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Slow roasted gyro spices and the waft of numerous cigarettes intermingle in a sea air aboard the F/B Lato. We leave a 2,800 year old port behind, our captain blowing his horn to a passing ferry less than half our size as we leave the harbor’s entrance. It’s a seaman’s greeting. The response is reciprocated.
With the Great Harbor, commonly known as Piraeus, this horn echoes round the surrounding hills. In the dark, they’re illumined with stacks of geometric apartment housing whose lights twinkle as the skies above. Honestly, the harbor is much more beautifying in the dark. Daylight shines upon the grime and modern hub of businesses built to the Greek ferry system and the extent of large shipping companies.

Piraeus Is and Piraeus Was

Camron Karsten
2006-10-07 13:37:03

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delays totaling four hours waiting time, and two bus rides later I am bound to reach my destination.

It began Seattle to Detroit, Detroit to Newark, Newark to Rome, and alas Rome to Athens. I spent two of those flights on red-eyes, the first from Seattle to Detroit. Upon that plane ride, back closest to the screaming fuselage, my ears were further tormented as I sat directly next to a mother and her one-year-old child. It was the first time I ever had the privilege to share a flight, be it a red-eye, with a baby, and as the night flew fastidiously toward dawn, the child wailed undecipherable obscenities in my left ear. I clenched and breathed in those dark four and a half hours of flight while the mother bobbed her baby up and down, from one shoulder closer to my ear on the next and back.

Undoubtedly, the child’s ears must have been in pain, but more certainly, she was more interested in yanking on my shirt and seeing how she could hang me the harder she pulled on my necklaces.
“So, is it her first flight?” I posed the query and already knew the imminent truth.
“Her second.”
"Ah,” I nodded. Close enough.

Meanwhile, a lady of seventy years to my right just returned from a cruise in Alaska. She was kind, but lonely. Her husband sat at the front of the plane without her. “Can you believe it?” she complained continuously. “We scheduled this flight over four months ago and still!”
Talk continued into the late night, my comments short, and her’s distending right through the screaming child’s mourning. She had to share her Alaskan journey ventures with somebody, and that somebody had to be me.

A Needed Reflection

Landing in Rome, I caught a one-hour bus ride to the port. Piraeus, or known to Greeks as Peiraias, is a harbor made into three: Piraeus is the main harbor, the Great Harbor of old, while Lavrio and Rafina are famed for their smaller commercial endeavors. Aboard ANEK Lines’ F/B Lato, we set sail into the Mediterranean at precisely 9 PM.

Looking back at the transits and the modes of departures and arrivals to bring me to this present moment, my head spins with my aged pocket watch, and it takes a second glance to add a PM or an AM to the end of that 9.
And looking ahead, it is not so comforting to gaze upon my $40 deck passage. Underneath the pleasant night skies, the air is warm, and scented uniquely with what Europeans only know how: that raw scent of tobacco. Stretched in rows below a sheeting of corrugated plastic, soiled benches of metal tubing will have to become real comfortable in the next eight and a half hours.

Yes, Crete and

the town of Chania (pronounced Hanya) loom nearer. I lie down and fall back into a rough and raw hewn tangle of dreams and their various transits.

And a new website is up with more photographs and certainly a more personal feel. I'll be adding more photographs and articles to this site (as this one) when time permits. Please check it out: http://web.mac.com/cam2yogi/iWeb/Yodeling%20Yogi/Yodeling%20Yogi.html