanized with many impoverished neighborhoods complete with broken-down cars on the streets, a dynamic criminal element, a flourishing drug trade, and – of course – plenty of traffic. What sets it apart as a suburb, aside from legal incorporation, is the fact that many of its cab drivers speak English, even if only as a second language.

Oak Park is actually two very different places: The north is populated primarily by wealthy white people who own big homes designed by Oak Park’s patron saint, Frank Lloyd Wright. So loved is Frank Lloyd that the local government once sought to officially change its name to Franklloydwrightsville, but then they would have lost all that state money for road repairs and dog parks.

The south is pretty much indistinguishable from Chicago or Berwyn, and most of the people live in small homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s less successful brother, Skippy, who was later found to have suffered from attention deficit disorder and severe nervous twitches in his hands. Oak Park rules require that at least four houses in south Oak Park occupy the equivalent lot size as one house in north Oak Park.

Oak Park was named after its many oak trees and many parks, most of which eventually became the private yards of wealthy people in the north or were paved over to build lovely lower-income housing in the south.  In between the north and the south is a thriving business district – despite the best efforts of the local government – in which there are many expensive condos and town homes populated by Oak Park’s most influential residents: wealthy white homosexuals. 

Oak Park’s town motto is (and we are not making this up) “One tree, many nuts.”

Actually, Oak Park is a village, not a town. This change is believed to have been made shortly after its other patron saint, Hillary Clinton, published her book about taking villages, which I originally thought was a novel about the Vietnam War.  Imagine my surprise. I am still curious to know who actually wrote that book, but not curious enough to waste time reading it.

To say that Oak Park is politically liberal is like revealing that dolphins defecate in the water. Like liberals everywhere, Oak Parkers like to call themselves “progressives” because it fits with their collective superiority complex.

In the finest liberal tradition of trying to control other people’s lives as much as possible, Oak Park likes to regulate everything, and its village council is always very busy making up new rules to force everyone else to conform to their view of the world. On those rare occasions when they can’t think of something to make a new rule about, they amuse themselves instead by sending their bureaucratic minions out to harass restaurants and other businesses, issue parking tickets, or count how many pets residents have.

But the fact is that Oak Park can almost always think of something new to prohibit or require, and they are really very creative about it. For example, by official ordinance, it is illegal to own or carry a nuclear weapon within the village limits (we are not making that up).

It is also illegal to be a Republican or Libertarian, or to listen to conservative talk radio. Oak Park even has a village-sponsored jamming device located somewhere in the public library that is specifically tuned to prevent anyone from getting good reception on WLS-AM, the Chicago radio station that carries many conservative talk shows. I heard that Oak Park attempted once to make Christian prayer illegal, but a “higher power” prevailed in thwarting that attempt. (OK, so some of that might have been made up, but just a little.)

Oak Park prides itself on embracing human diversity (provided none of those diverse humans are conservative or Christian), and this is evidenced by the many black people and many homosexuals who live there. Of course, in Oak Park, you can’t actually say “black” or “homosexual” (you guessed it, they passed an ordinance).  In fact, the president of the village council herself proudly pledges allegiance to a rainbow flag.

Oak Park goes to great lengths to tout its many gay and lesbian residents because they are mostly white and have money. This allows them to claim the diversity mantle and act very superior while obscuring the fact that they really wish that most of the African-American people would stay in Chicago or Berwyn. As it is, most of the black people live in the houses designed by Skippy Wright that are crammed onto the small lots on the south side, while homosexuals generally live in expensive new condo developments near the business district, most of which were happily funded by the village government in order to attract more gays and lesbians with money.

Oak Park is believed to be the first community in the entire nation to be considering an ordinance requiring that all residents be homosexual. They believe this could also help solve the “African-American problem” by encouraging more of them to move to Chicago or Berwyn where they could remain heterosexual.

Although all residents of Oak Park are required to vote either Democrat or Green for federal and state offices, the village has a variety of entertaining political parties for its local elections with names such as the Village Managers Association, the Out Party, and the Village Citizen’s Alliance. But by far, the most popular local party is the Entitlement Party, sometimes known also as the Pity Party. 

The basic philosophy of this party is that they are all victims who are “owed” something by everyone else. In their view, “someone,” such as the federal or state government, corporations, or utility companies, should be forced (by village ordinance, of course) to simply give them stuff. This is because they believe they are entitled the same stuff that anyone else has, but should not be expected to have to actually work and earn it.

Admission to the Entitlement Party is generally open to anyone who is not a heterosexual white male. In some cases, however, heterosexual white males have been allowed to join the party, provided they sign a letter asserting how much they hate themselves for their race, gender, sexual orientation and the terrible treatment their forefathers perpetrated on everyone else.  Considering that Oak Park will probably enact a ban on heterosexual white males soon (unless they are officially registered as househusbands), the admission criteria may become moot.

Because so many of its residents chose academia over actually working for a living and are, therefore, very well educated, Oak Park has two weekly newspapers. One paper is called Oak Leaves and is so thick it has to be bound with staples. The actual news content, however, can be read in approximately five minutes. Oak Leaves is the less popular of the two papers because it is owned by a large corporation that publishes local papers all around Chicagoland. Due to this corporate relationship, it is largely considered to be a pawn of the right wing and ultimately responsible for keeping Guatemalan peasants in forced poverty and depleting the ozone layer.

The other paper, Wednesday Journal, is one of those publications where journalistic integrity is not just a motto, it’s an oxymoron. The Journal’s real motto is “All the News that’s Fit to Slant.” It is edited by an avowed socialist, and its staff is made up of “reporters” who were not good enough to intern for a large Chicago daily or work for the Oak Leaves. At the Journal, they never let facts get in the way of a good piece of left-wing propaganda.

Oak Park has a very entertaining government system with numerous autonomous entities such as the park district board and school district board, which provide opportunities for citizens with no talent and overriding Napoleon complexes to pretend they are actually on the village council making up all those ordinances to control everyone else. 

The park board is especially fun because everyone who gets elected believes that it is a stepping stone to higher elected office such as the sewer commission. No one actually gets on the park board because they have an interest in parks; they just want to pretend that they are the alternate village council and prepare for that big opportunity to move up to controlling sewers. Plus, they feel special when they get to go into “executive session.”

One of the most fun things to do on the park board is to feud with the village council and to say insulting things about village trustees, which will then get printed in one of the local papers, further heightening that board member’s renown in the community and enhancing that person’s opportunity to make it to higher office. Each of Oak Park’s newspapers is aligned with one of the boards; the Oak Leaves tends to side with the village council, while the Wednesday Journal exists largely as the park district board’s “newsletter.”

But I digress. This was supposed to be about driving in Chicago, wasn’t it?

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March of the Meat Machine

It’s the end of the day. Another “consultation” and more bad news. I trudge along in my black coat, a wool cap protecting my head from the cold wind, with a backpack over my shoulder, a gym bag in one hand, and in the other a set of techno-med images that seem to confirm there is a brain somewhere inside my head.

But the images only prove that there is a three-pound piece of meat inside my skull. And at the moment, that’s all it is: a piece of meat. No mind, no soul, just a meat-based computer executing an application called “walk.”

And a piece of meat is all I am – a meat machine marching slowly along the cold, slushy street and the crowded stairs and passageways of the subway in accordance with the meat computer’s instructions. As my brain tells my legs to put one foot in front of the other and my hands clutch the bags that dangle by my side, I just lurch forward, without expression, without thought, without feeling – without anything that might mark me as more than just a kind of organic robot.

I lag behind a wave of humanity moving from one station through a cold gray passageway to an adjoining station. They move past me and, for a moment, I am walking alone. Until the next wave comes up behind me.

In that brief interlude between waves, I wonder. Why am I walking through this place? Why am I in this city? Why have I been here for so long? Why has my life come down to a series of numb zombie walks through soul-less metro stations or along the same old gray streets? What has happened to me? Where did my spirit go that has left me to just exist inside this cocoon of flesh, blood and bone?

As I stand on the platform waiting for the next train with hundreds of other meat machines, I look at the concrete wall across the tracks. I wonder if this is real or if I am having one of my strange dreams. It would be better if it was a dream because I would wake up and snap out of it. But that’s not my luck.

Maybe I’m a ghost. I am moving like a disembodied spirit. But that can’t be; a spirit is still something of a soul, I suppose. And I am without spirit or soul. Imagine being emptier inside even than a ghost.

Neither am I dead, at least not completely. I live, but in every sense that matters, I am lifeless. Where is happiness? Where is love? Where is passion? What happened to reason? For that matter, where, even, is pain? I feel nothing, I am nothing.

Happiness? Were you ever here? Perhaps once. Before the shapeless black apparitions rose up from below and blotted you out. Larger and hungrier they became, sucking what happiness remained, faster and faster until there was no more. The light of joy finally went out for good, and I became one of those shapeless black apparitions myself.

Passion? The fire died, little by little, until all that remained were a few smoldering embers. And then they went cold, never to blaze again. The ashes have been cold for so long, it’s like they never held warmth in the first place. I can’t remember.

Reason? How can reason survive in a world that makes no sense? Everything I see – in the news, at work, in people around me, in everything everywhere – makes no sense anymore. It’s a card game with nothing but jokers. The world is broken, the people are broken. I am broken.

Love? It never existed. What I thought was love flew away long ago, far before I realized it was gone, replaced with tantalizing lies and sweet self-deceit, circus acts and predictable practical jokes for the mistresses of ceremonies.

Jump, jump up on the pedestal! Do tricks for me! Entertain and please me! Then go back to your dark little cage, and don’t let me be aware of you until I require you again.

Come on, Charlie Brown! Kick the football. Don’t worry, I will hold it still this time. I promise! Once again I trust, and yet again she pulls the ball away at the last moment. I fall on my ass as I’ve done so many times before, and she laughs the same evil laugh as each of those many times.

Love and trust: the moronic blabbering of self-loathing fools in a carnival sideshow.

Happiness, love, passion, friendship, trust, loyalty, basic human decency: all just so many lies and illusions.

But wait! I do feel something. There is pain.

Alas, it’s not pain of the soul or spirit. How can it be when there is no soul inside this meat machine? I can't cry; I've forgotten what that was like. No, it’s just physical pain. The back, the hip, the knee. Trying to stand up on a moving train with my hands full, while smug young nobodies sit with their faces in their smartphones.

I would hate them… if I could feel anything.

And so I push my way out of the subway, acting on instinct. Like salmon, we all flow in unison toward the stairs and climb up to the exits. I wonder if the other fish are as devoid of feeling as I am. To look at the faces, you would have to think so: there are almost never any expressions on the faces of the Kharkiv metro. But most of them probably still have some things to cling to that help them believe… in something. Good for them. I wonder what that might feel like. I wonder what feeling might feel like

The “walk” application in my meat computer guides me out of the metro and out to the cold street. And more slush. I trudge on to spend another empty evening of an empty life in an empty apartment so that I can “rest” for another empty day at an empty job tomorrow.

And the meat machine marches on.

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