A Scandal of Beauty

We flew back to Greece a week ago and as soon as we set foot in the taxi, we got the full-on soulful Greek experience. Welcome back! Almost all Greek cabbies love to do an intake interview about your life, life decisions, and especially economics ("how much is your rent?"). We chatted in our surprisingly-not-vanished Greek after almost 3 months away, and got our driver's life story (from beautiful Lefkada, worked overseas as a chef...). We explained our convoluted life path and the rental rate for our short term place in Athens. As we usually do, we also asked him for names of his favorite restaurants. He couldn't remember the name of a souvlaki joint that he likes near where we're staying and when we got to our rental, he unloaded our suitcases and then grabbed his phone to find it while we waited on the street. But his search lasted for a while and cars stacked up behind his cab on the narrow, steep road in front of our temporary abode. The other drivers yelled for him to move along so they could pass. Reluctant to cause trouble for him or our neighbors, we said it was ok to skip the restaurant recommendation, but he insisted and told the other drivers that he's just doing his cabbie job and that there was enough room to drive by. But there was yet more yelling directed at our unperturbed driver and a dog began to bark incessantly. Eventually the other drivers nervously drove past the double-parked taxi, car wheels squealing from rubbing the curb edge. He kept searching his phone, unfazed, for his favorite souvlaki spot. Oh, and all this time, a beloved Scops owl could be heard making its cheerful chirp from the pine woods next to the road on Lykabettos Hill.

It's been a momentous few weeks with a new relocation plan coalescing. And unfortunately the planning phase occurred amidst recuperation from the dreaded virus.

Long-term Lucca

During our time in Lucca, the longer we stayed, the more good features we uncovered about it and the less we wanted to leave. Lucca feels like it was designed for the idiosyncratic things that we desire in a town (minus convenient swimming for Sam). We also made a new friend there, an Italian-American expat, Joanne, who's been living in Lucca for several years and regularly visited it for even longer. Aside from enjoying spending time with her, we benefitted from her incredibly helpful information about how to set up a life there. And soon it felt like setting up a life there was the right thing to do. With Joanne's tips, we looked at long-term rental apartments and they were all much nicer and much cheaper than places we found in Greece. Without much angst or overthinking (something I'm especially good at), we signed a lease! We now have an apartment on the top floor of a former convent built in the 1630s. I can't say either of us foresaw such a thing when we arrived in Italy in late October. One morning, we rolled our suitcases for ten minutes down the cobbled Lucca streets to move from our short-term rental to our new Lucca home. It felt right.

Consummate Consulate Experience

While in Lucca, we decided that instead of waiting for our Greek resident permits to expire, we ought to just go for it and apply for Italian resident permits. Luckily Sam learned that our Greek permits provide a benefit because we could begin the process in Athens instead of back in the US, as most Americans must do. Italians, including Joanne and the cabbie who drove us to the Lucca train station (who spent six months as a teenager in, of all places, Hyattsville, MD in the 1980s!), warned us of Italian bureaucracy. We wondered if it could be that different from Greek or even American bureaucracy. We met with an official at the Italian Consulate in Athens on Monday, and almost as predicted, he asked for a couple things that we didn't have.

We dug up the extra materials and went to a photocopy shop to print the new papers out. While we were in the small copy shop, an older guy walked in and started chatting with Sam in Greek. As is so frequent, he started querying where we're from. Switzerland? Germany? England? Sweden? We're more often asked if we're Australian than American. He then wanted us to guess his age; he looked good, but is there a more perilous question to answer? He pulled out his identification and he's 93! He'd just had a letter to the editor published in an Athens newspaper and was getting copies made. The guy running the shop kindly made an extra copy for us so we could read it. Or maybe he wanted us to get a truer sense of this old man? Later that day we translated his letter and it contained a series of elliptical missives directed at both of the major political parties in Greece.

On our return visit to the Consulate, there was an Italian guy also visiting the office to get something done with his passport. During a lull in both of our processes, he asked what we were doing there. We told him our story, and he said that he's an artist but that he recently opened a pizzeria here in Athens to help finance his artistic passions. He raved about the pleasure of being so close to the sea in Greece--"you can smell the sea in the air here," but said that he could see why we'd want to go to Italy. "Italy is a scandal of beauty," he said. Sergio, the Consulate official helping us, got a pensive expression on his face and paused what he was doing to say, yes, that's a good way to describe Italy.

COVID experience

Our last two weeks in Lucca didn't go exactly as we had hoped. I had some annoying allergies that we assumed came from mold due to all the recent rain in Lucca. But after a few days of me dealing with such, Sam started to feel under the weather. I went to a pharmacy and bought several COVID tests so we could rule that out. Sam took the first test and within seconds the test showed positive. Damn! We've been so careful wearing masks in every shop, not eating inside restaurants, etc. that it was a shock to find out we had the darned thing. We had been fully masked in N95s in the only places we visited during the likely incubation time period. For three years now, we've struggled, like many people, with how to calibrate risk versus getting to fully enjoy life. We miss eating in restaurants, hearing live music, and most importantly getting to socialize. It's frustrating to think that even with our mostly hermit-like cautious lifestyle, we still couldn't avoid it. How do we recalibrate our risk metrics now?

Athens and Beyond

We're staying another week or so in Athens and it's been in the 60s and sunny almost every day here. We've gotten our energy back and have done some nice walks and gotten some great views from the city's hills. We've both read the excellent book, Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, who described these views thusly--"When he reached the top, he turned and gazed back down at Athens, a giant bathtub filled with dirty suds." I'm not sure I've read a more succinct description of this city. It's not a scandal of beauty but it's soulful and lovable in its own way.

We considered going somewhere warmer for the next couple months, but the more we thought about it, the more we felt good about heading back to our new home (so strange to say this!) in Lucca. We are excited about our next steps as we transition from our Greek experiment to a new, Italian one.