Recap & Homeward Bound

So, this is it. My last night in the Hippo Hostel, in Budva, in Montenegro, in the Balkans. I am heading off to known and unknown elements back at home in the San Francisco Bay Area again in less than 5 hours. Sigh.

Before I get too much into thanking all those people who played any role in my many mind-boggling memories of this place from the past 6+ months, and then rehashing some of those memories in quick-witted fashion, I should say that I'm going back to the Bay, and hopefully finding a nice, new apartment in Oakland again, near the lake (anyone know of any good vacancies?) because I didn't manage to find an impressive new job in public radio anywhere else in the country that would necessitate my relocating out of the Bay Area so that I can practice the occupation that I have loved for almost 10 years now. So, sigh, again. I'm going back to my favorite city in the world, where the largest concentration of loved ones in my life reside, where all my favorite places and things are, and where my beloved is waiting for me to not have a long-distance relationship with him anymore. I'm not that bummed about going back, thus.

But, it's been quite an odyssey here these past several months. It's hard to be leaving this place that since April 5th, I've been calling Home, this beautiful, lively, hectic, scatter-brained, infuriating, wonderful place -- and that would be both the hostel AND the city of Budva. As far as life-changing, eye-opening, furiously intense, and adventurous chapters of a person's life, this ranks up there just under my 4 and a half years in college as the period of my "youth" that I'll think back to for the rest of my cognizant years on earth as a time when I met a world of wonderful people and things, and experienced the most in life. And, it all fit into a neat little window of half a year.

I'll remember a lot from this window: the places, the people, the sights, the conversations, the laughs, the torment, the mishaps, the food, the fun, the folly, the things I wrote about in this blog, the things I *didn't* write about, and everything in between. I think in Italian, the phrase mille locos, or something spelled similarly, translates to "a thousand crazies". Every last crazy of my mille locos these past 6+ months was worthwhile. From my early days here transitioning into this world, to my laid-up months with the back injury, to life in the trenches during the height of the heat, humidity, and water shortage of Budva, to the past month and a half when I've been able to double my number of red dots on the wall map I own of cities I've been to -- it was all worth it. All of it. That's right, I wouldn't have skipped this for anything in the world. Though, no, I also wouldn't do it again. Because I believe that the most life-affirming experiences we have, the ones that shape us with sledge hammers and not chisels, we can only have once, and must then move on to the next one. It's true, my therapist told me.

So, to recap: Martina is leaving the building. In just a few short hours. I'm traveling to London, New York, and Orange County for the next 2 weeks. I'll be back "home" the night of Thursday, October 25th. Everyone residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'll be expecting a massive ticker tape parade down Market Street that weekend. Thanks. And, I'll see you all soon, wherever you are.

Greece is the Word

I think the song lyrics go something like this, if I can remember my John Travolta musicals right:

Greece is the word (is the word that they heard)
It's got groove, it's got meaning
Greece is the time, is the place, is the motion
Now Greece is the way we are feeling.

Or, maybe not. But, since I just got back from there 2 days ago, I guess I should tell you a little bit about it.

This was my last "holiday" before I leave Budva for good, and it was 11 days of rest, relaxation, and a number of frivolous things that girls do when they've got lots of quality time together and nothing specific required of them. Nicole and I arrived separately in Athens, greeted each other with surprise and excitement, as if we hadn't planned on being at an airport in Greece at the same time on the same day, and then we hit the town. Actually, the town and two islands. That's specifically what we hit. Suffice to say lots of good times were had. In the interest of brevity, let me just give you some of the highlights (and maybe a lowlight or two, though I won't dwell on those much because I'm not feeling like a downer today) of what we saw and did in each of those 3 places that were thus hit...

ATHENS (4 nights): The capital city of Greece, Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 3,000 years. They like to brag about it being the leading city of all Ancient Greece, enjoying a host of cultural achievements during the 5th century BC that laid the foundations for western civilization, blahdy, blahdy, blah.

• The poshy hotel that Nic got us was short on friendliness but long on clear views of the Acropolis from their rooftop jacuzzi deck. It was centrally-located too, within meandering distance to 3 major Metro stops.
  
• We went to a ridiculously entertaining dinner at a tiny place called Edodi, situated inside an old house in a neighborhood that hardly let on about the charming, intimate setting that the restaurant enjoyed inside. The entertaining part comes from the incredibly personal attention you get from all the staff who bring every single dish on their menu to your table and describe them one by one to help you decide what to order. First, you choose apps that way, then the staff bring out beautifully arranged plates of raw ingredients for each main dish and explain how the dishes are prepared. Then, the desserts come out on a multi-tier cart. And finally, the toothpick dispenser is delivered to your table in a music box with a dancing puppet inside it. You open the drawer to get a toothpick out and the music starts so that the little puppet inside the window of the box dances around. It takes a guy named Romeo to bring that kind of charm to the act of getting a toothpick out to, well, pick your teeth.
• If you want to see live music in Athens, the way to go is rembitika, which they call "Greek Blues". (Though, being a fan of blues music personally, I didn't notice just 12 bars being played.) There are rooftop tavernas in the Plaka district of Athens that have great views of the Acropolis all lit up at night, where you can see local musicians playing rembitika, trying to inspire the Greek restaurant patrons to get up and dance. My favorite part of watching local people do traditional Greek dance? -- Anyone who's willing to get up always has a couple of friends who will come with and crouch on the edge of the dance floor, clapping along to the music and serving as The Active Admiring Audience that the dancing person is dancing for. Being a performing seal myself, I find that tradition very motivational. We went to drink and watch 2 nights in a row.

Cut to: a 9-hour ferry ride south to our first island destination.

SANTORINI (3 nights): The southernmost member of the Cyclades islands in Greece, Santorini, also known as Thera, is a small, circular archipelago of volcanic islands in the Aegean Sea, about 200 km southeast of the mainland. The largest island in the group has little towns built on the top of cliffs facing the caldera, a volcanic feature formed by the collapse of land following an eruption. Santorini's caldera was formed in the Minoan eruption around 1600 BC. (Yes, I looked all of this up to impress you.)

• This place was inhabited by the cruise ship set, which I personally feel is a population of travelers that can suck the charm out of even a port like Heaven. I saw a woman freaking out and yelling at a local man over some donkeys walking "too close" past her on their way down the mountainside to the docks that she was heading toward too so that she could "catch a boat out of this place".
• About those donkeys: I wanted to ride one up the mountainside as soon as I read about them in the guidebook, but then changed my mind when I saw how bored and depressed they looked waiting around with their wranglers for some overweight American fares to come along. I decided not to burden a donkey just for the novelty of the experience, and opted to ride up the mountainside in a cable car that dangled from overhead, much like the Sky Ride at Disneyland back home. That was fun too, actually.
• All Nic and I did on this island was sit around eating, drinking, and talking, and strolling the tiny passageways and dangerously cobbled stone alleys shopping for all manner of lovely trinkets and attire for mostly ourselves but also a few loved ones. I bought more on Santorini than I have done in the past 6 months of travel and living abroad total. I need new, bigger luggage.
• It's a toss-up which is my favorite of the 2 restaurants that we ate at more than one time each on the island. One contender was Naoussa. The cool thing about that place was that the gregarious, affable staff there who greet you upon arrival with a freshly-poured glass of locally-made white wine remembered our names the 2nd time we came by for dinner, even though it was 2 nights after the first time we were there. I felt like a total local, despite the fact that there are no locals on Santorini, just tourists and seasonal hospitality industry workers. The other restaurant that I might call my fave was Elia, run by Yanni, the island's resident Sean Penn look-alike and man-about-town. He knew EVERYONE in the restaurant industry on Santorini, and had a million things to say about everyone and everything. This is the type of guy who goes out all night to local bars after he's closed his restaurant and pays 20 Euros to the nearby baker just so that he can show his friends the baker's pet parrot who talks and whistles at pretty ladies. Yanni told great stories!
  

Then, it was a 4-hour ferry ride north again to our only other island destination.

NAXOS (3 nights): The largest of the Cyclades islands at 428 square km, Naxos was the center of archaic Cycladic culture, meaning that it now sells a lot of bronze or stone replicas of ancient idols, helmets, and other found archaeological garbage in the souvenir shops around Hora, the main town on the island. Not that that bothers the archaeologist in me at all.

• This was definitely my favorite place that we visited in Greece, which makes it nice that we ended the trip with it. I loved how Naxos actually had locals and families living on the island year-round, and now that the high season was coming to a close, the people you see on the main stretch of road in the center of town on a Friday or Saturday night are Greeks who live there and are out with their kids, or on dates, or enjoying the quarterfinals of the Rugby World Cup on the flat-screen T.V.'s at the bars. (Go, Argentina!)
• The hotel where we stayed was about 10 paces from the beautiful and largely unpopulated Agios Georgios Beach. I laid out on lounge chairs under umbrellas for hours at a time and went wading into the shallow waters that ran for meters out to sea for 2 straight days. Everyone in Santorini kept warning us that Naxos would be quiet when we got there, but actually, when I'm looking to spend some time on the beach, what I *want* is quiet. It was perfect!
• Nic and I stumbled onto the Domus Festival (a music and dance performance festival) in the Kastro (the old castle which was the center of things for the small Catholic population in the area) on our last night in town. We saw an overly-emotive jazz vocalist do pieces from Ella's songbook, and while she had a really nice voice, her grandstanding unfortunately made us have to avert our eyes so that we wouldn't laugh. The performance aside, it was incredibly cool to see live jazz performed in the cellar of an old stone church-turned-museum, surrounded by religious and household artifacts recovered from as far back as the 4th Crusades. That might've been the coolest venue in which I've seen live jazz performed to date.

Another ferry back to Athens then for a final, brief night there before Nic and I parted company in the Athens airport on Monday. She, heading back to the Bay, and me, going to Budva for my last stand. All in all, the Greece leg of my travels was a wild success of the luxurious relaxation variety. Thanks in large part to my dearest friend Nicole and her substantial appetite for idle conversation.