Hydration

After a week clouded with tear gas and punctuated by stun grenades, it was nice to be able to look forward to a three-day weekend away from the turbulent capital. Our long weekend coincided with two national holidays: the anniversary of the granting of dominion status to my own distinctly un-mediterranean native land, and more relevantly (since this is an American excavation), the 4th of July. On Friday night, the Canadians hosted a gathering, luring the Americans in with poutine before ordering them to undergo several rounds of trivia questions designed to draw further attention to our nation's underwhelming cultural accomplishments.

This morning I woke at 6, as usual, and headed down to Syntagma. I was absolutely astonished to be able to buy a frappé in a newly refurbished McDonald's, in view of the fact that the place had been firebombed only three days beforehand, suffering damage that I had assumed would take weeks to repair. By contrast, as I waited for my shuttle to arrive on the steps of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, I noticed that its fine marble stairs were still chipped at the edges and corners. Having suffered not even a sniffle from lingering tear gas, I climbed onto my bus to the Peiraeus.

I'd bought a ticket for a one-day cruise of the main islands of the Saronic gulf: Aegina, Poros, and Hydra. Although I didn't know it when I boarded the ferry, we were headed to the most distant of the three, Hydra, first. My plan was to disembark on both Hydra and Poros, spending a night in each, before getting back on the ferry to Athens via Aegina, which I visited last summer with students from the American School. (Most of the agoramericans ha set off for Mykonos and Delos for the long weekend; a few bolder spirits jetted off to Lesbos, Samos and even Rhodes.)

The passage was unproblematic enough, besides the traditional Greek music that was laid on free of charge (and apparently without anyone requesting it) for most of the journey. As we pushed through green, garbage-infested waters past Aegina's rocky hills, we were serenaded with a miscellany of Greek folk tunes, including 'Lady in Red' and 'Don't Cry for me Argentina' and climaxing with an extraordinary medley of hits, including 'I Will Survive' and 'You're Just to Good to be True (Can't Take my Eyes off of You)'. The lady sitting next to me looked over and rolled her eyes, but the singer could not be stopped. He crooned all the way to Hydra; that is his day-job, and he intends to go on doing it.

Hydra town is a collection of tourist shops and restaurants clustered around a bay full of bobbing fishing boats and jostling yachts. Unlike similar places, like Chania on Crete, it's not particularly distinguished by its architecture. I wandered around for a while looking for what I would consider a cheap hotel (a single room for 50 Euros or less), before realizing that there weren't any on this island. I did get a glimpse of a few stray kittens, though, most of whom ghosted away from me as I clumped down the narrow whitewashed stairs that serve as alleyways here.

There are no cars on Hydra, and that suits me just fine. I went for a walk along the coast

westwards, peering down at swimmers on pebbly beaches below me. After an hour or so I descended to a lonely strip of grey sand and swam a few strokes out into the salt water, which curled around me and got in my eyes. I thought about not stopping over in Poros tomorrow night after all. After all this writing about debt, perhaps I should put the cost of another night in a hotel into repaying my own; I'd spent too much money traveling last summer. I also thought about my mind, the way it continually

protests about the past and negotiates the future, while all around, the sun is raining silver on a rich blue sea.