Clearing the Air

This is not going to be the most entertaining post on this blog.  For one thing, there won't be any pictures.  Trust me, you wouldn't want any pictures.  Because this post is about the stuff we haven't mentioned so far, the less glamorous aspects of our first couple of weeks in Greece.  It's mostly about caca.

Which apparently means the same thing in Greek as it does in English and who knows how many other languages.  Let's start with the thing that ensures that certain of my relatives, never mind precisely which ones, will never visit us in Athens:  we aren't allowed to put toilet paper in the toilet.  At all.  It has to go in the trash.  This applies to home and elsewhere. 

I have already proven myself to be a poo weenie.  On our four-day canoe trip with Chase and Phyllis and Sasha this summer, two day's paddle up the Tangle Lakes in beautiful tundra, not having seen another person besides the six of us on the entire trip, I ventured into tactless territory and asked Phyllis why she carried a lighter with her when she went off to do her doody.  (She'd announced her reason for  heading off over the hill and then that she'd forgotten the lighter and returned for it, so I wasn't being as nosy as you thought.)  "Don't you burn your t.p.?" she asked in genuine surprise.  I felt ashamed of my poor wilderness ethic, as did Alex, but we were not persuaded to borrow a lighter.  I guess I feel that if burying my business was good enough for my father and his father, it's good enough for me.  Wait, I don't think either of them ever did any such thing.  I know for a fact my father, who loved to hike, would go to great lengths to avoid having to poop in the wild.  Well, anyway, burying is what I was taught in my formative camping years of those innocent Sixties and Seventies, and this old dog is not going to learn that particular new trick.  Mea poopa, mea maxima poopa.

But here in Athens I wasn't given the option of wimping out.  We were instructed that we were never, ever to put t.p. in the toilet.  No precise consequences were delineated, although there were a few apologetic allusions to the poor plumbing in Greece, and especially in Athens.  But I don't need specific threats--I have no trouble imagining all on my own the horrors that could ensue if I and my family disobey the rules.  Never mind the possibility of our toilet backing up all over our apartment.  I don't want to be standing in front of our building, with all the other inhabitants likewise evacuated (you should excuse the pun) and staring at us (more likely shouting at us in Greek), while sirens and revolving lights announce to the entire neighborhood the emergency presence of city sewage officers backed up by the toilet branch of the local police, as the entire neighborhood comes under martial law for the duration of the plumbing emergency.  I don't care how small are the odds of such a thing actually happening, I'm not going to risk it. 

You probably think I'm going to talk about the toilets themselves next, don't you?  But I'm not.  I'll leave that topic for some female blogger, who would likely have a lot more than I to say about, for instance, the whole topic of toilet seats and the lack thereof.  In fact, one of my creative writing students wrote her first poem of the semester on the subject of toilets, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty.  I mean, the poem was actually very good, but the subject was filthy.  Maybe she'll post the poem on her own blog, and then I can put in my very first link and you can read all about it.  But, like I said, I'm not going to talk about toilets here.  Except for their inevitable appearance above in connection with the discussion of toilet paper, from which they could hardly be entirely excluded.  But no actual focus on or attention to toilets themselves in this post, no sir.

That's probably actually enough on the entire topic of human caca--how about we talk about cat doodoo?  It's everywhere on the sidewalks, adding to the fun of negotiating the "parked" cars and motorcycles, low tree branches, irregular paving, and other pedestrian challenges.  Some of my students claim to be bothered by the smell of cat pee everywhere, but I myself hardly notice it for all the smell of cat poo.  You smell to-mah-to, I smell to-may-to, it still stinks. 

Instead I'll talk about the weather.  It's pretty danged hot here for a trio of Alaskans.  We have been mighty grimy on occasion, and not all of those occasions involved returning from the beach, when one expects a certain level of grime.  We ran the air conditioner in our bedroom for a couple of hours to cool it down, and when we went in there for a break from the heat of preparing a meal for my students, it felt blissfully cool.  But the thermometer on my travel alarm revealed that the room was at 77 degrees Fahrenheit.  And now we're headed south to Crete, where it will presumably be even warmer than Athens, and we're being told to bring coats and raingear, to prepare for the possibility of cooler weather.  I haven't yet worn long pants in Greece, and only regretted my shorts once, at a reception at the Athens Centre where I felt under-dressed (but not remotely cool).  I've only worn closed-toe shoes twice, once to run and the other time on the Acropolis when I wished I was wearing sandals.  So do you think I'm packing any long-sleeved shirts to take to Crete, despite the well-meaning advice of my colleagues?  We have a tiny umbrella under which we all three will crouch if it rains, but I'm not taking a raincoat.  I actually look forward to the possibility of being a little chilly.  Bring on that nighttime sea air. 

I just realized that I mentioned returning from the beach in the paragraph above, and I'm afraid that at that point I might have lost some readers, those of you who were pained at having to read a litany of complaints from someone who has been swimming in the Aegean several times in the last couple of weeks and now has to take time out from writing this blog to go lie on the beach in Crete.  I guess I'll stop there.  There must be other bad things about living in Greece, and I'm sure I could come up with them if I had time.  But the Minotaur calls.  I think I can just make out a few Greek words I recognize,  despite the bullish voice and Crete accent.  One of those words might have been "caca."