The Next Step

So, while I am actually up early at home on this Saturday morning doing a translation about cubist and suprematist Russian painters, I can continue my - sadly theoretical - Greek holiday...

This would have been me on the ferry passing early morning dark grey hump of Corfu on the right and coming into the entrance to the port of Igoumenitsa with its low wooded hills just behind the town and the hint of mountains beyond. When I was leaving Greece from here for what turned out to be a very long time in the 70s it was late evening and there was an incredible display of a kind of dry lightning across these mountains...blue streaks zapping and fizzing almost horizontally across the body of the uphills. The gods were obviously trying to tell me something important...probably something like, "don't eat the meatballs on the ferry".

Anyway, the ferry steams slowly into its berth and it is time to disembark. When you are driving around the port in Italy, Ancona or Bari or Venice as it would have been in this case, you are aware of the bustle, noise and aromas and you think, "aha, a Mediterranean port!" but on arrival in Greece...Igoumenitsa, Corfu, Patras, which are of course also Mediterranean ports, that bustle, noise and aroma is in some strange way different...I don't think I can describe it - it could well be an "if-you-have-experienced-it-you-will-understand" type of thing...
It is a Greek bustle, noise and aroma...

Anyway, time to look for a kapheneion to break my fast and have a spot of proino...