Together, with her husband, they ran a very small restaurant out of their house. Their front porch was used for the area to seat customers. It was a small area with three tables and plane wooden chairs. The porch was a cement slab, large enough to have three or four feet between the tables. It had side walls that were made out of one inch vertical cane. The front was open which gave you a nice view of the Mediterranean. Colored Christmas lights lit up the edge of the walls on the porch at night, probably to indicate that they were in business. Each table had a red checker board table cloth complimented with a small candle. Fish and rabbit were the two dishes that I remember having while I was there. It was very good Greek home cooking.
Their house was a simple rectangular, white plaster house inside and out that looked to be quite old. The ceiling of the room we rented had several spots of bare lath showing through the plaster which flaked off occasionally onto the floor. There was a fairly good size living room which had bottles of homemade wine lining the walls on a shelf, all around the room about seven or eight feet up. The kitchen was very small and the sink was molded out of what looked like cement or some kind of white plaster. It was all quite ancient looking, but very interesting at the same time. Of major importance was a well which was situated in one side of the front porch that the tables were on. It wasn't your modern day, all American well, but a source of water that was down from the cement slab about ten or twelve feet. It had to be hand pulled up with a bucket that was attached to the end of a rope. The opening at the top of the well had a gray painted cover about four feet square that was made out of one inch boards. When ever I needed water, I removed the cover, got down on my knees and let down the bucket. It took quite a few buckets to wash and rinse my dirty clothes...
It was a pleasantly quiet location and a nice break from the seemingly all too confusing tourist population. It gave me the time and space I needed to relax and take in a number of interesting things specific to Greek culture. There was one period of time that came around everyday however, when the peacefulness of the afternoon would get rudely interrupted by the deafening sound of clanging metal. It took me by surprise the first day, just after I had comfortably gotten myself into a meditative state of relaxation. I could faintly hear it off in the distance at first, which was ok, but before I new it, I was surrounded by a huge meandering herd of wayward goats that I had previously been unaware of, each of which carried a rather large clanging bell of its own. They didn't belong to a house down the road, or to some other far away place, but to the house I was in. Nightly, what had to be over a hundred well dispersed goats, anxiously clanged across the country side to a fenced in location within spitting distance of my bedroom window...
I'd grown accustomed to seeing goats around the community while I was living among the Palestinians on the West Bank. Surprisingly, there wasn't any noticeable odor accompanying the large fenced in area behind the house like you would ordinarily expect from a barn yard full of animals. Also, much to my surprise, the goats, beyond their bells were strangely quiet for the majority of the time. In spite of the hour or so incursion into my R&R each day, I was still able to fully appreciate the solemnity of the meditative occasion...
On the other side of our getaway house was a rather large wooden container that somewhat resembled a sauna, but hardly designed for the purpose of relaxation. Grapes were common place in the Med. and so was wine. I was asked if I would like to help them crush grapes by getting into this thing to stamp on them with my bare feet. I chose not to. The thought of smashing grapes between my toes while standing in a couple feet of grape juice wasn't really something I wanted to subject my feet to. I can't say as I ever cared for painted toe nails on a woman and the thought of getting my own feet and toes died purple, didn't seem like the most necessary thing to do either.
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