Google maps is mostly wonderful, but occasionally just terrible.

Alligator or Crocodile: Google maps wanted me to find out in person!

Google maps is mostly wonderful, but occasionally just terrible.  I rented a car at the Athens airport and drove back to a hotel where I was staying. The hotel was six miles away in a little village.  For some reason, Google maps told me to leave the highway and take a dirt road to the hotel.  For almost a mile, I followed the road with an increasing sense of foreboding.  At first it was two very small cars wide, then narrower. 

Then it went from straight to winding. There were stray dogs on and near the road. Then the road turned slightly downhill.  Although Athens is mostly very hilly, the area near the airport is flat and occasionally marshy. Slightly downhill can be significant.

It was.  I rounded a corner and there was a puddle. A big puddle. A width of the road puddle. I stopped. I stared. In the light of a waxing moon, the puddle was black but illuminated by the lunar light.  I looked beside the puddle and saw no clear path. The puddle itself was smooth—not rocks or branches sticking up through the surface, so it was deep.  The Renault Clio I was driving had about three inches of ground clearance, I had one bar of cell service, so I turned around and went back to the highway. 

Google tried to get me to turn around and go back to the impromptu alligator habitat, but I kept driving on the highway until it recalculated me a route on pavement.  Or was it crocodiles?

Persistent Pitch Men and Women in front of Athens Restaurants

Restaurant row in Athens.  Each restaurant has a 
pitch man or woman saying some version of "Eat here!"

Between my hotel and Athens and the place I rented bikes was a block of restaurants. They were side by side competing for tourists who could only eat so many meals.  My favorite coffee place was also at the far end of the line, so I passed restaurant row several times a day for three days.

Outside each of the restaurants was a hawker.  A man or woman who would say, “Eat here. Authentic Greek food. Or pizza if you want.” I passed by. Crossing the narrow street to the opposite sidewalk was no help.  Some of the times I was walking by I was wearing spandex—not a fashion choice of anyone else that I could see. 

Finally, the last night I wanted to eat a pizza, so I went in the restaurant with a tall, bearded guy doing the pitches and ordered pizza and water. 

When I left, I had to pass by a half-dozen other hawkers. One of them, a short, intense woman in her forties said, “Why did you go to his place? What did they offer you? Was it free beer? They give free beer.”

I was going to keeping walking, then I stopped and said, “They gave me a brand-new car. They gave me a 2020 Renault Clio.” 

She looked stunned for a minute then recovered and said, “What else?” Then the woman hawking for the restaurant beside hers, a taller woman in her late 20s, smiled and said, “Yes, what else did they give you?” 

I said, “Two motorcycles. A Ducati Monster and Honda CBR1000.”

She said, “You better be careful and not drink too much if you are riding those bikes.” 

I said I drank a whole bottle of sparkling water and would not touch the bikes till morning.  She smiled. The first woman forced a smile. Clearly, she had a side bet going about whether the old guy in spandex would ever eat in one of their restaurants.

A Woman Who Took Charge Like a Drill Sergeant Meeting a Recruit Bus

On the 15th of February at the beginning of a five-week trip across Europe and Israel, my friend Cliff and I took an Al Italia flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv, changing planes in Rome. Because the first flight was between two European Union countries, there was no customs check. We had a two-hour layover and knew there would be a customs check before flying to Israel.

We landed about a half-hour late; the next flight was in another terminal. As we left the plane, Cliff and I wondered if we would be spending the night in Rome. As we cleared the Jetway, we saw a tall, blond woman wearing an Al Italia flight attendant uniform holding a sign that said: Tel Aviv.

When we joined the group, she made a quick count, then an about face and marched away holding up the sign and saying, "Follow please."  We followed, about 20 of us. Fast. Cliff and I made jokes about whether we could keep up. We also said if she were not ex-military, she had us fooled.

After a long march she swept up to the customs area and pointed at two lines we were to join.  We obeyed.  All 20 of us. Customs proceeded quickly under the eye of our leader.  When we were all through customs, she counted, turned and marched us to the gate. We made the flight in plenty of time.  Once we were in line, she turned and marched back to her other duties.

It is a small joy for an old sergeant to follow someone confident who knows exactly what she is doing.

Shades of Yellow--in Taxis

This lovely, pale shade of yellow is the color of taxis in Greece

This German-standard color of taxis has also been declared yellow by the government in Greece. 

This is the cab of Niko, the taxi driver who took me to my hotel. It is only yellow in Greece.

When I first arrived in Greece, the hotel where I was staying sent a taxi for me.  The taxi ride was free, along with a very low nightly rate at the hotel.  The driver, Niko, met me at international arrivals. We walked to his cab. I noticed that many of the cabs were Mercedes and that they were a pale yellow—very different from the harsh yellow of NYC taxicabs.  When we got to his cab, it was cream color.  I said, “This is the color of a German cab.”

Niko spoke English well and told me about flying to Europe to buy the cab.  He was part of a group of Greek cab drivers who got permission to use cabs in German cream color rather than yellow.  He said the government decided to call cream color a shade of yellow, allowing any cabbie who wanted a cab that color to do so without special permission. 

Like German cabs, there are no ads, phone numbers or writing of any kind on cabs.  Not all are Mercedes, but all the cabs I saw were a paler yellow than is true in America. 

As in Tbilisi and Jerusalem, I saw a lot of Priuses as cabs.  Hybrids really are at their best in the intermittent, fast/slow/stop driving of city cabs. Niko wanted to keep driving Mercedes sedans as long as he could.  We talked like two old motorheads (which we are) about the joys of driving the A5 Autobahn in Germany in the middle of the night and going 150mph. 

Niko wants to travel to America someday, to New York and to California.  He loves Greece and is very proud of the projected number of tourists for the coming year. He said 36 million was the projected number.  The coronavirus will certainly put a damper on that, and on Niko’s travel plans.  

Nostalgia for Tito in North Macedonia--former Yugoslavia

Dozens of statues in every direction in the center of Skopje

In Skopje I met a very funny guy named Ferdinand. "Call me Ferdi," he said when I asked his name.

He asked me how I liked the statues in the center of Skopje. When I hesitated he said,  "I hate them. It's ridiculous." He began winding up toward a speech.  "We have no trains, the buses are old. The bridges are crumbling. But we have statues everywhere. Who needs them? I don't!"

He went on about the corruption and stupidity that has dogged his country since the fall of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. "Under Tito we had the best two decades in that past century. Maybe ever.  Tito falls. Capitalism is not so good for us.  Under Tito, the government worked. Now....." he shrugged.

Then he straightened up, his blue eyes flashed, he smiled and said, "But you guys elected Trump. At least we did not vote for someone who bragged about being corrupt. He showed you who he is, and you elected him."

I could only agree.  In "On Tyranny" Timothy Snyder recommends making friends in countries that have suffered under authoritarian rule.  They know what's coming. Ferdi's words echoed the Russian emigre writer Masha Gessen who said we should believe the tyrant when he says what he will do.

We talked about Bernie Sanders. As with other people I have spoken to in Europe, they all think Sanders is Trump's ticket to life rule. "If Trump runs against Sanders, democracy ends. Maybe it already has."

As I left I passed a lot of statues and some very old buses.

"If You Share A Room with A Monk in Jerusalem, You Have to Expect An Early Wake Up"

My recent ten-nation trip began with a week in Jerusalem. I met my old friend and roommate from our Cold War military service, Cliff Almes, in Darmstadt, Germany.  He has lived there since we both left the military in 1979, becoming a brother in a monastery there. He is Bruder Timotheus. 

We stayed in a German Guest House in the middle of the Old City of Jerusalem just 100 meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. For a monk of 40 years, being that close to the most holy site in Christendom was a blessing of the first order.  The Church is open between 4am and 6pm each day and mobbed with tourists and pilgrims every hour except 4-5am. 

So, Cliff awoke every morning at 3:30am, dressed and spent an hour at the Church.  Then came back. I was glad we could stay at a place that delighted Cliff so much.  I seldom go to sleep before midnight. Even if I weren’t an iconoclast, there is nothing that interests me enough to get up at 3:30am. 

Mostly I got back to sleep and stayed asleep through Cliff’s return, waking for the communal breakfast at 8:30am. 

Cliff stayed in Jerusalem a few more days as I went off to the Republic of Georgia. Two weeks later we went to Dachau and Nuremberg together.  We met in Darmstadt in the evening and drove to Dachau. At one point I asked if he had any reason to set his alarm before 7. He smiled and said, “No, but if you share a room with a monk in Jerusalem, you have to expect an early wake up.”

"Go Take a Flying F#ck at a Rolling Doughnut!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

  

In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”

Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.

The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted.  The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying. 

One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.”  I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.

But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything.  The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey. 

In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”  This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.

But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”

After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”