Cretan-homes, Crete property estate agents

GETTING TO KNOW THE LOCALS

BY ANN LISNEY

There is no doubt that if you spend much time in Crete, you need to learn the language. Of course you can shop at supermarkets and eat at a taverna where the waiter speaks English – but what happens if, like us, you move into a village where there are no other foreigners and no one speaks English? How do you get to know people?

In our case, it has been enormous fun. For example, we are now on chatting terms with many local shopkeepers. There are several wonderful hardware stores in our nearby town, which have been invaluable for our DIY. Our dictionaries and phrase books arrived weeks behind us, so initially we had to rely on drawing a picture or mime. We had to discard all our English self-consciousness and mime things like ‘saw’, ‘drill’ and ‘paintbrush’. Hilarity ensued, which led to successful purchases and often a coffee or a tsikouthia.

We are also bosom buddies with the OTE (telephone) engineers. We had problems with our ISDN modem recognising our computer, and went into the shop to ask for help. Almost before we had returned home two engineers were there to check the situation.

We know next to nothing about ISDN modems. We had a booklet, which was all in Greek, and two engineers, who were all in Greek. They kept lifting the telephone handset to show we had a dialling tone, and we kept pointing at the computer and the modem and shaking our heads.  Two coffees and a tsikouthia later and we were all very good friends.  We still had the problem, but it resolved itself.

Often when we plant something in the garden, someone from the village trots down to tell us the proper way of doing it. We soon learned that our newly-planted vine was in the wrong place and was probably not the right type anyway. That’s 4 whole euros wasted (about £2.75).

We were surprised the first time we discovered a bowl of vegetables at our front door; the wife of the vine expert had left them for us. And we are kept in eggs and tsikouthia by a very nice man we hardly every see. He just leaves a plastic bucket on our doorstep.

One evening in the summer there was a village barbecue, and we were invited. A long table was set with benches and chairs, and everyone – from a three year old to ancient ladies in black head-dresses – had turned out. The food just kept on coming, and so did the tsikouthia! The head chef, turning a lamb on a spit, was a great bear of a man with thick black curly hair and beard and a very loud voice. When he wasn’t delivering souvlaki, chops or sausages to our plates, he was quaffing quantities of alcohol and singing at the top of his voice.

The evening got darker, the drinking end of the table more excitable, and before long one of the men leaped to his feet, pulled out a pistol and fired into the air. Nobody turned a hair – just the normal Cretan way of expressing enjoyment!

We eventually slunk away, defeated by all the food and wine, at about midnight. No one else had left and things were just beginning to warm up at the drinking end of the table with an outbreak of singing. Plenty more shots were fired and many more songs were sung before the party broke up.

A quick tip about Greek hospitality. You may be invited to someone’s house ‘for coffee’, but that covers a multitude of sins. We have been ‘for coffee’ which turned out to be lunch, spread over three hours, with plenty of the local wine. We have also been ‘for coffee’ in the early evening to find twenty villagers seated around tables groaning with food the women had obviously spent all day preparing.

We were asked if we would like to go on a two-day village coach trip. “What better way of seeing Crete?” we thought. But no. We were going to have a look at the sights, and everyone else was going for the socialising and for the eating. We had only been going for ten minutes when the first tsikouthia was brought round, followed by biscuits, cheese pies, more tsikouthia, more biscuits…… And then the singing started. All the elderly men pushed to the front of the coach to take turns on the microphone.

After what seemed like forty eight hours of  eating, drinking and singing, we arrived back in our village at 10.45 pm – and were then invited for supper by one of the villagers. We lied. We said we were expecting a phone call, and beat a hasty retreat.

One of our favourites in the village is an eighty three year old lady, who gives me lessons in horta (wild plant) gathering, and the making of kalitsounias, cheese pies and egg pasta. She is wonderful and is very patient with my pigeon Greek. She leans forward in concentration while I labour over each word, and somehow we manage to hold a conversation. I always leave her house with armfuls of lemons, herbs, olives, grapes or whatever she has been cooking.

Our other friends in the village are a youngish couple where the wife is keen to learn English, so we have mutual learning sessions. Her husband speaks no English, but often potters round to sit with us over a glass of frappee while we jump up and down, looking up various words in the dictionary. We are also on very good terms with the local sheep, who rush across our drive daily on their way to grazing pasture, and the wonderful sheepdog, who calls regularly for a biscuit.

We dread offending the locals by our ignorance – by breaking some taboo or not doing something which is expected of us. But we potter on, learning as we go. After all, as they say round here – siga, siga (slowly, slowly).