Comfortable with (a little) Chaos

Tags

adrenaline, chaos, solo travel, Weekly Photo Challenge

Chaos sometimes happens when I travel and in retrospect, it has created many of my most powerful trip memories. Life at home is rarely chaotic; it follows a fairly predictable rhythm and most days I’m a slightly boring creature of habit. Drop me into a foreign locale, though, and I’m usually (strangely) OK with all hell breaking loose after a few days of acclimation.

Kathmandu has to be the all-time winner for daily bedlam. On first arrival, the sensory assault here was overwhelming in an almost frightening way. As I left the airport late at night, alone, I wondered if my days of solo female travel needed to finally come to an end. A good sleep later, I was feeling intrigued by the cows in the street; a few days into it, I was charmed by the jumble of vendors jammed into alleys; and two weeks later, I was truly, madly in love with this colorfully outrageous and unruly city, even when an electrical box exploded a few feet away, sending me and dozens of Nepalis running for cover.

Athens – in full summer, blazing in 100-degree heat, and polluted by thousands of belching vehicles jam-packed into an overpopulated metropolis – ranks a close second. The chaos here was mostly car-based: the sharp and constant cacophony of horns, the shouting of drivers at one another, the parking on the sidewalks, and once, the abrupt and spontaneous gathering of four men to pick up and move, in a fit of pique, one of said cars parked on the sidewalk.

A skinny street in Istanbul, approaching Taksim Square, seemed placid enough – until we rounded a corner and came face to face with the beginnings of a protest. Waving signs and chanting mobs thickened in minutes, and the sudden crackle of firecrackers set my heart pounding, my head panicking, and my feet beating a retreat.

Egg-throwing mobs similarly interrupted a pleasant morning stroll in Buenos Aires, and hurtling rickshaws threatened to cut us down as we tried in vain to cross a main street in Lhasa. Sweaty clumps of young men pressed (a little more than necessarily) close to my college girlfriends and me on a morning ride to class on Madrid’s metro years ago, trapping us and blocking our ability to get off at our station. Perhaps most frightening of all, a dense crowd at Sydney’s Y2K New Year’s celebration caused us to lose our 12-year-old for almost an hour as we were sucked into its vortex at the end of the fireworks show.

We could play it safe. We could skip the crowds and the bigger cities. We could leave the kids at home. I could travel with others to some of the exotic but underdeveloped places I like to experience. Some of the chaos has been simply unpleasant, some horribly frustrating. A few situations have been potentially dangerous, and one or two downright scary. But when push comes to shove (literally!), the deepest imprints of my trips have often been the unexpectedly crazy moments that started the adrenaline pumping and the opening of the veins that take in the lifeblood of a place.

A Dinner to Remember

Tags

cultural differences, dinnertime, family, Greece, memory

I am traveling this week between my old and new homes, so I will be lazy and recycle a story of a dinner I will never forget for this week’s photo challenge.

***

My first real connection with the wider world started with a little goat, a katsikaki, as it was called in the tiny arid villages of central Greece. I was a teenager at the time, on my first trip out of the United States. I had just spent a few weeks at a Greek Orthodox camp on the western shores of the country, and now I was traveling into the heart of the Peloponnese with my yiayia and papou to spend a week at Papou’s childhood home.

A distant relative was driving, and as we crawled along the rutted and twisted roads of Arcadia, my grandmother told me stories and taught me Greek in the back seat while the men sat up front, smoking silently as we rode. The road dipped and curled, backtracking endlessly upon itself as we climbed and descended the mountains and valleys. Although the windows were down, it felt as though we were looking through dirty glass as the dust swirled around us and the brown scrubgrass, muted green olive trees, and hazy summer sky melted together in a miasma of July heat. The car seemed to float across the landscape, its progress slow but steady in the oppressive warmth and constant thrum of cicadas and other chirping insects.

When she was young, Yiayia said, she had been rich and pretty and courted by many wealthy Greek suitors. She talked of trips on the Orient Express and her engagement to a young shipping magnate who had given her a silver ring encrusted with diamonds to herald the connection between the two aristocratic families. But that union was not meant to be, as my headstrong grandmother threw over the young scion for a dashing and hardworking immigrant new to America – my Papou.

It was his village we were riding to – a remote enclave of some 100 people, isolated and poor, deep in the heart of the mainland. Even the name conjured up images of ancient, black-garbed peasants, gnarled olive trees, mangy scrounging dogs, and mule paths that were now used as roads. Thoughts of the Orient Express, or even Athens, lay irretrievably far away as we pulled into the town square, a tiny area in front of the church. Old women emerged from the tiny stucco houses to wrap themselves around Papou’s neck – the long-lost son of the village. The widows keened over my grandfather’s arrival, but the children and young adults turned their attention to me – a blonde, green-eyed teenager in a jean skirt.

The week passed in slow motion, with morning trips up the hill to fresh water wells and afternoon gatherings in the tiny square for coffee and too-sweet pastries. Knots of old men and widows clustered in the streets, and farm animals emerged from under the houses to roam the village by day. The goats were the ring leaders, the billies bullying and the ewes taking up camp where they wished. Their babies, the katsikakia, were still innocent and irresistibly darling. The little one that lived under our house was my favorite, with its narrow head and silky ears. It scampered on the slender legs of a fawn and craved affection like a puppy as it moved its soft body into my legs. I spent hours with the tiny kid, hiding in the cool stone pen under the house, traipsing along with him to the well, and feeding him extra morsels of food away from the watchful eyes of Aunt S and Uncle T, my elderly hosts.

Finally, it was time to leave the village and return to Athens. Our bags were packed, the car was checked for the return drive, and goodbyes were said throughout the village. Sweet little Aunt S set the table with her finest belongings and spent the afternoon cooking a farewell feast for my grandparents and me. The house was festive; delicious aromas filled the air and the adults were cheerful as they sipped their retsina and smoked companionably on the grapevine-draped porch.

We took our seats at the table and were touched at the time and expense our poor relatives had invested in this meal. It might be years before American visitors came again, and S threw everything into making our last night special. The wine continued to flow, the small plates were passed, and S left to bring in the main course. She walked through the blue-painted door with a huge platter in her hands and a look of pure pride and happiness on her face. She came straight toward me. Puzzled, I glanced at my yiayia; the adults were always served first here. Aunt S beamed; “To katsikaki sou! …your little goat!” Stunned, horrified, nearly hysterical, I looked back at my grandmother. “Smile,” she hissed. “Say thank you … and eat it.”

I grew up that day, choking down this token of my relatives’ love and respect for me and my grandparents. They had given to me what I loved most in that tiny village and, as wrong as it all seemed to me at the time, it remains a hauntingly strong memory of that first trip away from home.

Ten Feet Out the Door

Tags

family, family travel, gathering, Weekly Photo Challenge

Every few years, our family of five eschews traditional gift-giving at Christmas time. Instead, we gather in some far-off location where we can just be with each other without the distractions of errands, other friends, or holiday madness.

Epidaurus, Greece

Long before we started this tradition, we carted our kids around the world as they were growing up. When I look back now, I can’t imagine how we herded three children under ten (with suitcases) through the radiating streets around the Arc de Triomphe to catch the rush-hour metro. I am in awe of the mere idea of trekking and camping with five teenagers (our three and two friends) on the Inca Trail. I cringe to remember my 6-year-old pushing and shoving with a friend on the edge of a chasm in the Dart River area of New Zealand. And I have photos to document the times we pulled over to capture some striking scenery and ended up with one boy or another watering the local flora on the side of the road. (T alone has sprinkled five continents, I would guess.) Ten feet out the door was not an excursion for the meek; it was a major production and involved the assembling of a lot more than just people. Back then we had to gather passports, inoculation records, tiny backpacks, snacks  – and more often than not, our wits – as we set off for new places.

Serengeti, Tanzania

As the years passed, the kids got busy with activities and college and their own lives, and my husband could never get away as much as I could to travel. I started to travel alone – either completely solo the whole time or just on my own until I met up with a trekking group somewhere. Even as some of my neighbors clucked disapprovingly, I grew to really relish my time alone, and I tried to book at least one and sometimes two trips a year during my work breaks to explore somewhere my husband didn’t care to go.

Iguazu Falls, Argentina

But as much as I enjoy the adventure and peace of wandering the world on my own or in small numbers, the gathering of my brood to travel somewhere new is the greatest gift I can imagine. This year, our gathering spot will be Colombia, and I can’t wait to have our ten feet all together once again!

See some other great takes on the Weekly Photo Challenge here!

Music Makes the World Go ‘Round

Tags

music, sense memory

Sense memories are often the source of some powerful post-trip nostalgia, at least for me. Most of these are tied directly to the place where they were experienced, like the tinkling of cowbells in an alpine meadow, the aroma of grilled souvlaki meat in a Greek taverna, or the low hum of chanting monks in Tibet. But I have also formed random associations of certain pieces of music with particular places that are just as potent as these more intrinsic sounds and smells.

I have a short and whimsical playlist I associate with almost every trip I have taken and more often than not, it makes no sense thematically or chronologically. When I hear certain songs or artists, I am transported back to the strangest places – cities and countries that have no inherent connection to the music in question. One of the most recent examples is Daft Punk’s summer of 2013 hit song “Get Lucky,” which instantaneously evokes a warm summer day in Ljubljana, Slovenia, every time I hear it. This one, at least, fits its timeframe; I was there that summer, and every restaurant and bar along the Ljubljanica River seemed to be playing the catchy tune as we strolled the streets of this incredibly lovely little town. The light, peppy beat perfectly reflected the bright, energetic summer vibe of the city, and I (now annoyingly) contact my travel buddy K every time I hear the song and think of our happy time there.

Lucky to be in lovely Ljubljana

A more unlikely combo is R.E.M. and the twisting, turning roads of the Arcadia region of Greece’s Peloponnese. The track I remember most, “Losing My Religion” was released in 1991, but this trip was many years later, and there was little about those dusty roads and small villages that seemed connected to the haunting, mandolin-heavy melody of this song. Nevertheless, R.E.M. is now forever linked to that road trip of shimmering hot days, with seven people packed into a van on the way to an ancestral village and home. The memory works both ways; I hear the tune whenever I look at the village photos, and I think of the mountain drive every time R.E.M. comes on.

Winding through the Peloponnese with R.E.M.

Some parts of the world, whether through geographic or cultural isolation, are decades behind in the radio music scene. Two anachronisms still make me smile. One was listening to The Doors in remote Namche Bazaar, Nepal, on the trail to Everest Base Camp just a few years ago. On a dismal, rainy night, two of my fellow trekkers and I escaped our freezing lodge for a beer and some popcorn in a tiny bar warmed by a potbellied stove. We sat for hours, listening to the rain pinging against the metal roof and the strains of some very dated ‘60s and ‘70s songs, most notably a medley of The Doors. I may have thought about “The End” and “Riders on the Storm” at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, but I certainly did not expect to hear his memorable voice deep in the Khumbu in Nepal!

The Doors play Namche Bazaar, Nepal

Do you associate somber, serious Russia with bouncy Boy George? On the day of my arrival, I tried to make sense (while seriously jetlagged, no less) of the incongruous juxtaposition of “Karma Chameleon” and the austere architecture I was viewing out my sleet-covered cab window one January day. I would be hard pressed to think of a song less evocative of Soviet Russia than this, but it’s fixed now: St. Petersburg’s outskirts and Culture Club, together forever.

Culture Club or culture shock? on the gloomy drive in from Pulkovo Airport, St Petersburg, Russia

Aside from these random associations, there are also the songs that were playing on my own iPod on different occasions, either on purpose or arbitrarily. Pitbull took my mind off my panting on the way up the last set of steps and hills to Dead Woman’s Pass on the Inca Trail, The Fray have shut out any number of people snoring in nearby tents, and Kacey Musgraves’ country twang accompanied us on a drive all over Iceland’s country roads last summer.

Above The Fray in Paine Grande Camp, Chile

Chilling out to Kacey Musgraves on the Ring Road, Iceland

Last but not least, there was one unforgettable trip on which we provided the “music” ourselves. We had grown very attached to our adorable, charming guide in Tibet after spending over a week with him in Lhasa and the Tibetan countryside. As we drove back from our expedition to Everest North Base Camp, we grew silly and sentimental about leaving him and decided to sing along to many of his favorite western artists, including Michael Bolton (had to hum that one!), Back Street Boys, and Céline Dion. I will never hear “My Heart Will Go On” again without a mental picture of a tiny Tibetan guy crooning his heart out on the Friendship Highway!

Back Street Boys enliven the Friendship Highway, Tibet

Off-roading to Celine Dion in Tibet

Do you have an internal soundtrack from each trip you’ve taken? Stay tuned for another post some day on all the books I associate with each trip!

The Village Revisited, or Back to the Beginning at the End of the Year

Tags

family history, Greece, Vasta

As the year comes to a close, the blogging trend seems to be to post an all-inclusive 2014 roundup, but I want to return instead to the beginnings of One Foot Out the Door this year. My inaugural (and still my favorite, so go read it!) post on this blog was called “It Started with a Little Goat.” It told the story of my first real experience with a culture totally unlike my own, a trip that was to be the impetus for a lifetime of curiosity about the world. If you really want to make sense of today’s post, take a trip back in time with me and read that post first. If you are in a hurry to get to this century’s story, plunge in below. (And if a roundup is really all you want, head over to An Eye on the World for a monthly line-up of photos from a few 2014 trips.)

—————

The Village Revisited

When I left my grandfather’s tiny village in Greece, and my relative, Aunt S, decades ago, I had no inkling that I would sit with her on that porch and in that kitchen with my husband, my children, and my parents nearly thirty years later. She seemed elderly when I first met her; would she even be alive when I went back? A few years ago, our family decided to take a trip to Greece to see the country and meet a few distant relatives. At a holiday meal sometime before that, my father and I, over a few glasses of wine, prattled on about how wonderful it would be to go as an extended family, neither really thinking anything would come of this sentimental plan. Pondering it more seriously a few weeks later, I remembered my trip with my own grandparents (the theme of my original post) and realized this was an opportunity for my children and my parents that they might never have again. I broached the idea to my husband and kids and, with their blessing, invited my parents to join us on a vacation to Greece and a pilgrimage to my grandfather’s village.

The village is not an easy place to visit or even find, as I discovered when it fell to me to plan the trip and do the driving. Only some 200 kilometers southwest of Athens and a two-hour drive from Nafplion, where we started our stay, Papou’s village nevertheless feels as remote as a town in the Outback, a tiny village literally at the end of the road in the central Peloponnese. The maps I consulted and printed out before the trip showed a reasonable road up to Megalopolis, a “big city” of 15,000 or so people, then a thinner, but still solid, line off the main route, then a faint, dotted line that inched and curled past another small town to an end in our village.

The Greek that I started learning with Yiayia in the back seat of a car threading its way through the mountains years ago had developed some serious rust, scrubbed away and polished up every so often with a college course here, a Berlitz tutoring session there, some stubborn self-study, and even a little speaking practice with the dog over the years. It was enough to allow me to read the signs and ask directions, although we found in the course of several weeks that the Greeks are not particularly good with directions, a problem that is compounded when the listener catches only a third of the directions each time they are given.

Wedged into a stick-shift van (which only I could drive) with seven people, seven large suitcases, seven day bags, and a few stray purses and bags of snacks, we bounced and wove through the same shimmering Grecian landscape I remembered. Waves of heat lent a blur to the fields of olive trees and mid-summer-brown grasses, while a few wispy white clouds scuttled across a Mediterranean blue sky. An old R.E.M. CD was our soundtrack as we climbed and plunged, curved and skidded on the narrow, gravel-covered roads. Terrifying drop-offs beckoned on one side and then the other as we hairpin-turned our way toward the village.

The road finally came to a T and a small sign pointed to the right. Now we were truly on that dotted line, no more than a dirt path, and we slowly crept the last few minutes into town. My heart beat in my throat as I thought about Yiayia and Papou, now gone almost 20 years, and my days in this place out of time so many years ago. My mother, too, had made a previous visit to the village with her parents in the late 70s; she was feeling, as I was, a mixture of excitement, sadness, apprehension, and nostalgia as we passed the first houses outside the main village. Suddenly, we cried out together as we spotted the big black door closing the family home off from the road.

After an initial certainty that this was the place, we questioned ourselves and continued a few hundred feet farther into the village where we passed the main square and the church. Thinking we might have been mistaken, we started to climb past newer houses on a hill leading deeper into the village. Our progress was immediately halted, however, when the over-sized van could not squeeze between the buildings on either side of the road. We inched backward down a steep hill, tried to back between two other buildings to turn the vehicle around, and listed so far to one side that the far-back-row passengers were sure we were going to tip over.

Descending one by one from the van to the incredulous eyes of a few old men sitting outside a little store, we asked for the house where we had last seen Uncle T and Aunt S. A cheerfully energetic woman emerged from the store and eagerly responded. Yes, she said, S still lived in the house! She would call her right now and tell her we were going to stop by in a few minutes.

To give her a little time before seven American strangers descended upon her, we took a quick detour up the hill to the elementary school that Papou had attended before emigrating to the U.S. Our children seemed slightly more interested in the small school building than they had in any family stories or reminiscences so far, but their pre-adolescent indifference remained frustratingly hard to break through.

A little hot and cranky, we descended to the store and confirmed that S was home and waiting for us. We walked back down the hill and as we approached the gate, tiny Aunt S inched toward us, a huge smile on her radiant face. Clutching my mother and then me, and smiling shyly at the rest of the group, she led us up the crumbled concrete steps to the same grape-covered porch I had sat on for my last meal there years before.

As we entered the kitchen, my family’s mouths dropped open to see photos of my mother, their great-grandfather, and me on the walls. Whatever apathy they had been feeling melted away as they spied the jarring existence of their mother’s face – my own teenage face – on the walls of this worn little house in the middle of nowhere. That afternoon was a turning point in our trip. They had made a human connection to this beautiful land and its ancient people, and there was not a dry eye as we bade S farewell that afternoon. The trip ended up being one of our children’s most powerful family memories, and forged a bond with their grandparents that lives on today.

Friday Photos: Is it Summer Yet?

Tags

Australia, Boston, Cinque Terre, Croatia, Door County, Glacier National Park, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Santorini, summer

It’s only November, and already a deep chill has settled into my bones. A dose of summer memories from this country and others seems like just the ticket today. Let’s pretend we’re warm …

Door County, Wisconsin

Dublin, Ireland

Buza Bar, Dubrovnik, Croatia

Farmers Market, Boston, Massachusetts

Adare, Ireland

Gruz Harbor, Dubrovnik, Croatia

Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy

Glacier National Park, Montana

Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy

Mykonos, Greece

Late summer, North Dakota plains

Christmas Day lorakeets in Wahroonga, Australia

Collecting Countries

Tags

Country count, in-depth travel, places visited

Lately I’ve noticed that some world travelers seem rather unappealingly attached to their “country counts.” It is certainly tempting to do; once you do start seriously wandering the globe and the count does start creeping up into impressive numbers, it is hard not to get a little, let’s just say, aggressive about adding places. Why not sneak over to Colonia del Sacramento for a day while in Buenos Aires and add Uruguay to the tally? Or take a day trip to Montenegro from Dubrovnik to bulk up the Balkans score. I’ve done both of those myself and enjoyed them immensely, but (I’d like to think) not just to notch two more nations. I gave my son grief this summer for driving a car over the Bosnian border from Croatia for a grand total of fifteen miles, and I joked that he could not really say he’d been to Bosnia & Herzegovina. His facetious response/rule? If you have something to eat or drink in a nation, it counts. So a cup of coffee later, he had added a new country!

All silliness aside, for all my wide travels, I’ve discovered in myself a preference to go deep – to spend a whole trip in one country or even one region. Beyond this, I’ve also gone back to many countries more than once when I just couldn’t get them out of my head. Yes, I could use my hard-earned money and vacation time to add another place to my list, but on a second or third trip, I can dig deeper than the main tourist sites and really get to know a place, or I can branch out and visit lesser-known cities or areas. And I just love the feeling of going back somewhere and feeling almost like a native; it’s so satisfying to really feel attached and connected or, even better, to know every little shortcut in a town and even give directions to someone else in a city halfway across the world.

Greece was one of the first places I visited multiple times. I had gone there as a child with my Greek grandparents, attended a camp in my teens, funded my own way there one summer during high school, and returned years later with my own family. Spain, too, became a favorite after a study abroad program and two subsequent trips to see new places and revisit old favorites, and France (notably Paris) has managed to insert itself into almost every western European trip I’ve taken.

The first country with which I truly fell in love, though, was Peru. I distinctly remember getting on the plane after trekking the Inca Trail and spending a little time in Cusco and Lima. I looked longingly out the window and just knew I would be coming back. In fact, I was back on a plane by myself a mere five months later to further explore the Cusco area and the Sacred Valley. I stayed in a small neighborhood in Cusco and fancied myself a Cusqueña; I walked all day, shopped in the local markets, and took a few day trips to Pisac and other towns along the Urubamba River. Rather unbelievably, I was offered the opportunity to go back again four months later to help lead a small group of visitors for a microcredit organization, and a year after that, I repeated that trip. Other than Peruvian tour guides, I may be one of the few people who has visited Machu Picchu three times in less than two years! I am now certainly the go-to source on Peru among my friends.

I have an even deeper connection and infatuation with Tibet, a country that is difficult to get to once, let alone twice. I originally went to Lhasa as part of a bigger trip to China but, again, before I’d even left this mystical city, I knew I was destined to go back and see more of both Lhasa and Tibet overall. A year later, I was back on the roof of the world and, this time, I hired a young man I had met on the first trip to take my daughter and me deep into the countryside. We spent days bumping along dusty roads on the Tibetan plateau. We stopped in raggedy little towns and ate with the locals; this eventful ride culminated in a brief stay and trek at Mount Everest’s north base camp, a place I had often imagined from all my reading. If I could, I’d jump right back on the brutal flights necessary to deliver me to spiritual Tibet yet again.

But other lands do call. One of them is Russia, the land of some of my favorite authors and a place that has long attracted me through its history and literature. In January, I will finally walk the streets of Anna Karenina and Raskolnikov, and in the bitter winter cold, I hope to experience in some small way the plight of so many pre- and post-revolution Russian characters, both real and fictional. I will see as much as I can, but after the Russian feast, I will do what the country-counters do – I’ll stop in Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland for a small bite of dessert on my way home!

A Grave Situation

Tags

Buenos Aires, Cemeteries, Greece, Kazimierz, Krakow, La Recoleta, Paris, Pere-Lachaise, Sarajevo

What is it about cemeteries that attracts visitors and photographers? Some find it morbid and bizarre to walk around among gravestones and the dead, but I find most cemeteries to be peaceful and hauntingly beautiful places to spend an hour or two.

A rainy morning in Père-Lachaise Cemetery is one of my favorite memories of Paris. The weak morning sun seeping through the mist and illuminating the cobblestone walkways was the perfect backdrop for the mossy headstones engraved with famous names. Any reader, musician, artist, or just plain citizen of the world can appreciate a reflective stroll by the resting places of Proust, Molière, Chopin, Jim Morrison, and Seurat, among many others.

  An Ottoman-era cemetery high above Sarajevo is an incredible vantage point for seeing the valley in which this embattled Balkan city lies. The stories of snipers shooting down from these hills during the Seige of Sarajevo come frightening alive with this view, and the 15th century setting adds to the drama of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tangled history.

Eva Perón’s grave is but one small reason to venture into La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. As in Paris, the architecture of the tombs is spectacular in itself, and the narrow lanes arranged in a grid pattern evoke almost a neighborhood feeling among the tiny buildings. An abundance of cats and cobwebs adds to the mysterious allure here.

 

In Krakow, there are two fascinating cemeteries in the Kazimierz neighborhood, the “New” (1800s) and “Old” (1500s) Jewish Cemeteries. Oddly, the “new” one feels more ancient than the older one (also known as Remuh), perhaps because so many of the headstones are aslant and covered with moss. The older-growth trees half block the sun, dappling the toppling graves with light and shadow.

When I thought back on a number of trips, I was astonished to realize just how many other cemeteries I had visited, from the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, to Arlington National in Washington, D.C., Montparnasse in Paris, and St. Louis in New Orleans.

Among all these monuments to mortality, perhaps the most emotional was an overgrown plot in Vasta, Greece, where I located the rough stone under which my great-grandfather lies. Grand or humble, cemeteries can be a quiet step back in time and a surprisingly serene way to spend a few hours outside on my travels.

It Started with a Little Goat …

Tags

family, goat, Greece, Peloponnese, Vasta

My first real connection with the wider world started with a little goat, a katsikaki, as it was called in the tiny arid villages of central Greece. I was a teenager at the time, on my first trip out of the United States. I had just spent a few weeks at a Greek Orthodox camp on the western shores of the country, and now I was traveling into the heart of the Peloponnese with my yiayia and papou to spend a week at Papou’s childhood home.

A distant relative was driving and as we crawled along the rutted and twisted roads of Arcadia, my grandmother told me stories and taught me Greek in the back seat while the men sat up front, smoking silently as we rode. The road dipped and curled, backtracking endlessly upon itself as we climbed and descended the mountains and valleys. Although the windows were down, it felt as though we were looking through dirty glass as the dust swirled around us and the brown scrubgrass, muted green olive trees, and hazy summer sky melted together in a miasma of July heat. The car seemed to float across the landscape, its progress slow but steady in the oppressive warmth and constant thrum of cicadas and other chirping insects.

When she was young, Yiayia said, she had been rich and pretty and courted by many wealthy Greek suitors. She talked of trips on the Orient Express and her engagement to a young shipping magnate who had given her a silver ring encrusted with diamonds to herald the connection between the two aristocratic families. But that union was not meant to be, as my headstrong grandmother threw over the young scion for a dashing and hardworking immigrant new to America – my Papou.

It was his village we were riding to – a remote enclave of some 100 people, isolated and poor, deep in the heart of the mainland. Even the name conjured up images of ancient, black-garbed peasants, gnarled olive trees, mangy scrounging dogs, and mule paths that were now used as roads. Thoughts of the Orient Express, or even Athens, lay irretrievably far away as we pulled into the town square, a tiny area in front of the church. Old women emerged from the tiny stucco houses to wrap themselves around Papou’s neck – the long-lost son of the village. The widows fairly keened over my grandfather’s arrival, but the children and young adults turned their attention to me – a blonde, green-eyed teenager in a jean skirt.

The week passed in slow motion, with morning trips up the hill to fresh water wells and afternoon gatherings in the tiny square for coffee and too-sweet pastries. Knots of old men and widows clustered in the streets, and farm animals emerged from under the houses to roam the village by day. The goats were the ring leaders, the billies bullying and the ewes taking up camp where they wished. Their babies, the katsikakia, were still innocent and irresistibly darling. The little one that lived under our house was my favorite, with its narrow head and silky ears. It scampered on the slender legs of a fawn and craved affection like a puppy as it moved its soft body into my legs. I spent hours with the tiny kid, hiding in the cool stone pen under the house, traipsing along with him to the well, and feeding him extra morsels of food away from the watchful eyes of Aunt S and Uncle T, my elderly hosts.

Finally, it was time to leave the village and return to Athens. Our bags were packed, the car was checked for the return drive, and goodbyes were said throughout the village. Sweet little Aunt S set the table with her finest belongings and spent the afternoon cooking a farewell feast for my grandparents and me. The house was festive; delicious aromas filled the air and the adults were cheerful as they sipped their retsina and smoked companionably on the grapevine-draped porch.

We took our seats at the table and were touched at the time and expense our poor relatives had invested in this meal. It might be years before American visitors came again, and S threw everything into making our last night special. The wine continued to flow, the small plates were passed, and S left to bring in the main course. She walked through the blue-painted door with a huge platter in her hands and a look of pure pride and happiness on her face. She came straight toward me. Puzzled, I glanced at my yiayia; the adults were always served first here. Aunt S beamed; “To katsikaki sou! …your little goat!” Stunned, horrified, nearly hysterical, I looked back at my grandmother. “Smile,” she hissed. “Say thank you … and eat it.”

I grew up that day, choking down this token of my relatives’ love and respect for me and my grandparents. They had given to me what I loved most in that tiny village and, as wrong as it all seemed to me at the time, it remains a hauntingly strong memory of that first trip away from home.