How Long the Lonely Road

Autobots, let's roll. —Optimus Prime After leaving Crete, I was sorely anxious to leave Greece entirely. I planned the following days  with selfish efficiency. For the Fourth of July, I went to the new Acropolis museum, got a newspaper, and feasted at the Amerikaniki Agora. The market hall's high roof echoed with chopping cleavers and the butchers' rabid peddling. On learning of his death, I mourned quietly David Carradine, who passed a month ago without fanfare, hung naked in a Bangkok wardrobe. At the hostel, I met two Americans from California: one an ROTC cadet from the University of San Francisco studying in Germany for two semesters (and refusing to shave for the eight-month duration, just to enrage his commander back home), and the other an Orange County stoner with a Jewish grandmother, who used that connection to move to Israel, near the Syrian border, four months ago. We talked about beer, and I realized how much I missed hops, for there is no pale ale on the Medi...

Anywhere I lay my head, that place I call my home. —Tom Waits The city of Rethymno strikes east from a triangular peninsula, which ends in the walls of the Fortrezza. Canopied restaurants encircle the old Venetian harbor on the peninsular flank, defined by a limestone jetty and lighthouse, which flashes green at night. There is little room to maneuver down this promenade, and the proselytizing maitre d's block the only route with desperate appeals to fill their empty tables. "You want rest and drink?" "Look at these fish. You can have any of them for eat." "You know Frommer's? Well, I have a Frommer's guide right here — and look, we are in it!" "Why are you wearing that Albania shirt? Don't you have any other shirts to wear? You wear it every day!" (I'd never worn it before!) The Greeks are incorrigible schemers, who are constantly and inexpertly considering possible enterprises, and who follow through with a single-minded det...

My word, how mortals take the gods to task! All their afflictions come from us, we hear. And what of their own failings? Greed and folly double the suffering in the lot of man. —Homer On Friday morning Ivan burst onto the hostel balcony where we were eating breakfast with the news that the King of Pop was dead. The global response was just as unbelievable as the hasy obituary. Moonwalking in the Liverpool Tube station; spontaneous concerts in Leicester Square, Copenhagen, and under the Eiffel Tower — if you didn't know what a joke Wacko Jacko was two weeks ago, you would have thought by such international veneration that he was still a respected cultural icon. Ivan saw the news in between his comprehensive survey of the security camera footage from the morning before. A man had walked in, past the camera in the entry hall, up the outdoor stairs, and under the surveillance of the second camera in the lounge, where he grabbed a British girl's half-charged iPod off the shelf next ...

I got a long way to go, I'm getting further away. — Elliott Smith, "I Better Be Quite Now" I spent a few days recuperating and reintegrating in Athens, and again visited my favorite place. From the Areopagus hill at sunset, the grid of the city is lost in a disordered mass of cubic concrete, linear windows, stale white blocks, and the twinkle of hasty street lights. The families and lovers and tourists seated on the smooth, uneven marble steps watch the Acropolis redden with the dying star's farewell light. The squeaking bats come out from pits on the hill to harvest. One morning, when I was rebooking my bed, I heard this speech from a tour guide: "We only have a limited time at each site, and you need to limit yourself to that time frame. Some of the sites close at different times than others, and if we want to see them all today we have to follow the schedule. If you need two to three minutes to take a photo, that's fine, but any longer and the tour group w...

If you don't want it, we'll take it; If you don't want to give it to us, we keep walking by. Keep going, we're not tired. Got plenty of places to go, Lots of homes we ain't been to yet. West Side, Southwest Side, Middle-East, Rich house, dog house, outhouse, old folks house, House for unwed mothers, halfway homes, Catacombs, twilight zones, Looking for techniques, turntables to gramophones. —The White Stripes, "Rag & Bone" For my twenty-third birthday, I thought I'd look at how my inventory has changed since I first left home four-and-a-half months ago. To lose items when you change residence every day is inevitable; to accrue new one when you're halfway around the world is also to be expected. But really, there's nothing extra that I wish I had brought, except maybe a good pair of walking sandals for the Mediterranean, or an extra pair of light socks. I lost the chain to lock up my backpack in Cologne, my clothesline in Vienna, a pair of ...

We do not say that a man who takes no interest politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. —Pericles of Athens The Israeli couple who picked me up in Delphi dropped me off near Omonia Square, about half a mile from the Acropolis, and right into the middle of a budding protest of KKE, the Greek communist party. I had noticed the party's signs and banners painted and plastered everywhere from Corfu to Attica, all white and red with a hammer and sickle — the communists are apparently very good at marketing. At the protest I saw in Athens, they read a few megaphone manifestos, backed by shouts of, "Allah akbar." The condensed, modern construction and cosmopolitan bustle of Athens immediately disoriented me, after two weeks spent wandering the sparsely-peopled hinterland of northwestern Greece and southern Albania, and two months in cities which at best were post-Communist, and at worst war-raved, and universally backwards and hom...

Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Broad wholesomeness and charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one tiny corner of the globe. —Mark Twain Crossing from Albania into Greece is a lot like crossing into the United States from Mexico. If you are Albanian, you are scrutinized and searched by the intrusive and tyrannical Defenders of the Border; if you are white, the same guards wave you through with hardly a glance. From Corcyra I took a bus across the narrow island of Corfu to the famous Pink Palace hostel, which lives up to its desultory reputation as a Pepto Bismo-colored monument to white western debauchery. I checked in and received a pink-dyed shot of Greek ouzo along with the constrictive ground rules and the programme of extreme sports, sunbathing, and drinking. I was also greeted by a shirtless douche in a sailor's hat, shorts, and flip flops, who grabbed me and demanded that I punch him in the face. "I need the adrenaline bro,...