Vajra-Bath in Aetolia

Easter(wood) Everywhere hasn't gotten much love during this journey ~ or really, since last Spring after I returned to Texas.   As mentioned in the preceding post, I've been here in Greece since late November 2017, intending to stay until mid-February.   I had hoped to set up the merest framework for living/working in Greece, but was surprised (again and again) by the challenges of establishing the communication system upon which my work depends. 

So... much of this trip has been spent in technical quagmires, which made the respites and unveiled beauties more welcome.  One of those was discovering that the second apartment I rented was mere steps from the Corinthian Gulf.    I have walked on the beach almost daily, and been gently surprised by its many moods - including nights in which the water was almost flat, becalmed as a lake. 

The sea is backed up to the western edge of the Agrafa mountain range (the one that includes Parnassus), though at this point in the geography, those are foothills, not mountains.  My front balcony has hills to my right; but the sea, on the left, is much closer!

Although daily temperatures have been from 10-16ºC (45-60ºF), and the waters are pellucid and mild,  I haven't been able to shake off my quasi-hibernation to consider a swim.   The other day it struck me that I could take some of the sea to my bath and mix it with the warmer tapwaters.  'Thought a few gallons would make a nice addition.  

I hauled 10 gallons in two trips, and since the apartment is on the second floor, it was four trips.    I was still muttering-through the workshop I came here to create, so I decided to wait until later in the evening to set up the bath. 

Intuition:  This water would like to be left outside, please.   So I set the buckets on the back balcony.  More intuition: Got any seastones for us? Went back down and collected a handful of shore pebbles and put them in the water.  Thank you. 

The workshop I am developing comes in odd little bursts, so I was twirled up in that work until 3 a.m.  Too late (early?) for the bath.  I fell asleep and woke to thunder and downbursts of rain. Thought about the buckets of seawater, went to the balcony to check on them.  Yes, they had collected an inch or two of the storm, but all cloud-birthed - no run-off from the roof.  I watched lightning play through the trees behind the apartment and realized the new water would descend from that flashing mirror.

It was going to be an excellent bath.

On the chemical side I was hoping the sea water would stand in for some of the magnesium sulfate I didn't have.  As it had been almost a month since my last Epsom salts bath, my body had a background ache that I had managed to ignore, but it wasn't sweetening my mood. 

Turns out that the Med has an small, almost homeopathic percentage of both magnesium and sulfate, but still higher than ocean water.   Per litre? Let's see, 10 gallons is around 35 liters, so I would be soaking in, say, 200 mgs of magnesium sulfate. About one aspirin-worth.   But the carrier, oceanic sodium chloride, seemed to make a potent difference.

After checking on the balcony buckets, I discovered the storm had knocked out my electricity, so no hot water until it was restored (six hours later!).  One of the more sensible differences in European household management is the attitude toward hot-water: 'what is this, a hotel? heat the water when you need it.'  So water stays cool in the tank until 20 minutes prior to bathing.    

When I had written as far as I could ruminate, I drew the bath, pouring the cooler sea/rain water into hot tap water, then added the stones.  "No soap." Okay.  By now I had picked up on the presence of a few curious sea nymphs, who came up with the seawater to check me out.   I don't see them with what my friend Bobby calls 'meat eyes.' I perceive their presence with my visual imagination (the eye's mind, as it were), a kind of liquid architecture that was both structured and mobile, like music. 

I once rested in a garden in Mexico between two atmospheres, cooler on my right, warmer to the left, and felt them meet and resist one another just over my face.  Conversing with this presence was a little like that, as we misunderstood and resisted each others' eidos, being from two very different realms.  They asked me what kind of 'dolphin' I was - and it took a while to understand that they were joking, as they knew full well that I am human and mostly landlocked.

The bath was so rich, even as it cooled the water felt heavier, like melted tapestries.  I dozed and soaked, occasionally waking up enough to scrub a patch of skin. I didn't use soap, but I did put handfuls of sodium bicarbonate on the bath brush.  To my surprise, I peeled as though I was sunburned, layer after layer sloughing anything I could reach, even the inside of my arms and the backs of my knees.   The body that emerged felt lighter, less knotted, cooler somehow.  Stood up and rinsed the soda-seawater off me, then reached for the plug.  Wait.  The question was light but clear: could I take the water back to the sea?  Some of it, anyway?  I agreed, but added that this needed to wait till tomorrow.  Fine...  I hauled 3 buckets to rest on the balcony, left about 8 inches back in the bathtub.

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It has continued to rain off and on through the day.  The water isn't as limpid now - winds have whipped the waves, which roils up the silted seafloor.  But I caught a few minutes of sun and hauled the buckets downstairs, down the half-block to the gentle, curling edge of the sea.  As I approached, the waves got bigger for a minute, throwing themselves a few feet beyond the water line.  "Happy to see us, are you?" as I poured the first 3 gallons back into the bay.   The wind rose and sky brightened to silver, then swept back down to pigeonbreast blues.
 
I don't think I've ever been so clean.

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Greek-in-the-Box

Preamble: In the Spring of 2017 I made a couple of blogposts designed to help my readers with communication and transportation systems in Greece.  So much has changed in the last six months that it neutralizes most of that advice.  But here's an update, may it be of some small use. . . 

Late in 2017 I returned to Greece to finish up the Ten Senses workshop - a project that got shelved last year as family obligations prevailed.    Upon arriving to Athens in November, I discovered that Greek communication systems had been bought and sold and bought again, so new dispensations were in place. 

Getting the car was moderately complicated (yes, you will need that International Driving Permit as well as your license and passport - and carry photocopies!), but CarNMotion still serves the larger cities.  Their people are funny, kind and efficient - so I continue to recommend them for a quick rental. 

Phone/net service was strangely difficult to obtain.  Six months earlier I had purchased SIM cards from Cosmote for my iPhone and iPad, but the iPad wouldn't recognize it.  I went to Cosmote stores and found pretty close to sheer chaos... workers looked tired and anxious, questions were shrugged off and technical support non-existent.   Moreover,  Cosmote (and most carriers) had broken their data and minute packages into tiny, specialized slivers so you pay 5€ for social media, 7€ for music, 3 for 'general data' (which can only be sent out as hotspot data), etc.  Oh and everything purchased expires in 1 day, 3-days or a week.  Nightmare. 

Vodafone works well in the cities and small towns, and seems less dysfunctional as a business.  The stores have enough personnel and no one appears to hate their job.  The data packages are a wee bit less expensive than Cosmote, but marginally.  They have an introductory packet of 5GB on a 10€ SIM card, but be aware that they burn up around 60-100 MB per hour - if you are not streaming video or music.  Then it shoots up to 200mb per hour. 

I make my living as a writer, so keeping a line open to the Net is essential for a number of reasons.  This trip had another family emergency pop up as well.  My exasperation was bottomless for a good bit of this journey, as Net access was stymied again and again, and my only quasi-reliable communications system was a wifi hotspot (through my iPhone) which burned out the battery. 

About two months into this fracas, Vodafone saved the day, sending a tech named none other than Soterio ("Savior") who set up an inexpensive wifi hotspot and sold me an introductory data pack. Total: 50€.     I had to buy another 22€ of data for the next three weeks, but it has been well worth it.  Be sure and look for the Pre-pay pages. 

Funny thing is, you won't find this router or service on their Vodafone Mobile Network website, you have to ask for it in person.  But here's a link.  I paid about 22€ for the router, 18 to set it up and 10 for the first data packet.   I strongly recommend getting some form of wifi  independent of your hosts or hotels while in Greece.  Cosmote has the biggest network in Greece, but they are dropping the ball, big time. 

(PS... if you *do* go to Cosmote, be aware that as of this writing Cosmote will not set up the router for you and they will NOT allow returns/refunds  if their hardware doesn't work with your systems. Caveat emptor, on steroids.)