I'm writing this from the verandah on our apartment, late in the morning on July 16th. (Yes, I know, we don't have internet here. I'm writing it here on the verandah, and will post it at some point when I'm in an internet café down in the village). We arrived here around noon yesterday, picked up at the airport and brought to the apartment by our helpful host/landlord Despina. She gave us a quick tour around the place and the village, we had some nice cheese-filled pastry things, and went to sleep for four hours. More on that in my next post.
When we got up around 6, it had cooled down considerably, and the weather was perfect for sitting on the verandah. I won't try too hard to describe what it's like out here, since I won't get it right, and it'll just sound like a tourist brochure. I'll just say it's beautiful and more or less perfect, and let you look at the photos.
There's something very strange about coming to a place for the first time after having seen pictures of it -- lots of pictures. We made the arrangements to rent this place months ago, in no small part because of the pictures of it on the AirBnB website. In the interim, we've spent a lot of time poring over those pictures, as well as pictures of Agia Pelagia on the internet. So we knew more or less exactly what the village and the beaches and the surrounding countryside would look like, and recognized it immediately when we pulled off the highway. We knew nearly every inch of the apartment, including the arrangement of the rooms. So when we came in with Despina yesterday, it took a minute for it to dawn on me that I hadn't actually been here before. Everything is where I remembered it being from the photos. The furniture is all arranged the same way. And the verandah really does look in person the way it does in the photo. Usually you look at photos you've taken after visiting a place, and remember what it was like to be there. This was the other way around, and it was quite odd.
I had gone to the supermarket with Despina in the afternoon, and we had basic groceries including a bunch of fresh produce. So for dinner I made a salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and feta, and we had that with good bread, excellent oranges, and even better oil-cured olives. When we finished, we just stayed on the verandah, moving to more comfortable chairs, watched it get dark and read for hours. There was nothing to do, and it was perfect.
Agia Pelagia is a completely touristy place -- it's not an old fishing village where somebody recently decided to add a few hotels and turn the old buildings into tavernas. The old village (called Achlada) is somewhere further up in the hills, and it was precisely for beach tourism that all of the stuff here in the coves and on the hillsides above them were built in the last few decades. The main beach below us is crowded with umbrellas and beach chairs, and the beachside is all bars and restaurants and tavernas pack one next to the other. I got a bit of a glimpse of this yesterday afternoon when Despina took me to the store, and we heard the effects of it last night sitting on the verandah. There's apparently a beachfront club, that plays the strange mixture of beach boys, latin dance and 90s club music that you only get when European adults go on vacation and want to get drunk. Ace of Bass featured prominently. Here's the thing though -- it went on like this from about 7 to 9 pm last night, and then it stopped. For the next hour or so, it was intermittently replaced by things like orchestral versions of Red Army Choir hits (Volga Boatmen, anyone?) and the kind of music you'd expect to be the soundtrack of some 50s movie about beautiful people having dramatic times on the Riviera. Now, we're about 300 meters up the hill from the main beach, so when the music is really loud down there, it gets to us at a volume where it's just loud enough to recognize the music, with significant variations according
to the breeze. I think Sandhya may disagree with me on this, but I thought it was quite pleasant. For me, growing up with yearly vacations to Ocean City, Maryland, a beach holiday means sun and swimming and relaxation during the day, and loud, silly and moderately badly behaved crowds listening to questionable music at night. I dig that shit. So this here is just right for me. Out on the verandah now, it's quiet and warm and beatiful. All I hear are the boats in the water, a few people splashing, and the cicadas in the olive grove below me. But tonight, when the crickets take over, I want to be an idiot and drink some Mythos beer and hear about what Fred thinks he's too sexy for.
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