My favorite types of movies are romantic comedies. Most people see them and come out of the theater saying “oh, that only happens in the movies” but I know it sometimes happens in real life, too. The story of how I came to live in Greece could’ve been a romantic comedy.
You might expect your typical holiday romance story where girl goes to foreign land and finds true love–usually after some mishaps and mix-ups. I can’t say my story is like that. I was forty–a full forty-something–when I took my first holiday in Greece. It was my friend who was looking for adventure. It was the early 1990s but the movie Shirley Valentine was still fresh in her mind. Shirley was an English housewife who was bored with her life and her husband and came to Greece to find adventure, or herself. It sounded to me almost like a baby-boomer version of the teen-Greek-island-holiday romance. I’m sure quite a few women came to Greece hoping to be like the movie’s Shirley. My friend didn’t find romance, but she stepped on a piece of glass and got a bad cut on her foot so we ended up spending most of our time getting a tan on the balcony of our rooms to rent on Skiathos. I didn’t get to see much of Greece, and I only had a glimpse of the Acropolis in a few hours in Athens just before we caught the plane home.
Greece haunted me though. My “unfinished” holiday felt like an unrequited love. I obsessed about it in small ways–eating at Greek restaurants, buying posters of Greece, reading books about Greece or by Greek authors. It was like I was trying to make up for what I didn’t experience on my trip.
The idea of a Greek holiday stayed with me, but somehow I never managed to visit again. One year it was my daughter’s wedding, another year it was a cruise in the Caribbean, then it was a college reunion…the closest I came was a trip to Ireland in early 2001 but I couldn’t work out flights that would allow me decent time in Greece without breaking my budget.
About a year later, my company transferred me and I ended up in the northwest Pacific. It was a completely new environment–I had lived most of my life in the northeast–and there were a lot of adjustments, in my work life and my personal life. I was new and alone, so one of my colleagues invited me to her son’s wedding. It was a wonderful, colorful Polish wedding. Seated at my table was a man, about my age, who didn’t seem to know anyone either. He was a business associate of the groom’s father-in-law. I guess it was natural that as strangers we would gravitate towards each other. I thoroughly enjoyed myself–and he must have as well because he asked to exchange phone numbers. That same week he called me. We spoke on the phone several times and also met for lunch. Over one weekend, we took a drive to the ocean. Then one evening he invited me to see a movie. I accepted, although with some trepidation about what movie he might choose.
We saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I loved it! It wasn’t just the jokes and the obvious fun, but it was the warmth that the characters gave off for one another. I was also impressed by the fact that my date had chosen a romantic comedy, although most men I know aren’t really fans of the genre. Leaving the theater, we went over some of the scenes, laughing again. I said the Portokalos family reminded me a little of my Polish colleague’s family. My date said the Portokaloses at times reminded him of his family. “Oh, so you’re Polish, too,” I said. “No,” he replied, “I’m Greek.”
If I had had any doubts before they all evaporated: I was in love.
Who would’ve thought I’d find my “Greek romance” in the suburbs of Seattle. But there he was. Call it fate–the Greeks call it moira.
I don’t think the romance progressed faster because he was Greek–well, maybe it did, a little.
When I met his family–some of whom almost immediately started calling me ‘Mara’, and the name has stuck–they reminded me a little of the Portokaloses. Not their habits, or their house, or the way they talked, but their warmth. I immediately felt at home and peppered them with questions about Greece and Greek traditions.
We married six years ago. He proposed on our first trip to Greece (although he confessed he had wanted to do so earlier but had decided to wait). My husband’s family is from a small village near Kymi, on the island of Evia. As excited as I was, I confess my first trip to Evia was a bit of a disappointment. Naturally, in my mind, the word “island” conjured white-washed houses and, at the very least, a boat trip. We drove instead, crossing over from Halkida. I remember wondering on that first trip about the “travel poster Greece”. But it didn’t take long for me to succumb to Evia’s charms. Making the Kymi area our base, we toured Evia, and I immediately came to love the alternating scenery of mountain and beach. I remember one lunch, in particular, at a pretty inland village where we sampled pies made from cheeses and wild greens in thick, slightly oily, hand-rolled phyllo, followed by barbecued meat and platters of thick pasta tossed with coarsely grated white mizithra cheese with hot butter (or maybe it was olive oil) drizzled over the top to slightly “cook” the cheese.
We also made a trip to Skyros and although my husband-to-be explained that it was part of the same island group as Skiathos–the Northern Sporades–it felt very different. I loved the “hora”, or Skyros Town, although on my first couple of visits I was somewhat confused by the fact that the capital or main village of most islands is called “hora”, which the dictionary translates to “country” or “land”. Finally, my white-washed village! I still have a small ceramic pony bought as a souvenir on that first trip. It’s symbolic of the island, which is known for its ceramics but also its small ponies, most of which have been whisked off the island somehow.
My Greek romance has blossomed into a romance with Greece. That first trip back eight years ago has been followed by many more–we now visit at least once a year. Last year we found a small house on Evia that we bought and are fixing up. It’s closer to the coast and has a small piece of land attached to it where I plan to have a small garden. We’re going to retire there in a few years. That is when “my odyssey” will end–­or maybe that’s when it will start. It’s not the typical Shirley Valentine story because I didn’t come to Greece to find my romance. Instead, I found the romance that brought me to Greece. Sometimes life is like the movies.