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Fiona Goes to Corfu, Part 2
Fiona Goes to Corfu, Part 2
By Fiona Klonarides
Fiona Klonarides is sharing her new life with us as she looks for health and happiness and to make peace with her hypothyroidism on the Greek island of Corfu. This is the second in an ongoing series. Read Part 1 NowIt’s after midnight, and the road home is completely dark, but I know the bumps and dips by heart. I’ve walked through this blackness often.
Tonight, there’s a tiny light flickering in my path, which looks like the glinting eye of a dog perhaps. As I approach it, it has a rhythmic glow: on, off – on, off – on, off, and there’s something enchanting about it, but I’m still not sure, as I reach my doorstep, what this tiny light was.
Coincidentally, the next morning, Spiros and Sofia (who own the mini-market up the road) ask me if I’ve seen the fireflies yet. It’s early May, and these miniscule star-like bugs will soon saturate the olive groves at night. In a week or so, my way home will become a magical stroll through a carpet of stars. These bobbing, reddish bugs are male fireflies, all aglow in an effort to attract females during mating season, and at the end of the month they’ll disappear as suddenly as they appeared.
Corfu is bursting with life: blue and yellow housemartins flit and dive under foots, gathering mud and dry grass to build their upside-down honeypot-shaped nests. These carefully constructed new homes will soon house baby birds who’ll sing for their food, yellow beaks prized wide open, like enthusiastic little choirboys. Even the snakes are surfacing from under the earth. The hotter it gets, the more snakes I see on the road, squashed flat by the early tourists in their small, brand new hire cards, or by the crazy Greek drivers. I have a terrible fear of snakes, and it doesn’t help my phobia when the villagers assure me that the ones about 5’ long, thicker than your fist, tobacco-colored, are definitely not poisonous.
Not a day goes by when I don’t feel grateful to be here. Waking up without the alarm, having my coffee in peace, just following the gentle rhythm of the day - - no schedule, no errands, no commitments is sheer luxury. It takes a while to get used to the erratic, unreliable way of doing things in Greece, but once you learn patience, and to go with the flow, you can handle it.
After my walks and afternoons at the beach with my book, I make it a ritual to visit Andreas, the handsome, bohemian son of the owner of Jimmy’s Restaurant, the taverna with the best food and the best people in Pelekas. Andreas is a musician who works on his music in the winter, and works extremely hard in the restaurant from May – October. Like most Greeks, he works 7 days a week throughout the summer, without a single day off, at least 12 hrs a day. “We work double in summer to be free in winter” he explains to me, as he sits with me for a cigarette break as I have my early evening glass of wine before the restaurant fills up.
Evenings in Pelekas are spontaneous: you might bump into friends and join them for dinner, or sit and chat with one of the bar owners before they get busy, or watch the sprinkling of tourists in the small square while the Greek boys scoot by on their Vespas, and the old men sit at the bus stop and watch the world go by, still wearing their winter jackets even on these mild evenings.
As the days pass, and the sun sets later and later, it dawns on me that this blissfully simple and somewhat escapist life that I have cannot last. I have no income, and although I live frugally, I feel slightly uneasy about my finances. Like a swimming pool slowly draining, I need to fill up my cash reserves again, so I can have peace of mind until the autumn. I need to find a job on the island.
Corfu is a large, very hills island, with sporadic bus schedules. I don’t have a car or scooter, so my chances of finding work are limited. I tell everyone I’m looking for a job, and soon the villagers, the boys who rent out beach umbrellas on the beach, someone’s cousin and friends of friends are all putting out feelers for me. I get a job in a restaurant, washing dishes, but after one night the English owner breaks the news that he can’t afford to pay me, the place isn’t busy enough. Then I find a job in a boutique at a water theme park, but it barely pays enough to pay my living expenses, and the days are long. Not to mention the bus ride and the 2 mile trek along a main road in the hot sun to get to an air-conditioned boutique where I’d be selling overpriced pink flip-flops.
So it’s Plan B. Spend a few months in London, do temp work, and return to Corfu for September and October. I get offered a job at my old internet company, in their London office, where they need temporary help. Can I start next week? With 5 days left on this beautiful island, I made the most of every hour before I leave for London. The more I think about leaving Pelekas, the more I realize how good for me it’s been, and even how emotionally attached to it I have become. The warmth of the people, my new British, Greek and Albanian friends. Their kindness to me, the slowness of time, the gentle rhythm of Corfu; the red poppies and tall, yellow flowering bushes along the side of the roads; the chickens next door, scratching and pecking in the dirt; the cock that screeches so loudly at 5am; the haphazard “maybe tomorrow” way of doing – or not doing – things; the one callbox in the village that when you need it most, is out of order; the steep hills that used to exhaust me; the panoramic views and the sunsets; the handsome men; the elderly villagers who’ve had extremely hard lives but live well into their 90s; the evenings at the kafeneion, philosophising about life with Greek men, their wives who are usually friends, and their girlfriends who eye me suspiciously; the awful Greek dance-pop radio stations. All these, I will miss. What have I really missed about the States? Not my car, not the stores, or Starbucks, or going to the movies, or TV, and not CNN. I miss my friends back in America, and now I will miss my new friends in Corfu.
Corfu, London….what a contrast. I’m going to be taking the bus to work and working in one of the most vibrant, richly cultural, diverse, sophisticated cities in the world, 15 years after I left it backing the late 80s.
The morning of my flight, I’m up at 6am, before the alarm goes off. I feel quite calm about leaving Pelekas as I wait by the side of the road for Spiros from the mini-market who’s taking me to the airport. I drag my two bags out on to the road, and look up at the delicate pink clouds above, heralding another beautifully sunny day. As we wind down the hill in Spiros’s truck, he tells me he does this trip from Pelekas to Corfu Town every morning at 6.30am to buy supplies for his mini-market. After the run, he sleeps for a few hours before he works in the store, then at 11pm he starts his second job, as night receptionist at a local hotel, to earn enough money to put his son through university. The dial on the truck’s speedometer is broken, and it whizzes around and around, in mad circles. Yellow foam is sticking out of the ripped plastic seats, and the engine is struggling. I half hope – very selfishly – that we don’t make it to the airport, so that I miss my flight, but not only does Spiros carry my bags for me, he refuses point blank to accept my offer of gas money, and shakes my hand, telling me we’ll see each other in September.
In the airport lounge I’m surrounded by British tourists heading home, some sunburned, but most of them looking healthy and tanned by the Greek sun. In a few hours’ time, I’m in a window seat on the Gatwick Express, the fast train into London. It’s humid and hot and outside the window the sky is grey, while dark brick buildings, covered in graffiti, flash by.
There are no purple and yellow flowers in sight, just the backs of office buildings. I’m in this cutting-edge, stylish city, now. I’ll get used to it, I tell myself. I’m going to make the most of these 2-3 months before I go back to Corfu. Anyway, London used to be my home for seven years, and as the saying goes, “home is where the heart is.” Mine is in Corfu.
Copyright 2003, Fiona Klonarides. Reprinted with permission.
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