The Highams discover they are actually Greek

Recently we found ourselves sitting on an all-night ferry leaving Athens, Greece, heading toward a Greek island near Turkey.  This was my first experience with Greeks in large numbers.  Sitting on the deck of the ferry, I was reminded of a scene from the movie, "My Big, Fat Greek Wedding" except we were missing the guy with the bottle of Windex.  There was an elderly woman about 200 pounds overweight going up and down the aisles singing at the top of her very capable lungs.  No one paid her any attention, because she seemed the most subdued person in the crowd.

As we leave Europe, we have to leave behind any notion that we can ever blend in.  As I sat on the ferry leaving Athens, two little girls, aged about 4 and 5, stood staring at me through wide and unblinking eyes, mouths agape so that I could scrutinize their dental work.  To them, I must have looked like I was from outer space.

But although we can no longer BLEND in, FITTING in seems within reach -- at least in the midst of a ship full of Greeks returning to their island home.  Surveying the scene before me, I could not help but sit back and fully relax for the first time in ages, realizing that my noisy children and our tendency to spread our belongings out for all to trample on would not raise an eyebrow.  Throughout Europe we have felt like water buffalo trampling through a delicately constructed, very proper society.  We even coined a new verb to describe the phenomenon.  To "higham" an area is to make it cluttered with stuff and strewn with crumbs, or to ruin the serenity with our noise.  For example, the other day in the train Jordan broke the silence when he returned from the W.C. by announcing loudly to the entire car that the restroom didn‚t have toilet paper, describing in all its detail what that implied.  And you just can‚t help but feel conspicuous stepping onto a subway with the locals carrying their Gucci handbags and their hair looking like it was carefully lacquered into place when we lumber on with 100 pounds of gear and wearing the remnants of our lunch on our shirts with pride.

But we couldn't "higham" the deck area of the ferry leaving Athens if we tried.  People were setting up little fiefdoms throughout the cabin area with blankets on the floor, sleeping bags, pillows, boom-boxes and all manner of stuff.  Each fiefdom had its own crowd and they all seemed to be making political ties with the neighboring tribes.  We were hoping to be able to sleep there on the deck, but it was clear that the tribes were settling in for an all-night party.

It wasn't some college students‚ coming-of-age drinking party, either.  With each tribe having its share of kidlets, aunts, uncles, and cousins, this was an affair the entire family could enjoy.  While nobody was roasting a lamb on board, if I didn‚t know better all the maternal types had brought a potluck dish to share.  We saw no evidence of a bundt cake.

When I sent the last e-mail we were just leaving Venice, Italy.  In a bit of a rush to get to less-expensive Turkey, we hustled through most (but not all) of what we wanted to do in Italy and then made our way across the Adriatic Sea then across Greece.  

We planned the world-the-round trip to start in Europe on purpose, because, well, travel there is easy.  You can expect things to work.  Things like the rail system, or the phones.  You can expect to drink the water coming out of the tap and not get sick.  Stuff that Americans simply take for granted.  Now we have left easy, comfortable, but most importantly familiar, Europe.

As I sat on the all-night ferry from Athens with a Greek party starting to rage around me, I couldn‚t help but be a bit nervous about what lies ahead in Turkey and beyond.  It is, at least to me, a bit unknown.

We were dumped unceremoniously onto an obscure Greek island at 3:30 in the morning, and as we waited outside in the dark to catch our boat to Turkey, we had several hours to contemplate what it meant to leave easy, predictable Europe.