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Published: August 12th 2009
Lindos, overview
I don't know what the Greek equivalent of the Mexican phrase "Chicken Bus" is, maybe "Goat Bus?"The shirtless bus driver is having a blood feud with some guy right in the door of the bus, but you have to ignore this sort of thing. Greeks have blood feuds all the time and it doesn't stop them from cheerfully conducting business at the same time. Even if the tourists balk at entering the conversational blast radius, they will wave you in and take care of you with a smile just as they are inaugurating bitter hostilities with their own neighbors that will last a thousand years.
I've seen this before. I approached a cab stand and saw two drivers in each other's faces with their veins purple and standing out on their proud faces. I considered walking on by and coming back later in order to avoid the ordeal I expected to follow. To me, a scene like this ends in bloodshed and you will be required to "make a statement" if you get caught being a witness. In Greece, this is how the locals say "hello" to each other. One cab driver seemed to have carried his point; he had out-shouted his interlocutor with such a burst of verbal suppression fire that the other guy was
Blood Fued
An early depiction of a common Greek form of greeting, this one from the Minoan palace at Knossos. now considering falling back by squads to the nearest APC. Having won the advantage, the victor was now proceeding to the annihilation phase of argumentation operations. He simply glanced up at me, mid stream and with a friendly grin and brightly said, "just a minute my friend," and went right back to screaming bloody murder while he gingerly lifted my backpack ("no, please, I help"), asked me (friendly grin) where I would like to go, fired another burst at his now stunned debate partner, opened my door (friendly grin), shot some more evil looks and loud abuse, asked me, "you are ready?" (friendly grin), and drove off with one arm waving fiercely out the window while he howled his closing statement. "You like Rhodos?" he asked, with a friendly grin.
As I said, you learn to ignore this sort of thing. So, while shirtless bus driver escalated his assault on the other guy from the classic arms-up position (or "The Mediterranean Bench Press") to the far more serious blood feud gesture (right hand at chin level, palm up, first two fingers and thumb together clenched tight 'ooh-la-la' fashion), I just queued up to buy a ticket from the guy
The Mediterranean Bench Press
A Minoan depiction of the gesture. he was shouting at. You buy the ticket from the guy at the door. He lets you in. Later, as the bus is moving, the door guy comes by to check your ticket and tears the corner. You may think this unnecessary since there's no way you can be on the bus if he didn't sell you a ticket and watch you get on, but somehow he found a family of four who were riding the bus without a single ticket between them. I got impression this wasn't the first time this had happened, which may explain the shouting match at the door.
Door/ticket checking guy queried the father of the ticket-free family and then shouted something at shirtless driver. Shirtless driver applied one of his bare feet to the brake pedal, pulled the bus over to the edge of a rocky precipice, and came flying back to blood feud the father of the ticket-less family. He shouted at the guy for a good long while, cars and buses hurtling by all the while and shaking our bus which, I feel inclined to repeat, was parked on the unguarded shoulder of a rocky precipice. Father of the family had
Dorian depiction of a boat
This is carved on the inner wall. nothing to offer shirtless driver besides a Gaulic shrug. Shirtless driver screamed at him for a bit more, seemed satisfied, got back in his seat, slammed the bus into gear, drove on. Father of the family was never asked to buy tickets, howling indignantly at him was considered adequate compensation for the driver. Ticket checker guy moved on to the next row. Everyone had their tickets out and ready.
I was catching a bus to Lindos because I wanted to see something on Rhodes besides Rhodes. Sentences like that one come up uncomfortably often when describing Greece due to the practice of having the major town on any given island lend its name to the whole island (or vice versa). Hence, when you are on Rhodes, you may be in Rhodes as well, or you may be on Rhodes but somewhere outside of Rhodes. The major town of Kos is Kos, but there's plenty on Kos besides Kos. The major town on Thira is actually Fira, which you may find less confusing depending on your ear's ability to differentiate a voiceless labiodental fricative from a voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative...but I digress. Either way, I was in Rhodes and wanted
Lindos from the bottom
The new town is all the white buildings in the front. Ancient acropolis is, well, way up there. to see what was on Rhodes besides Rhodes and I don't see anything odd about that anymore.
The Latin American style "chicken bus" seems to be disappearing from the major tourist routes in the Greek Islands. Who knows what anachronistic rattle traps may be lumbering along the Peloponnese on the road to Kalamata, but most of the buses I saw, even the ones prowling the sub-optimal roads of Southwest Crete, are modern, sleek EU approved-looking affairs that actually have air conditioning and side mirrors that aren't battered and leaning like a Bourbon Street lamppost. The bus to Lindos was more like the older kind, however, and it was standing room only for a while unless you were prepared to hold onto your seat while a superannuated French couple had to stand. While the Central Europeans have mastered the art of pretending not to notice that Methuselah and his wife are swooning with the heat while they're seated comfortably, I'm a naive American and am thoroughly convinced that if I don't offer them a seat my Lebanese grandmother will rise from the grave, step onto the bus, and give me a little blood-feuding of her own. A note to anyone
who attempts this simple act of civility on a bus loaded to the luggage racks with overheated Euros: be prepared to run interference for the intended object of your courtesy. Mark and I, acting automatically (same grandmother), weren't halfway out of our seats before two Germanic looking twenty-something's angled in on them. Fortunately, I had planned on being in the sun all day and came equipped with my Euro repellant: a battered straw cowboy hat; armed with this simple accessory, you can bring a bunch of babbling Bavarians to a dead stop with a glance. Just imagine yourself as Clint Eastwood, because they seem to imagine you as the Pale Horse Rider, too. As it happens, Madame and Monsieur didn't quite get the idea at first, but with a nod in the direction of the empty seats and a hand out to negate any further attempts at German annexation, they Merci Beaucoup-ed us to excess and sat down. Okay, I couldn't resist a self-indulgent backward shame-on-you glance at the German kids, but I'm sure it fell on deaf eyes.
Just outside the gates of Old Town Rhodes is the New Market. This is of no use except for buying
miscellaneous trinketry: quiche Greek urns in various sizes, busts of Hippocrates, statues of what The Colossus might have looked like, etc. These sort of things come pretty cheap, so you may as well grab a box full and mail it all home. You will want to pack it yourself, however, and buy enough to cover the 10% breakage that you can rely on if you ship via Hellenic Post. I remember pulling up at Mark's house and seeing the poor, defeated box on his porch looking not the least rectangular anymore, but rather more like a partially deflated soccer ball that had been kicked, a little at a time, across the Atlantic.
Behind the New Market, you can pick up a bus to Faliraki or Lindos, or wherever else you want to go on Rhodes. The Lindos bus drops you off a little outside the village that has sprung up at the foot of a rather dominating hilltop that was once the acropolis of one of the members of the Doric Heliopolis. You climb down to the town. Then you climb up through the town. Then you climb up the hillside. Then you climb up some steps, climb some
more steps, and you come to he bottom of some steps. These lead to steps which lead to steps; you climb those too. If you are beginning to notice a pattern at this point it's not your imagination. Get there early, it's a bit of a climb...and there are steps. There are enterprising locals that will rent you a mule when you get about halfway and they do this for an extortionate rate. At the top of all that climbing are heaps of anonymous rubble and some more Italian Fascist reconstruction (concrete). There's also a Byzantine church redecorated by the Venetians, and lots of scaffolding awaiting the day when somebody at the department of antiquities gets around to thinking about what to do with this rather impressive site. There's also a view down from the top that explains why they chose this site and why the hell anybody would carve all those steps, let alone climb them.
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mschottland
non-member comment
Ah, the joy of it
In classic fast-food American fashion, drive-thrued a ritual older than our beloved country. To be precise, the Med. bench press is really more of a curl. It begins at the waste and, you probably get it. Kudos to my brother for delving his art history book and finding proof of purchase, however, the photos might have been painted 1,000 years ago, or last thursday (though the artist would have been finishing 3rd grade). All above is wonderfully true. The wonderful things about the Islands is that they are Cheaper, Faster, and Much Much Safer.