Day 4: Re-speaking Greek

I am starting the day with the almost perfect breakfast. Yoghurt, honey, instant coffee (yes, I know, I know but I couldn’t be bothered making Greek coffee!) and bread, fresh bread from the little corner shop, just delivered from the bakery…mmm.

And I found out the proper way to ask for a normal white loaf. She had remembered me asking for a normal loaf the other day and said:

Aplo? Etsi?

Ah, aplo, ochi kannoniko, malista.

Another of the little words or phrases which are occurring to me as my memory of Greek is slowly being prised open.

She was stocking the shelves when I went in and as she stood up she put her hand to her back and said, “ow!”

From nowhere the word, ponaei, came into my mind so I said it:

Ponaei? Hurting?

Nai, nai, dyskolo einai.

Never being one to avoid a conversation in a shop I suddenly had little pictures of my legs, stiff muscles, walking up and down the steep streets and I wanted to say something like, “yeah, my legs are killing me too from walking up and down all these bloody streets.”

And I could feel my brain frantically searching as I stood there, probably looking a bit vacant, but all it found was a black chasm, an empty abyss where once words and phrases would have been ready to jump joyfully into a conversational sentence and, frustratingly, where words and phrases suddenly appeared again after I had left the shop and walked a few steps down the lane …I suddenly knew how to say what I had wanted to say – but it was too bleedin’ late, wasn’t it. Just too late to go back in and say, “ah, you know you said ‘ow’, well, my legs …blah blah blah.”

That’s going to bug me all day that now…as it does when you think later on of all those clever things you could have said in an argument, etc…

Snatches of language are starting to light up, though, as my brain goes searching around the archives, looking in the Foreign Language Centre: Greek Section but sometimes it just can’t get the filing cabinet open in time.

Perhaps this is how a stroke patient feels as he or she slowly renegotiates the speaking ability.

This language speaking thing has always fascinated me. To begin with of course I used to make the mistake that everyone makes when they learn their first foreign language. I doubt if it is possible to avoid it in fact. You think first in your own language and then translate the sentences you have thought out into the target language. This is where all the hilarious errors come from when foreigners speak English (and when the English speak foreign languages, of course) because languages just do not work in parallel on a one-to-one basis and a sentence which is perfectly correct in your language can sound a bit weird when translated literally into another. An example from yesterday was my waitress in the Tsinari:

You very very good speak the Greek!

Apart from the ‘you’ at the start which in Greek wouldn’t be there at all, the Greek verb form already expresses the personal pronoun, that is pure Greek vocabulary and word order translated into an English sentence. In this case it works but in other cases it doesn’t!

For example when a German looks pale, holds his head gingerly in his hands and says,

"I have a cat."

You could be confused if you didn’t know that the German sentence he is translating means, I am suffering from a hangover.

You could write a book about these problems (in fact I have: My Book)

When you have finally got far enough with a language that you don’t do that any more, you realise that you are actually thinking in the target language and that what you are expressing are simply ideas and thoughts which are somehow constructed non-verbally.

And this is what I do and am doing at the moment. Because of the fact that I used to be fairly fluent in Greek and because the Foreign Language Centre in my brain knows that if I want to say something in Greek I have to think Greek, I basically wait for the words, phrases and sentences to arrive more or less ready to be spoken and sometimes, at the moment a little too often, nothing arrives!

Imagine a combination of the feeling you get in your head when you have to broach a difficult subject and you say to someone, “hmm, let’s see, how should I put this …” and you look up in the air and perhaps finger your chin looking for the apposite expressions, and the feeling you have in your head when you say, “oh, what’s the name of that guy who was on TV last night…” and you just CANNOT remember.

That combination is the feeling I have quite often at the moment trying to re-speak Greek.

I have a plan though. Trying to speak and learn languages in the respective country is all about strategies; asking people questions to which you already know the answers just to hear how they express themselves is one strategy, another is learning the equivalent of “thingymajig” in the target language and saying that with a wave of the hand as if you have forgotten the word which you don’t actually know and thereby inviting the other person to supply it.

The plan is simple but ingenious. I go back into the shop, ask for something low down on the shelves. When she gets it and stands up there is a good chance that she will say, “ow!” And then we have lift off and I can launch into my sentence!

Day 2: Living Next Door to Alice

Funny how sometimes you roam far and wide and then find what you want on your own doorstep.

Oh, hang on a mo, that’s not really what Living Next Door to Alice is about, is it? Ah, sod it.

Anyway, I slept in quite dramatically this morning and didn’t manage to get up until 11.00 which constitutes a minor miracle for me.

When I lived in Ioannina back in the distant past I got into the habit of nipping out early in the morning before it got too hot and getting a loaf and a sheep’s milk yoghurt and coming back for a breakfast of Greek coffee, yoghurt with honey and bread and butter.

Starting every day with a wonder taste combination.

The only problem this morning was…no bread; my cinema/supermarket last night hadn’t had any and all the other bread shops I passed on the way back were closed.

I went out to do a cursory search for a loaf without going down too many highly sloped streets…found nothing, so came back to the wonder breakfast without bread. Still 90% wonderful.

My plan for the day was a kind of mixed thing. I needed to find a bread shop nearby and I thought I would combine this with a walk down to the station to check the train times and then stroll along in search of estiatoria and Internet hot spots where I could get online with my laptop and see what was happening in the world.

Something I learned long ago from John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie” is that you need an aim if you are going to explore a city; it doesn’t matter if it’s totally unrealistic or useless but it lends your exploring a structure and purpose: hence, train times, estiatoria and hot spots.

I wandered down a different way from the flat and round the fourth or fifth corner found a bread shop. “Right, get bread there on return”.

I used to think Thessaloniki was Athens without the Ancient Monuments but that’s a bit unfair. Much more than an Athenian, Periclean, Akropolean feeling, it has its own Byzantine character, not so much marble columns and temples as brick arches and domed churches. Realising this has also made me realise that Ioannina, which provided me with my first taste of Greece and so painted my basic picture of the country, is neither Periclean nor Byzantine but, at the considerable risk of shocking and insulting any Greek readers, actually more Turkish than Greek. When I lived there the churches still had minarets harking back to the relatively recent Turkish occupation and they were invariably topped off, perhaps deliberately disrespectfully, with storks’ nests.

I suppose there are lots of little things in Thessaloniki which go together to give this Byzantine impression …the churches themselves of course snuggled down between the great, chaotic blocks of flats with their air-conditioners hanging out of every window, the names of the streets, Saint This and Saint That, the icon shops and so on.

What all Greek cities I know have in common though are the smells. I must someday try and work out what the more obscure ones are, but the smell of coffee, sweets and grilled meat are ubiquitous and wonderfully evocative.

Strolling down to the station there is one familiar, typically Greek smell after another; it made me wonder whether I could navigate by nose alone…you certainly couldn’t navigate by ear alone as there is a constant background clattering and groaning of engines, car horns, footsteps and oaths. A lot of this horn hooting and oath shouting is due to the relationship between the road signs and the trees. The road signs were set up first, marked clearly in Greek and English to show where the various destinations were and which way you had to drive to get to them. The trees were planted later. Unfortunately the trees grew, as they do, and their branches and the leaves on them tended to hide the road signs. This is only my theory but I have seen it in operation in every Greek city I have driven in and as a result have been subject to many of these horn hoots and shouted oaths myself as I suddenly changed direction and veered left or right having seen which way to go only at the last minute!

Found the station and dutifully looked at the train times. Actually, this did put the idea into my head of doing a day-trip to Volos where I have never been, so my invented Steinbeckian aim might actually bear fruit.

I wandered down Monastiriou, another parallel, and discovered a couple of estiatoria which looked authentically shabby enough and were serving etoima on the menu; ready-cooked food which sits there all day keeping warm and tastes increasingly tremendous as the hours go by.

On the other side of the street there was a Starbucks…bleeuuugh. I guess I am not alone in finding it a travesty whenever I come across a MacDonalds or BurgerKing or whatever in historical cities.

Still, this Starbucks was advertising an Internet hotspot so I made a resigned mental note of it.

Right, time to go back before it gets too bleedin’ hot.

I was feeling pretty confident of my orientational abilities by now and my navigation had been reduced to “if it’s uphill it’s probably right”.

However I began to find myself not remembering if I had passed this or that shop and this or that church, and suddenly a Greek phrase from a long lost guidebook popped into my head, echo chathei – I am lost!

Much as I hated the thought, I felt I would have to go downhill a bit before finding where I had to go uphill again, so I did…and then there was my graffiti, gamo tous dodeka theous, so, echo brethei - I am found!

Bread! I needed bread. Stopped at the bread shop but they were looking a bit low on bread.

Mipos echete akoma psomi? Could it be that you still have some bread?

Ochi, teleiose! Nope!

None left…bugger. So, up the steep street and then the very steep street and on impulse I went along a little side street just before the flat…and there was a little corner shop. I went in and asked for bread…

Oh yes, I have this bread and that bread and the other bread…

Ligo periploko…erm…ena kannoniko psomi? That’s a bit complicated, erm…just a normal standard loaf?

Oriste, 70 lepta. Here you are, 70 cents.

So up the last little bit to the flat; and a lunch of gigandes, dolmadakia, feta, turopita, psomi kai retsina - µµµµµµµµµµµ… (mmmmmmmmm).