31. We Meet a Mean Greek

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.
Here in this island we arrived.
——The Tempest, I.ii 

Sarah and I said goodbye to Holly and Brian and boarded a Metro train for Piraeus. Once there, we settled on a hydrofoil for our trip to Hydra. It was more expensive than a standard passenger ship, but also a lot smaller and faster. 

I complained about a cabdriver in the previous chapter, but at least he tried to help us despite a significant language barrier. So, apart from Q. and E., the only truly unpleasant person we met in Greece was the purser on board our hydrofoil.  

In Greek mythology, of course, the Hydra was a nasty, nine-headed, people-eating beast slain by Heracles as one of his twelve labors. Our purser didn't have nine heads or eat people, but she proved that she could be nasty. I must admit the initial offense was ours: We failed to get off the boat at Hydra. We didn't hear the PA announcement, didn't know where we were, and didn't realize we had only a couple of minutes to disembark. I didn't figure it out until the boat had pulled away from the dock and was headed toward the next island, Spetses. So I found the purser, a slender blonde with heavy eyelids and a long nose, and told her what had happened.  

A word of advice to those of you in customer service: When a customer admits to a boneheaded mistake, it's best if you don't assume a condescending air and say "Why?" It takes great humility for your customers to admit they were wrong, and asking them why just puts them immediately back on the defensive. It also frustrates them, because they usually won't have a good answer for you. People don't know why they make dumb mistakes; if we did know, we probably wouldn't make them.  

The purser must have seen that I was flummoxed, though, because she sweetened up and said we should get off at Spetses and wait for the boat to return (it was going to one more island, I forget which). Then we could take it back to Hydra. This seemed reasonable enough, so we complied. According to the schedule posted on the dock at Spetses, we had only about 20 minutes to wait, which was just long enough to nearly get hit by someone on a rented moped and discover that the ATM at what appeared to be the island's only bank was out of order. (Since the hydrofoil had cost more than we'd anticipated, we needed more euros.)  

When the boat came back, the purser recognized us, but instead of letting us aboard, she said, "Did you buy tickets to Hydra?"  

Flummoxed again, I said no. She turned up her chin, looked at me down her nose, and spat out, in the tone of voice one might use with a dog that has overturned one's garbage pail: "You have to."  

While this requirement was certainly reasonable, it was the first time the young lady had mentioned it. Why on earth she didn't tell us when we got off at Spetses I don't know — but judging from her demeanor, it was her way of getting even with us for being dumb Americans. Because guess what: you can't buy the tickets on the boat. Away to the ticket office we ran, but in the meantime the boat left, and we were now stuck on Spetses for another hour and a half.  

Which, in itself, wasn't a bad thing. We found a working ATM, took a carriage ride and saw a bit of the island, and ate lunch at a seafood restaurant with freshly caught octopuses hanging up on a wire to dry outside. Our purser friend, thank heaven, wasn't on the next boat, and we saw nothing further of her. I can't chalk our misunderstanding up to a language barrier; her English was just fine. There was simply no real effort on her part to help us. She was, let's face it, just mean.  

The charming thing about Hydra is that, unlike Spetses, it doesn't allow motorized transport. You get around on foot or by donkey, and we did a bit of both. We bought a lot of gifts for relatives and some sandals for ourselves, and poked around a monastery for a few minutes.

In the 1960s, Hydra hosted something of a bohemian colony of artists and writers from other countries, notably including Leonard Cohen, who spent five years there as a poet and author and produced a scandalous novel, Beautiful Losers, before embarking on a singer/songwriter career. We knew none of this at the time, and simply enjoyed the island for its own sake. 

Back in Athens, we decided we were tired of Greek food, so we ate at what is surely one of the world's most overpriced Mexican restaurants, a few blocks from Acropolis House. Twenty-five euros for a couple of basic beans-and-rice burritos and a quesadilla.  

At the next table was one of several American pin collectors we'd seen around Athens: guys who bought and traded souvenir pins for all the Olympic events, and wore hundreds of them on hats and vests everywhere they went. This particular collector was from Georgia, and couldn't shut up about how great this Mexican food was. I wonder if he ever ate Mexican food in Georgia. I have, and it's better there than it is in Greece.  

Perhaps Mexican ingredients aren't easy to get in Athens, or perhaps that's just what the restaurateur wanted us to think. Either way, next time I think I'll stick with Greek food a little longer. And if I ever go to Mexico, I'm avoiding Greek restaurants there.  

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: I almost wish I didn't have to report this, since today was the first and only day in Greece that Sarah and I had entirely to ourselves, and it seems a shame to drag Q. into an episode in which he had no role. However, the Pearl of Wisdom in question is so astonishing that I'd be remiss in not recounting it.  

Earlier I said that we had several encounters with film crews in Athens. Well, months later I discovered what one of them had been up to: It was a crew from a certain European country, shooting a documentary about American evangelical missionaries at the Olympics. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Given the recent political ascendancy of American evangelicals, capped off by the election of George W. Bush, the filmmakers were worried that those evangelicals are now trying to extend their newfound influence into Europe — and they, the filmmakers, tried to answer this question by sending film crews after missionaries at the Olympics. I haven't seen the film yet, although the excerpts posted at the filmmakers' Web site seem to indicate that their answer would be a big fat yes. In other words, where missionaries see themselves as trying to address the world's spiritual needs, these filmmakers saw only another attempt at political hegemony.  

What does Q. have to do with any of this? Well, they interviewed him. I don't know when or where, but he shows up quite unmistakably in one of those Web excerpts. And what does he say to reassure these suspicious Europeans, who think he's after their parliament buildings, not their souls? Get this: He says European Christians need to walk across Europe and "reclaim" the continent for God.  

As one who's somewhat conversant with this particular strain of evangelical thinking, it's obvious to me that Q. was talking about some kind of "spiritual warfare"–type "prayer walking" across Europe. However, although that might be what he meant, you can bet it isn't what that film crew heard. If they were looking for proof that American evangelicals had political designs on Europe, Q. had just handed it to them, gift-wrapped.

(Editorial note [2022]: Much of My Big Fat Greek Vacation still holds up after 16 years, but if I were writing the following two paragraphs today I'd write them differently. American evangelicalism has evolved significantly since then, and not in a good way. Or perhaps I'm just more aware of its deficiencies — or perhaps both. In either case, I'm much more comfortable calling myself a "post-evangelical" these days. I can no longer deny that evangelicals seek to impose their will on both the United States and Europe via political means, and I would no longer entrust any form of "spiritual renewal" to them. It's interesting to look back on my perspective from back then and reflect on how much I have changed. But many of the seeds of that change were sown during my trip to Greece.) 

Allow me to make myself clear. I do agree that Europe desperately needs spiritual renewal. I just don't think it's very smart to talk about spiritual renewal in military/political terms. I don't know, of course, whether Q. had any idea how the film would be slanted — but it might not have made any difference. He might have said the same thing anyway, blissfully unaware of the cultural divide between himself and his audience — as on most occasions when I observed him talking to Europeans.

It's things like this that fuel my own religious identity crisis. You see, I have no doubt that American evangelicals are systematically and often deliberately misunderstood, both at home and abroad. But I'm just about equally certain that they often do and say things that either practically beg to be misunderstood or are just plain dumb. So am I an evangelical or not? Well, get that camera out of my face and maybe we can talk about it.