Easter chants, ex-pat woes and a beer in the ‘I love you’ bar
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LAST week, I recounted some of the highs and lows of my recent package holiday to Crete. Now, safely back home, with my suntanned skin shedding all over the floor and my countenance returning rapidly to its customary jailhouse pallor, I have time to reflect on some of the lessons I learned from the trip.
The primary one is that it is a mistake to go to that part of the world before the beginning of May. The Greek Orthodox Church has its own ideas about the celebration of Easter. While it was all done and dusted in this part of the world back in March, the Greek clergy have a totally different timetable for the event.
For reasons best known to themselves, they decided that Easter in Greece would be celebrated on the last weekend in April. For the preceding 40 days, devout Christians live in an extremely abstemious manner. They don’t eat meat, drink alcohol or indulge in anything that might be considered a pleasure of the flesh. For this reason, the vast majority of the pubs, restaurants and nightclubs remain closed until the day after Good Friday, when all hell breaks loose, with firework displays, bonfires and general bacchanalia.
The village in which I stayed had a dinky little church in the town square. It couldn’t have accommodated more than about two dozen worshippers, with the result that most of the congregation had to stand outside while the priest broadcast his sermon over the Tannoy system. Well, I say sermon, but, in fact, it was simply a never-ending chant.
During the chanting, the assembled congregation draped their arms over an imaginary clothesline in an approximation of Christ’s posture on the cross. Unfortunately, the church was right next to one of the few eateries in the town – a Chinese restaurant run by an affable Dutchman. My son and I had our last meal in this establishment. The food was excellent, but the constant chanting was a bit wearing and one of the diners, a woman who supported Glasgow Rangers, objected strongly to “all that Catholic carry-on” going on while she was trying to eat her dinner.
I learned an even more painful lesson earlier in the week. I had purchased a pair of sandals to take with me on the trip. Herself instructed me that on no account was I to wear socks with them, as that was something that only the most naff tourists did. I did as I was told for the first two days but, by the end of the second day trudging around the Cretan landscape in the blazing sunshine, my feet looked as if they had been savaged by a pack of wild dogs and my ankles felt as if they had been worked on by a KGB interrogator armed with a blowtorch.
The unforgiving leather straps had dug holes into my unprotected skin so that I left a trail of blood everywhere I went. After two days of that nonsense, I covered my weeping wounds with plasters and put my socks on. There’s no point trying to look trendy if it means ending up in the casualty department of a Cretan hospital.
Since the tourist season hadn’t started, most of the people we met were a mixture of Scots, Irish, English and Welsh ex-pats who have forsaken their respective homelands in search of a sun-kissed paradise. They refer to themselves as “the workers”, thus differentiating themselves from the army of tourists that was about to descend on the island.
In fact, the term “workers” is a bit of a misnomer, since they work only from May to September. For the rest of the year, they rely on the local equivalent of the dole to keep body and soul together. Since this amounts to about 360 euros per month, they don’t actually live high on the hog.
The only work available to most of them in the tourist season is extremely poorly paid, such as bar and hotel work. Many of their Cretan bosses make their lives even more difficult. Some refuse to allow the workers to keep their tips, while others won’t pay the national insurance contributions, with the result that they will not be entitled to any state benefit when the season finishes.
Then there’s the danger factor. The village we were in is relatively quiet throughout the holiday season, but the larger resort, less than two miles away, was the scene of pitched battles between rival gangs of black hoodies last summer. There was an average of a stabbing a week at the height of the season.
One elderly English hotel proprietor I spoke to ended up in hospital with several broken ribs and a fractured skull when he tried to break up a fight in his establishment.
All things considered, I got the feeling that most of the ex-pats I spoke to were not quite as happy and content as they had hoped to be when they deserted their native shores in search of Utopia.
On the last day of our holiday, an Irishwoman told us we couldn’t possibly go home without calling in to George’s “I love you” bar. She explained that George was a local Cretan who greeted every tourist who entered his shebeen with the words “I love you.”
This I had to see, so that night I went to where she had directed me and came across the smallest bar I’ve ever seen, a grubby concrete structure that looked more like a gun emplacement than a pub. I ducked down to peer inside the door and was not impressed by what I saw. But before I could make my escape, a shrill voice cried out “I love you.”
Through the gloom, I saw a grey-whiskered old man beaming at me. “I love you,” he repeated. I hadn’t the heart to keep on going. I ordered two beers while George busied himself with a knife before producing a sliced apple and orange. He then insisted that we join him in a glass of raki, a drink that tastes like lighter fuel.
I was grateful to George for his hospitality, but mixing fresh fruit with the local firewater proved to be a big mistake. No wonder the Olympic Games originated in Greece. My son Barry and I were running for the next two days.
