it hunger

I love that in Greek to be hungry is a verb.

I realized it while I was daydreaming in Italian class, trying to impress into my mind that hunger is a noun in Italian, much like in Spanish. You have hunger (ho fame). You possess it. You don’t become it (sono fame). Or, I mean, you might if you’re a character from a Neil Gaiman novel. Good Omens was a fun read.

In English, it’s an adjective most of the time. Though I guess that you can say that you own hunger the way you own the shoes you’re wearing (hopefully) or the way you own some other aspect of your being. I don’t know. The color of your eyes, maybe. People will just look at you weird.

But in Greek it’s a full-on verb with a conjugation and everything. Hunger is a thing that you do. I hunger. You hunger. He and she and it hunger.

I wonder what that says about culture. That the same concept, something as universal as fulfilling a basic human need, is expressed so differently even among cultures that share so much in common. That maybe the way we relate some intangible universality to ourselves says something about the way we place ourselves in the universe—at the center or off to the side or just accidentally sort of there with hunger just happening to you.

Or maybe they all just come from different roots and I’m just making a big deal out of nothing. I don’t know. I’m not a linguist (who could’ve guessed it?).

Still. Something kind of cool to think about before the professor moves on to the next phase of the lesson.

–Marie-Irene

The World According to Grandma

My grandmother is eighty-four years-old, exactly, and this is a fact that she hangs over all of our heads. Eighty-four years-old means a heck of a lot more years than however old you are, so you better listen to what she has to say. So this is the world according to my grandmother, a world that I never want to forget.

Every morning from the months of May through September she goes for a swim in the sea. She swims one hundred meters out, sixty meters to the right, and then thirty meters diagonally back in towards the shore so that she swims in the shape of a large right triangle. When my dad pointed out the obvious fact that her numbers might be slightly off, according to the Pythagorean Theorem, my grandmother disagreed. Pythagoras, old as he was, is not today, in fact, eighty-four years-old.

In either case, this morning in the middle of her one hundred meter swim out into the ocean depths, she met one of her friends from her circle of fellow retirees. She used to sing with them every night at the gazebo on the beach before her arthritis got so bad it hurt for her to walk. But, you see, my grandmother has a very beautiful voice and loves to sing, and her friend said so. My grandmother took this as her cue.

In the middle of the ocean, a little less than one hundred meters out, she belted her heart out, all the old songs that came to her memory. The other swimmers were totally unfazed. In fact, according to my grandmother herself, they all started to clap.

“Wait a minute,” my father interrupts my grandmother’s story. “How is that even possible? How can they clap and swim at the same time? Wouldn’t they drown?”

“They clapped,” my grandmother insists. They clapped because she sang.

It’s already the beginning of August, and she does not have a lot of time left. She has to get one hundred total swims in for the summer season in order to ensure a light winter with minimal sickness. So you guys heard it here first–if she has not, in fact, completed all 100 swims by winter, we’ll all know it. Probably not because the winter is rough and we’ve all come down with colds, but because she’ll let us know it. She’ll sing us a song about it. And let me be perfectly clear here: I love my grandmother’s songs, whether sung in the middle of the ocean or in the middle of dinner, I don’t care.

So next time you’re on a ship passing through the Mediterranean and you see an eighty-four year-old woman swimming exactly one hundred meters out and who occasionally but nevertheless loudly starts to sing in the middle of the sea, wave hello. But whatever you do, if you’re swimming along beside her, please don’t start to applaud. She’ll single-handedly drown half the populace of Greece if she keeps this up.

–Marie-Irene

On the Edge of the Sea: Another Athens Travel Blog

The Eurobank next to my favorite Starbucks in Athens is a building with a tawdry history. And we all know that those are the best kind. It looks out onto six lines of traffic, then the tramline, and then, finally, a stretch of brilliantly blue sea. In the mornings the nearby water shimmers and there is no distinguishing the blue of the sky from the sea as the two sort of meld together, the perfect picture of what the Mediterranean is supposed to be, like the face of a postcard. What I’m trying to say is that this is a Eurobank with a view like no other.

It was a brothel, first. At least that’s what my dad calls it in Greek. I don’t know if I’m translating the word correctly. Maybe the word “brothel” is too crude or maybe it’s just not at all politically correct. The point is that this building was not always a bank. Apparently, later on in its history, the Mormons took it over and used it as a base from which to convert the local populace who turned out to be decidedly un-convertible. The Mormon enterprise soon became widely regarded as a failed venture, and the building remained empty for a while. Today it is a Eurobank beside a Starbucks that overlooks highway, tramway, and the sea. Mostly, it overlooks a kiosk and newspaper stand that is permanently situated exactly in front of it. But let’s pretend I haven’t mentioned that part. It’s more poetic this way.

Or maybe the word “brothel” isn’t so accurate after all. Perhaps the word “sex hotel” works better here. In any case, the building was once called “Phryne” after the fourth-century BC Athenian courtesan. Her birth name was originally Mnesarete, meaning “commemorating virtue,” which I think indicates her parents had a sense of humor. Her nickname became “Phryne,” meaning “toad,” apparently, for her “yellowish complexion,” whatever that means. She was very good at what she did. She served as a muse for great sculptors and orators alike. And–get this–she is most famous for her trial where she was accused of… impiety. Between the year three hundred and the year two thousand and fourteen very little has changed. Because I find that the best most interesting sort of people are the ones with a tawdry history.

The best part of this story is that I don’t know if any of it is true. I am about as gullible as they come and a real sucker for tall tales, and my dad, well, he’s a storyteller. He can get away with convincing me of just about anything. He was born and raised in Athens. He lives and breathes the life of the city–it’s in his blood, and he is as much a part of its history as it is a part of his. I’m not concerned about whether or not the story true, anyway. I know that his story, the story of this city, is. And these tall tales capture part of the city’s charm, its charisma. Besides, it’s a nice story regardless, the story of the building that is at least a century old and the Eurobank that inhabits it.

It’s a perfectly inconspicuous-looking place. You won’t even notice it’s there.

–Marie-Irene