By Dan Wake
Gold Solas Award-winner in the Funny Travel category
Europeans have a saying: If you speak three or more languages, you’re multilingual. If you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak one language, you’re American.
I was twenty years old when I got to Greece in August 1977, two months into a college summer of hitchhiking around Europe. Being American myself, I spoke only one language when I got there, and it wasn’t Greek. I wasn’t going to be in Greece very long. I wasn’t anywhere very long. When you’ve never been overseas, it’s hard to resist the urge to go, go, go! I have to see everything! The Eiffel Tower? Check. The Roman Forum? Check. I would soon learn the benefits of slowing down while traveling, but “slowing down” and “twenty years old” rarely cross paths, and maybe they never should.
My plan for Greece was much the same as any young backpacker who went that far south in Europe: Spend an obligatory day or so in Athens to see the Acropolis, then jump a ferry to some Greek beach on some Greek island. Any Greek beach on any Greek island would be just fine.
For a short stay in a country, it’s hard to get motivated to learn much of the local language, and I intended to get by with two words of Greek: drachma, the currency, and yasoo. An Australian backpacker told me that yasoo meant “thank you,” so I committed yasoo to memory. You should always thank people in their own language, hopefully frequently and courteously, and I did so often in Greece. I found out later, however, that I was a little off. Even a well-intentioned attempt to learn a few words in a foreign language could easily go awry in the days before Google Translate. It turned out that yasoo meant something closer to “be healthy” and was used commonly as a greeting, like “How are you?” For as long as I was in Greece, every time someone gave me directions or showed me to a table or brought me a beer or delivered my bill or gave me change, I said, “How are you?”
After seeing the Acropolis, I took a ferry to Naxos. I’d heard some good things from other low-budget tourists about the island, smaller and less visited than famous neighbors like Mykonos and Santorini. People said it was tolerant of penny-pinching backpackers, even inviting. You could set your tent on the beach or throw your sleeping bag on the sand and sleep under the stars for free. This was most generous of Chora, the picturesque white and bright Mediterranean village that was the main town on Naxos. I don’t know what the people and merchants of Naxos gained from that hospitality, but it was awfully attractive to backpackers. A free beach is cheaper than a hostel or even a campground. It’s free. After two months of racing around Europe and weathering the highs and lows of hitchhiking, the prospect of spending a couple of days relaxing on a Mediterranean beach sounded sublime. Greek sun, Greek sand, Greek food, Greek wine. The ferry ride was only a few hours. The fine sand on the beach was warm under a bright blue sky, lapped by the dark aqua waves of the Aegean Sea. I pitched my tent and set about reveling in my glorious freedom.
But Naxos lost its charm on my second morning when I contracted a case of food poisoning. Perhaps the only drawback to sleeping on the beach—and proving the adage that you get what you pay for—was there were no bathrooms on the beach. Instead of loitering on the beach, I spent my second morning wandering around Chora, trying to stay near toilets. On any other morning, I would have delighted in strolling the lovely, winding cobblestone streets lined with whitewashed houses and shops, flowers cascading from their balconies and patios. But not that morning. I focused on darting into a café every thirty minutes to find its toilet. In short order I’d become familiar with most restaurants in the small town and knew which were clean and which were staffed with the friendliest people, the kind who would let a sunburned kid wander in and use the facilities without throwing him a nasty glare. I kept asking for “toilette,” with my best German pronunciation. English was not so prevalent in Greece in 1977, particularly on a smaller island like Naxos, but many Germans vacationed in Greece, and a lot of Greeks worked seasonally or otherwise in Germany, so German had some play.
Visiting most of the toilettes in Chora worked for a while. Food poisoning is usually a tolerable inconvenience and soon fades. Yet as the morning went on and I memorized the streets of Chora, the problem only got worse. I reluctantly concluded it was time to pay for a hotel room … a hotel room with a bathroom. Even more urgently, I needed stronger medicine. I needed a pharmacy.
The closest one was a small shop, and business was brisk. Unlike most pharmacies in the States, however, there were no products out on open shelves. I expected to browse the shelves and look for something that would speak to me as diarrhea medicine, even if in Greek packaging. But virtually everything was behind the counter at the back of the store where a man and a woman, perhaps husband and wife, were minding the customers. People were already in line, with a few children milling around, making mischief until their parents bought what they came for. New customers came in at about the same pace the earlier ones left. Nobody was in a hurry. The woman behind the counter was gregarious, occasionally shouting to a passerby on the sidewalk, who would then stand outside the door and carry on a brief but loud conversation. It felt like a neighborhood bar as much as a pharmacy, where all the customers knew the owners and they all knew each other. “Yasoo,” they all said to each other.
I took my place in the queue and listened to the friendly hubbub, none of which I understood, hoping I wouldn’t need another sudden trip to the bathroom. When I got to the front of the line, I asked the bubbly woman, almost prayerfully, if she spoke English. She shook her head apologetically. I motioned to the man beside her, and she again shook her head. I cringed a bit. That meant I would have to communicate, across a language barrier, that I needed medicine for diarrhea. I’d known in the back of my mind it might come to this, but I’d tried to bury the thought, the thought of pantomiming that I had diarrhea.
Trying to pretend the store was empty, I took off my wristwatch and held it in my left hand. I showed her the time, then held my stomach and groaned … kind of softly and quietly. While she watched from behind the counter, I moved the minute hand on my watch thirty minutes forward. Again I held my stomach and groaned. She looked at me with big sympathetic eyes but shook her head. She wanted to help me, it was obvious she did, but she just didn’t understand. Next, I pointed to the back of the store, where they presumably had a bathroom, and said “toilette.”
Suddenly, the whole store was aware that the red-headed, freckle-faced tourist was playing charades with the owner. I became the center of attention, especially for the children. Everyone in the store wanted to win the prize, to be the first to guess what I was pantomiming. I moved the watch forward another thirty minutes. Stomach. Groan. “Toilettte.” Against my better judgment, I turned around, maybe searching for help, but all I saw was a sea of faces staring at me, some grinning, some chattering in Greek, all very entertained. I moved my watch thirty minutes forward—an ironic gesture since I felt like time had completely stopped. Stomach. Groan. “Toilette.”
By now word had spread out to the street. People were flocking inside. Still the cheerful woman behind the counter looked at me expectantly, wanting so much to help me if she possibly could. Finally, I pulled out all the stops. I feigned pulling down my pants and sitting on an imaginary toilet, feigned standing up and lifting my pants, moved the minute hand on my watch, and pretended to sit on the toilet again.
Finally, her eyes got big. She grinned happily, her face beaming. She hopped a little hop of success and waved her arms with excitement. “Ooooh!” she shouted triumphantly, and to my horror: “Diarrhea!”
It’s a Greek word. Diarrhea is a Greek word.
~
Dan Wake is a retired trial lawyer. There is a saying that trial lawyers are frustrated actors; it may be more accurate to say they are frustrated storytellers. Wake now writes about tales of lengthy journeys (as long as nine months at a time) he made to four continents in the 1970s and ’80s, from a time and a world that have now vanished. He won Second Prize at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference 2024.