So, I’m in Greece. In Ancient Corinth to be exact. I guess my dad has some business being here and, I suspect, decided to bring the family along as some sick joke.
When I signed up for this little excursion, I did so expecting that what we were doing was going on vacation. After all, it is July, I am on summer break, Greece is known as a tourist destination; it all made sense in my mind. What this has become is nowhere near a vacation.
We’re staying at a house just across the street from the “American School,” a residence house for archeology students who spend their summers assisting on digs here in Corinth. The house, while perhaps “folksy” or “cozy,” lacks many of the luxury items I’ve grown accustomed to in the states. Luxuries like a refrigerator, a functioning toilet, and consumable water. On the plus side, it has hard wood floors, and they tell me there’s a maid who will launder my unmentionables, but I have yet to call in her services.
They tell me that the house was used by the Nazis as a base of operations during WWII, which has led me to constantly wonder, no matter what I happen to be doing, “I wonder if Hitler did (fill in the blank activity) here too.” When I’m sitting out on the porch, I wonder if Eichmann was as annoyed by the super aggressive flies as I am. When I’m taking a dump, I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, Goebbels had similar problems getting the damn thing to flush. When I hide to shamefully masturbate in the bathroom, I wonder if Hitler was ever out in that living room, planning an extermination, and the stress just got to him, got to him to the point where he just had to take a little break and pound one out.
Ancient Corinth itself is little more than a tourist stop, worthy of perhaps twenty minutes at most before getting back to the task of getting to Athens. We’re spending three goddamn weeks here. My brother, David, and I have been here three days and we are already almost at wits end as to how exactly we are going to survive.
To compound the boredom problem, I have discovered something that the guidebooks conveniently forget to tell you: Greek food sucks. Even the pizza tastes like hell. The other night at dinner, David got something called Mussaka. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this garbage, but from where I was sitting, it looked like the chef had pooed on the plate, rubbed some dirt on it, and topped the thing off with a creme brulee. It was nauseating. I ordered a steak (beef, way too much fat, not enough meat), and I was gagging because I had to look at that goddamn Mussaka. Watching David actually eat it was almost too much for me to take.
All was not lost, or so I thought. There are about ten restaurants here, surely one of them will be able to suit my fancy. No fucking way. Every restaurant here serves the exact same fucking things, all prepared the exact same fucking way.
Oh well, I thought, there are little super markets I can frequent, where I can fill up on potato chips and junk food. This would be a great plan except that every super market has the exact same things, and each place has four flavors of chip: plain (no salt, gross), BBQ (not what we Americans might expect, also gross), oregano (sounds intriguing, tastes like ass), and salted (perhaps too salted). I did chance upon a package of pizza flavored Cheetoes, but guess what, they were crappy Greek pizza flavored.
I swear, as soon as I get home, it is straight to McDonald’s with me. I’m not going to find my friends, I’m not even going to tell my girlfriend I’m back. I’m just going to have the Mo-X driver head for the nearest golden arches, fuck what the address is on my passenger info sheet.
I’ve touched on this a little bit here, but the point merits elaboration. Everything is the same here. Not the same as America; that would be delightful. Every store has the exact same souvenirs that every store keeper pretends are unique to their shop. Every restaurant, though differently named, and claiming to serve different things, have the exact same menu. Every place serves the same beer (Amstel Light, though some places have a locally brewed beer that only closely resembles the taste of Camo). Every market has the same selection: chips, biscuits (not Pillsbury, these are like bad cookies), Coke, Orangeade, vegetables, disgusting looking frozen meat, and chocolate sprinkles (I’m not sure what the deal is here, but every store has at least three or four different brands of chocolate sprinkles, where they only have one brand of any other type of food. I’m comfortable reporting: the Greeks love chocolate sprinkles).
The entire place seems to be set up on the belief that no one is going to be in town long enough to go to more than one of these stores (or restaurants, markets, etc.), so why have any diversity at all? It makes sense to me, and I approve, but feel like quite a rube staying here as long as I am.
The trip here was decent, the 24 plus hours of traveling that got us from St. Louis to Corinth went remarkably smoothly. I made a photo essay (which I will post as soon as it’s complete) which I have tentitively titled “Dan Smokes Around the World.” I’m sure you can guess the theme.
Conspicuously absent from my photo essay, you will find, are pictures of me smoking in the airport in Paris. As it turns out, there is no smoking anywhere in the airport (I would say its name, but I’m not sure how to spell Charles’s last name). Can you believe that? Growing up, the only two things I knew about the French were that they were snooty and smoked way too many cigarettes, and now I come to find out that they are such giant pussies as to not even allow a smoking lounge in their airport? I could barely control my rage, and decided to protest by eating a croissant and going to sleep.
But anyway, here I am, in Ancient Corinth, expected to eat shit because these people call it cuisine; expected to make polite conversation with stuck up intellectuals who clearly look down on me for the indecisive path I’ve followed through my undergrad years; expected to go along happily with whatever boring ass activity my parents decide to foist upon me; expected to volunteer at the Corinth museum to compensate them for “room and board” (in the shitty, dilapidated Nazi house); expected to be having a good time with this all. I can’t shake the feeling that this trip was one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life.
I’ll keep you all posted as this disaster progresses.
it sucks that it is at your expense, but this is one of, if not your finest, pieces. I too am also on a sort of mini-vactation right now (El Paso, Boulder, Missouri and Chi-town in a few days,) and if I could some how magically put Cibi in your place and you in Cibi’s, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Seriously, your misery is comic gold. You should do a travel show where all you do is complain about how much everything sucks. All those shows on the travel channel talk about how romantic Europe is, you need to show how much of a pain it is. Your tale reminds me of the time Micah and I ended up in a tourist trap town in Italy called Taormina and for the life of us could not find a way to get out of the city. And they make you volunteer? That’s brutal.I knew you were going to hate Greece regardless, but you’re being put through something no one should suffer. Opa! Motherfucker.
I’m glad you’re all enjoying my misery. I don’t expect it to end anytime soon.
I am gladdened by your misery. I must say, however, that I can produce a much fattier piece of meat. It’s called samgyopsal, and it’s the bacon to end all bacons. It is ten inches long, and is mostly fat. Its name literally translates to “Three Layer Meat”. In actuality, it is three layers of fat. It has a cousin, “Five Layer Meat”, which I cannot list as a meat, but does stand to triumph over Greek steak in the Battle Of The Bulge.
I am prepared in this life to subject myself to the incoveniences and duress of many of our world’s locales. Would you care to join me?
[...] know what a lot of you are thinking: I went to Greece for a month last summer, and had a miserable time. The truth is that I had a miserable time because I had no [...]