NAOUSA VILLAGE
I spent the first morning on my own in my room at my kitchen table and then at the round table on the little white balcony outside my room above the narrow street that Efi’s Rooms is on. This narrow lane has several steps as it goes up the hill so no car or motorcycle can use it. They whiz by on the street that crosses about 100 feet down the lane but it is quiet here. And just as I had hoped, the morning was a completely ordinary morning filled with the sound of Efi talking to someone in her apartment and then talking to the older woman in the house across the street who was hanging clothes out to dry on a line in her courtyard.
Covering the porch and hiding me as I sat on the balcony is a pink bougainvillea vine that shielded me from the sun and from people looking up at me. Just up the street a man was repainting the while lines in front of his house that outlined the stones used to pave the street.
We saw a woman yesterday painting the lines just up the street from our Airbnb. Just as people are responsible for sweeping up around their house, they seem also to be responsible for repainting the white lines in front of their house. In the late morning Efi brought me a covered jar of sesame cookies that she had baked and I ate one.
The only tourist in sight was me. In the afternoon I went for a walk to explore Naousa a little bit. I walked a mile and a half to the spot where I remembered a carry out food store to be but couldn’t find it. It had vanished, or I was in the wrong place. The more certain I am about directions the more likely I am to be dead wrong. I should just go in the opposite direction from the one I am sure is right. So I shuffled back, completely tuckered out, and lay down after eating two more cookies and drinking a glass of milk that I had wildly overpaid for at a little grocery store far up the hill. Yesterday when taking out euros to pay Efi I discovered that I had paid 10% for the 400 euros that I got, about $46. I read up on ATM’s in Greece last night and today got 500 euros from a different ATM today at 2.5%, one quarter as much. I wonder if the grocery store owner jacks up the price for obvious tourists who ask their questions in English or if milk, like gasoline, is just more expensive on Paros where there are certainly no cows.
Now I’ve napped, texted with Tom as he flies home, and am revived. I think all my days by myself in Naousa will be about like this.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 