La isla bonita

A byproduct of all the Siberian cold that descended upon Greece last week was a massive power outage on the islands of Kefalonia and Ithaca. Parts of the islands were without power for nearly a week, and the travails of the island residents brought back memories of my own trials and tribulations when we lived on the island of Kos.

The reaction most people had when I told them we were moving to a Greek island for a year was one of envy and awe. An island must be paradise, right?

Not exactly.

While there may be many people out there who would be permanently mesmerized by the sand and surf, normal, reasonable people who don’t spend all their days on the beach are really just trying to live their lives, which I daresay in an island environment can be a little bit trickier than on the mainland.

First, let me say that Kos is a beautiful island, very scenic, filled with friendly denizens, good restaurants, and lots to do. I did not hate living there, but I would certainly think twice before moving to an island permanently or for a several year stretch after having had the experience. I would even suggest it for a nice holiday, as there are lots of clean and reasonably priced hotels and beaches all around.

We lived in the village of Pyli, which is situated in the southern mountainous regions of the island. That means if we wanted ANYTHING (aside from a good meal or some overpriced artwork) we had to drive, usually to the main city of the island, aptly called “Kos town”. Now, Kos is a pretty small island, although not the smallest, certainly far from being called large. The island is shaped sort of like a fish, and the length was around 30 miles or so, with the width no more than 5 miles or so at its widest. There was one major road that ran the length of the island, and for the most part it was a two-lane highway, with ample room on both sides for slower vehicles to get over so normal moving vehicles can pass. The speed limit was, I think, 70km/hr, but obviously there were always people going MUCH faster than that. I typically drove between 80-90, depending on the curvy parts of the road, and I always had people on my ass. Seriously guys and gals, you can’t go anywhere that takes more than 30 minutes to get to on that damn island, what’s the friggin’ hurry?

The fun thing about that road always occurred during tourist season. Kos was a popular locale for British tourists, so it was open season on people trying to figure out how to drive on the right side of the road. Even more pleasant were the people who rented motorcycles – people who obviously had never driven such a conveyance before. And lets not forget the people on those weird dune buggy things that couldn’t go more than about 40 km/hour. Traveling mostly in gangs (surely as protection from irate islanders), it was especially pleasant driving behind a group of 4 or 5 of these vehicles trying desperately to get their little buggies from one part of the island to another. Then you have a plethora of tour buses, every once in awhile some local farm machinery, and once there was even a poor old man in a motorized wheelchair. Driving anywhere on Kos was always an experience, you can be sure of that.

Since we lived in a village and not in Kos town, we didn’t have access to public sewage, which meant my first experience with a septic system. Oh boy, was that fun! When we first moved in, our crazy landlady did not tell us it was a septic system, and of course, we proceeded normally with flushing our toilet paper in the toilet. It took a month and a half before the whole shebang overflowed, and we had to be warned not to put the paper in the toilet. I’m sorry, but this is what civilized people normally do with their toilet paper – you gotta tell us city folk these things before we get started! Needless to say it took me a long time to get used to putting used toilet paper in a trash can. I still have nightmares.

When we first arrived on Kos it was still the dead of summer. After about a week, we were in what came to be our favorite taverna in Pyli when the electricity went off. Our waiter told us this was not an uncommon event, especially in the winter. Apparently, I had no concept of what exactly he meant by that – I assumed very frequent short power outages. Oh no. He meant power outages that lasted hours, sometimes into the night. Day long power outages. Power outages in the middle of fixing Thanksgiving dinner, which meant sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at 1am, only to have the electricity go out again while we were eating. This was the wondrous glory of island life.

We had one big grocery store on the island, a Champion, which is a pretty big Greek chain that was bought out by the French company Carrefour. It was a nice grocery store, very convenient, with a nice variety of products. What we didn’t realize was that on islands in the winter, sometimes the products can’t get there. The store almost ran out of toilet paper (among other things) before they were able to restock again. Sure, there were several smaller mom and pop supermarkets all over, but no doubt they ran out of stock quicker than the Champion. Luckily, some of the major companies had milk bottlers on the island, so we never had to go without fresh milk. I suppose the key here is learn to plan ahead for the winter. If we had had any idea, we would have.

The normal city water was so full of salts and calcium it was undrinkable, and left stains on everything (granted, it is somewhat like that in most of Greece, but on the islands it was especially bad). Occasionally we also had long water outages, sometimes at the same time as the power outages. It is always a blast when you can combine the two. Not to mention the cost of water and electricity is a bit higher than it is on the mainland. I can understand why, but the bills could be a bit shocking, especially if you consider the average Greek income.

Needless to say, I have an awful lot of respect for people who spend their whole lives on the islands. Sure, I suppose they don’t know what life is like anywhere else, and they are used to it. And no doubt there are benefits: good weather most of the year, beaches all around, friendly neighbors, beautiful sunsets. But I’m thinking island life is definitely not for me, not unless I have a LOT of money, and a really good generator.