The Best American Travel Writing 2014 Read online

  One of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done in public was to appear—against all judgment—in a debate at the Hay Literary Festival in the mid-’90s, speaking in defense of the motion that American culture should be resisted. Along with me on this cretin’s errand was the historian Norman Stone. I can’t remember what I said—I’ve erased it. It had no weight or consequence. On the other side, the right side, were Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker, and Salman Rushdie. After we’d proposed the damn motion, Rushdie leaned in to the microphone, paused for a moment, regarding the packed theater from those half-closed eyes, and said, soft and clear, “Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby . . . Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby love.”

  It was the triumph of the sublime. The bookish audience burst into applause and cheered. It was all over, bar some dry coughing. America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be. It set aside the canon of rote, the long chain letter of drawing-room, bon-mot received aesthetics. It was offered a new, neoclassical, reconditioned, reupholstered start, a second verse to an old song, and it just took a look at the view and felt the beat of this vast nation and went for the sublime.

  There is in Europe another popular snobbery, about the parochialism of America, the unsophistication of its taste, the limit of its inquiry. This, we’re told, is proved by “how few Americans travel abroad.” Apparently, so we’re told, only 35 percent of Americans have passports. Whenever I hear this, I always think, My good golly gosh, really? That many? Why would you go anywhere else? There is so much of America to wonder at. So much that is the miracle of a newly minted civilization. And anyway, European kids only get passports because they all want to go to New York.

  ARNON GRUNBERG

  Christmas in Thessaloniki

  FROM The Believer

  Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

  UNTIL RECENTLY, wars had a venue. They had a front. Wars had a beginning, and often came to a clear end. Then the war against terrorism came along. This war was everywhere and nowhere; it could pop up anyplace. And although the war was more manifest in some places than others—Afghanistan and Iraq, for example—it remained elusive. Then the financial crisis hit, and proved every bit as elusive as the “real” wars at the start of the 21st century. The crisis, too, was everywhere and nowhere, but it did have a single nation at its epicenter: Greece.

  Not at Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008, and not on Wall Street; Greece was where the fire broke out. One heard the word contamination again and again, but this time it was no imperial cultural contamination, no creeping process of civilization. This time the crisis was a contagion: debts and obligations that would never be repaid, a gradual deterioration of the financial immune system.

  And so, in the darkest days of winter, I decided to set off for Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city. Cities like that are often at least as interesting as the capital, and if God is in the details, then the truth is going to be revealed at the periphery. In conversations with people working in various capacities to regenerate Greek social and economic life, I would try to assess the collateral damage from this newest international conflagration. But I also went to Thessaloniki to meet its mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, who had recently rocketed to international stardom. In newspaper articles he was portrayed as a “good Greek,” a man who wanted to combat corruption, who did not compare Angela Merkel to Hitler, who did not blame everything on capitalism, and who had no desire to defend in veiled terms the country’s nepotism and status quo. In those articles one detected an unmistakable relief at the fact that a good Greek had been found.

  I would spend Christmas in Thessaloniki—the light in the darkened world of the crisis.

  I. Kostas

  About a 15-minute walk uphill from the sea—Thessaloniki has an upper city and a lower city—is the RentRooms Thessaloniki youth hostel. In the cafeteria there I meet with Kostas Terzopoulos. He has a little beard and kindly, not-quite-shy eyes. Kostas is wearing a gray sweater that looks like it’s been washed too often. I’ve been told that he organizes the Totally Naked Bike Ride in Thessaloniki. Why wear clothes in a climate like this? Clothes, too, are something on which one can economize.

  We both order tea. “To start with, it’s an ecological thing,” Kostas says. “I’m a member of the Green Ecological Party. It’s a small party. In the last elections we just made our quorum—we ended up with 2.93 percent. And in the second round of the elections we only made 0.88 percent. People had no more confidence in us then. It’s a pleasant party. We have a representative in the European Parliament, and there’s also someone on the municipal council in Thessaloniki; he’s been misbehaving lately, though, so we’re trying to drum him out of the party.” Kostas talks to me as though I’m his friend, or at least as though I’m rapidly becoming his friend.

  “I’m unemployed these days, but it all started back when I still had a job. I did the IT for a radio station, and I was a part-time DJ. At school, all the cool guys had scooters, and later on—like lots of Greeks—my car was one of the most important things in my life. I did all the things you’re not supposed to do: I parked wherever I found a spot. My car meant everything to me. Like a lot of Greeks, I had the idea that I didn’t have to do anything and that the government had to do everything for me. The change in my mentality started when I became a nudist.”

  “How did that go?” I ask.

  “I was always very shy, especially in the bodily sense. But a few years ago I was with a few friends at a lovely, quiet beach. One of them said: ‘Let’s go skinny-dipping.’ I hesitated, but I finally took off my clothes, too, even though I didn’t really enjoy that yet. A few weeks later I actually started as a practicing nudist. At first only at home, where I walked around naked as much as possible, but later also outdoors, in natural surroundings. I didn’t do any nudism in an urban setting, not yet.

  “Then, I guess that was in 2007, a colleague said to me: ‘Why don’t you ever come to work on a bike? It would make it a lot easier to find a parking spot.’ I bought my first bike, an Ideal Megisto, something between a mountain bike and a regular bicycle. At first, biking was an experiment, like nudism.

  “I haven’t eaten all day; would you mind if I ordered a sandwich?”

  “Go right ahead,” I say.

  “I wanted to combine my two great passions,” Kostas tells me, “nudism and cycling. That’s how I stumbled on the Totally Naked Bike Ride. I called some friends and I got a lot of help. People liked the idea. Thessaloniki’s first Totally Naked Bike Ride was held on June 27, 2008. There were about a hundred participants; ten of them were women. The police said they were going to arrest us, and they actually did arrest a couple of participants who were totally naked, but we kept protesting until they let them go. Not everyone, by the way, has to be totally naked. Some of the participants wear strings, others wear body paint. Each year, more and more people take part in the Totally Naked Bike Ride. In 2009 there were 350 riders, in 2010 there were 700, in 2011 there were 1,300, and in 2012 we had 2,000 participants. The Totally Naked Bide Ride originally started in Vancouver, but it’s spread all over the world.”

  Kostas takes a few bites of his sandwich.

  “It’s a social movement,” he says. “We have three objectives: to promote cycling, to increase environmental awareness, and to promote bodily freedom. I always have to explain to people that nudity has nothing to do with sex. Nudity isn’t at all sexy. I’ve gone through four phases myself. It started with nudism, then I discovered the bike, after that I became a vegetarian, and in 2013 I’m going to go vegan. But the Totally Naked Bike Ride isn’t the only thing I do. I also organize the bicycle carnival. Thessaloniki has no carnival tradition, which is how I hit on the idea. The floats will all be pulled by bicycles. This year’s theme is ‘anti-gold’; there are plans to give a Canadian company permission to start a gold mine near here, and we’re against that. The new mayor likes us, but the church doesn
’t.”

  “And what about the crisis?” I ask.

  “I’m thirty-eight,” Kostas says. “And like I said, I’m unemployed. I live alone, but in a house that belongs to my parents, so I just get by. But I’m going to stay here. Ever since 1974”—the year the Greek military junta collapsed—“we’ve been stuck with politicians who keep on failing. But the crisis also brings out good things in people. They do more things together; sometimes they even do things for each other. They talk to each other more, because that doesn’t cost anything either. Soon I’m going to organize a totally naked event where people come in and take off all their clothes.”

  “That doesn’t cost anything either,” I say.

  Kostas nods.

  I feel sympathy for him.

  Walking back to my hotel, I realize that I forgot to ask him if it hurts when you sit on a bike naked. I e-mail the question to him and receive a reply almost immediately: “It depends on the seat. My seat is very soft, and therefore very comfortable.”

  II. Debbie

  At the Social Clinic of Solidarity, located in a rather dilapidated building, I have an appointment with Debbie Litsa.

  Behind her glasses, her eyes are inquisitive; she looks to be in her mid-30s. We sit down in the waiting room. Beside her is a man who I figure at first is one of the doctors who works here, but he turns out to be her boyfriend, waiting for an appointment with the dentist—beside the doctor’s office is a little room with a dentist’s office.

  “It started two years ago,” Debbie says. “Illegal immigrants who had been here for years but had never been legalized were holding a big hunger strike. There were two hundred and fifty hunger strikers in Athens and fifty in Thessaloniki. They received support from local activists. The hunger strikers came from northern Africa, most of them from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. The strike ended after forty-four days, when the strikers received a temporary residence permit that had to be extended every six months. Some people considered that a victory, others a defeat. We figured: We can’t stop now. We have to do something for the community.”

  A woman comes in with her husband and child.

  “In Greece, everyone with a job has health insurance,” Debbie Litsa continues. “But there are lots of self-employed people who can’t afford it. Private health insurance is not at all common in Greece. We asked the mayor to give us an office, but he didn’t want to do that. This building was where the trade unions used to meet to decide whether or not to go on strike. We fixed it up into a health center for people who are uninsured: the Social Clinic of Solidarity.”

  More patients are coming into the waiting room now. Debbie Litsa’s friend gets up and goes into the dentist’s office.

  “This project is greater than the sum of the people who work here,” she says. “We’re not hierarchical. Here, there’s no difference between the secretary and the physician. We don’t provide charity, because charity assumes a relationship based on power. Patients are welcome at our meetings, too.”

  “How many patients have shown up at meetings so far?”

  “None,” she says. “That’s disappointing, I admit. But changes in mentality take time.”

  “And during those meetings, do you vote?”

  “No,” Debbie says. “A vote implies that the minority is not heard. We discuss things until we reach a consensus. Everyone has the right of veto.”

  “That’s not very efficient,” I remark.

  “Efficiency is a capitalist term that assumes one has the goal of achieving a certain level of productivity. That’s not the way we think. Capitalism, of course, is what sired this crisis. But the crisis is also an opportunity to ask the right questions. We want to teach people that they have the power to fight back. No one can take away your dignity; that’s what I tell them. No one has to be embarrassed by the fact that the system can’t guarantee that everyone has health insurance. The power of capitalism lies in how it presents itself as the sole alternative. I don’t have any illusions about ever seeing it disappear, but we can create little fissures in it.”

  Debbie’s boyfriend comes back from the dentist.

  “How did the clinic get dental equipment?” I ask.

  “It was donated by a dentist who was retiring.”

  She doesn’t want to have her picture taken, but she encourages me to take pictures of the patients. A black man refuses to have his picture taken and one woman gets up and walks away, but the other patients meekly allow themselves to be photographed.

  “Don’t forget the secretary,” Debbie says.

  III. Dora

  Nothing drives out melancholy better than music, as Spinoza knew. Orfanidou 5 is the address I was given, along with instructions to take the elevator to the sixth floor. Here I am going to meet Dora Seitanidou; I’ve heard that she leads a percussion group.

  Dora is in her late 30s, with dark shoulder-length hair. Her boyfriend, Nick, is there, too, but Nick leaves the talking to Dora.

  “This neighborhood we’re in,” Dora says as she makes coffee for me, “used to have a lot of small industry. Shoemakers, for example, but they’ve all closed down. Not so much because of the crisis; the process started long before that. The Chinese have taken over. Nick is my boyfriend. He’s a musician, a teacher, and an educator. This space is used to give dance, music, and drama lessons. Nick does the percussion group. We call ourselves Ektos, which means ‘outside.’ As in ‘outside myself’ or ‘outside of town,’ but also as in ‘out of fashion.’ The crisis has changed a lot, of course. The person living in times of crisis needs to express himself, and money is important, but if you don’t have it, you have to find some other way. We’re a nonprofit organization, and the course fees are low. Some courses, like percussion, cost forty euros a month. Others, like modern dance, cost thirty euros, and students and the unemployed get a five-euro discount. We made all this ourselves—almost everything you see here was found on the street. We don’t do all the lessons ourselves, though; we also have teachers. But the money we make on courses isn’t enough to pay the rent.”

  We drink our coffee at a makeshift bar. Dora sits across from me; Nick is sitting beside me.

  “Most people feel betrayed by the state, and their attitude is like: If you don’t help me then I won’t help you,” Dora says. “Look at the garbage. Look at obesity, and you’ll see that the problem is education. That’s the big problem here in Greece. You have to teach yourself; there’s no other way. All the parties have tried to push reforms in the Greek educational system, but it hasn’t gotten any better. For example, now there’s a law that allows the police to go onto campus. That wasn’t legal for a while; it led to lots of rioting, but better education? Roughly speaking, you can say that Greek education is aimed at making children and students learn a lot of things by rote, but no attention is paid to teaching them to think.”

  She sips her coffee.

  “If we become increasingly fascist—and Greek society is becoming increasingly fascist—you have to put the blame not only on the crisis but also on the educational system. The whole system is sick. Until recently everyone wanted to work for the government in Athens, because working for the government meant security, and it also meant you didn’t have to really work—it meant you could just set up a business for yourself on the side. Security is an obsession that was passed down from grandfather to father to son; maybe it can be explained by the fact that here in Thessaloniki, we’re almost all the descendants of refugees.” (Many of the inhabitants of Thessaloniki are the descendants of Greeks who were run out of Turkey.) “Take my uncle and aunt, for example; they’re not incredibly rich people, but they have five houses. They have the house that they live in, three houses they rent out, and they also have a vacation home. The Greek is obsessed with property because he sees property ownership as security. My uncle and aunt have a son who’s confined to a wheelchair; they think that those houses are going to guarantee his financial security.

  “Or take Fena, the department store, where yo
u can buy the most expensive brand clothing on credit. People from the lower classes were suddenly walking around in Armani suits because the down payment was so low and they didn’t ask any bothersome questions. Everyone could buy fancy clothes on credit. They took out loans for everything.

  “You could get a loan to go on vacation, a loan for Christmas, a loan for your own funeral—there was a loan for everything. We were taught to borrow money; we weren’t taught to be productive. But you’ve seen it already: at Christmas the department stores are packed. Life on the installment plan has never stopped; maybe it never will. It just moves from one place to the next. But Athens is meaner and bigger than Thessaloniki. We have the sun; we have family; we don’t need much.”

  I decide to take the plunge and ask: “How much do you earn?”

  “I work for the university,” Dora says. “One of the things I do is teach classes in Greek culture to foreign students. I gross eight hundred euros a month. The university holds back twenty percent of that, and twenty-three percent goes to taxes. If I had to pay rent I could never get by, but we live in a house that belongs to Nick’s parents. Like I said, we wouldn’t be able to pay the rent for this place from the money we get from courses, but we also have to pay municipal taxes that are included along with the electric bill, and we can pay those taxes only because we sell coffee and tea to our students, and drinks under the counter. Otherwise it would be impossible.”