Milo's Fruit Fiasco

On January 1, Alec announced that his new year’s resolution would be to eat more fruit, and he invited Milo to join him.  You need to know that, with the exception of apple sauce, Milo eats no fruit (and virtually no vegetables).   He accepted Alec’s invitation, but added:  “I’ll bet Greece has very good fruit.  I’ll start eating fruit this summer in Greece.”  Alec agreed to this compromise. So you can imagine that Alec and I were pretty excited when we finally arrived in Greece and made that first trip to the market with Milo.  He asked us to buy watermelon and apples, which, he declared, would be his first two fruits.  He asked for some apple slices on his dinner plate.

But then, when it actually came time to put the apple in his mouth, and the rest of us were leaning forward, holding our breath . . . he couldn’t do it.  Or he wouldn’t. I think we’ve been hornswaggled, that the little minx just bought himself seven months of not being badgered by his parents.

We’ve tried most of the obvious tactics. We’re good role models.  We always have a variety of fruit and vegetables on hand.  Milo even grew vegetables at his school in Barcelona and loved selling them in the schoolyard, a la Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard.  But try them?  He is more of an entrepreneur than an omnivore.

If I could do one thing over as a parent, it would be to capitulate less to the demands for kid food—hot dogs, grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, and all kinds of nuggets.  C.C., although she eats a very healthy and balanced diet, has no desire to take risks where food is concerned.  Like most parents of my generation, we have gotten ourselves into a situation in which we cook not one, but two or three dinners.  My parents would never have been so gullible.  Where did we go wrong? 

When we have had breakthroughs, such as the curry noodles Milo has come to love, they have been the result of going to places we really want to eat that do not have kid food.  And somehow, our kids don’t starve.  Although I have been grateful for every bowl of spaghetti Bolognese we have encountered on our travels, I sometimes wish the dish had never been invented.

We have no desire to have power struggles over food—although we did set up an unfortunate face-off between Milo and a tiny piece of mango in Mesta that lasted more than an hour.  We clearly lost the battle.  So we have resorted to a time-tested strategy that we probably should have implemented years ago.  We put something on Milo’s plate at every meal—a grape, a cherry tomato, a slice of cooked carrot—and he does not get a sweet unless he eats it.  He’s eating a lot less dessert these days.

The beginning of the end of the journey

A night in crisp sheets and an extra pillow to put beneath my knees to support my back did wonders for my constitution.  Alec took the kids down to breakfast early and they were back before I even woke up.

The Aegeon Beach Hotel is one of those places where there are lounge chairs and umbrellas set up on the beach for you.  We felt luxurious ditching our mismatched, salt-stiffened towels for the spiffy blue hotel ones, and sitting up off the sand in comfortable chairs.  We had the morning to hang out and swim, and go for one last snorkel in the sea, the Temple of Poseidon watching over us from a nearby hill.

Although we had to check out of our room at noon, the hotel folks were kind enough to let us use another room to shower and change before we left.  We grabbed lunch at the taverna next door and then hit the road.  One last Greek salad, one last order of fried cheese—it’s good stuff.

We had a 3 ½ hour drive from Sounio to Patra, where we would board our last and longest ferry.  We arrived in Patra early enough to stretch our legs in the square and get some pizza for the kids.  A local newsstand stocked a huge range of magazines and newspapers in English, which made me unreasonably happy—I picked up The Economist and People to catch up on the important and interesting news of the day.

Our boat was scheduled to depart at midnight, but we were able to board at 9:30, so we schlepped our stuff on board (including a few bags of food Alec insisted on stopping at the market for on the way) and got settled into our cabin.  We have a window which, although it is salt-encrusted, is a luxury.

There is something romantic about traveling by sea, and the fact that we are getting somewhere while we sleep—instead of driving for days through Albania and Macedonia, which Alec tried to convince me would be a good idea for awhile there—is terrific. In reality, however, the room is pretty much like a Motel 6 room, except with bunk beds and a smaller bathroom.

When we woke up this morning, we were in port somewhere.  I left the room to get some tea, only to find much of the floor space outside occupied by people sleeping on blow up rafts, sleeping beds, fold-up lounge chairs, and beach towels.  One guy had spilled out of the common room in which his family had settled, his large, hairy belly protruding into the hallway on the way to one of the coffee shops.  The ship folks seem to keep some of the lounges sleeper free, thank goodness.

There is a pool on board, and the kids have been swimming, messing with the new art supplies we brought with us, and playing in the room.  I’ve nearly finished my fall syllabus.  We sleep on the boat again tonight, and arrive in Venice early tomorrow morning.

The very bad ferry

Lemoinya cried when I hugged her goodbye.  We brought her a box of food that we couldn’t bring with us, and she insisted on giving me a bag of almonds, and a chocolate bar for each of the kids.  Her face is the color and texture of a baked apple, her whole life etched onto her face.

Alec has asked me to report that we did not, in fact, have too much food left over.  I guess he has been reading my past posts.  Perhaps I’m just in denial about how much we eat.

We boarded the ferry in Mesta Port, and before we even got going it became clear that the ride would not be as smooth as those we had had on our previous boats.  I know that I get seasick, having once practically overdosed on a seasickness medication you apply as a patch while in the Galapagos.  So as soon as I felt the rocking in the pit of my belly, I took motion sickness medication.  Our kids have never gotten sick on a boat before, and we did not want to medicate them without good reason, so we took a chance.  We weren’t out of port an hour before the summer bronze drained out of C.C.’s face and she began to turn green.  I ran to the bathroom with her.  She got sick, and C.C. does not handle the kind of discomfort she was experiencing well.  She was really wailing there for awhile.  We got her to keep some Dramamine down, and she calmed down in front of a movie.  Meanwhile, my medication kicked in and I could not keep my eyes open.  There were no couches for stretching out, so I spread one of our fleece blankets on the floor, laid down on it, and covered myself over with the other.  I was knocked out for about an hour. 

Two television sets were set in the wall in the front of the lounge where are seats were located, and they blared for the entire voyage.  I asked one of the stewards if they could turn them down—it was clear no one was watching them.  He seemed to agree, but then it never happened.  So we were subjected to years-old episodes of The Nanny and Janice Dickinson’s Modeling Agency.  I tried reading aloud to Milo but I was no competition for Fran Drescher.

When we finally arrived in Lavrios, after 9 pm, we were all tired and snappish.  We have gotten along remarkably well given that we have no spent nearly 5 weeks together, 24/7.  But sometimes you just have a bad day.

Perhaps Alec was prophetic when, months ago, he reserved us a room for the night at a rather nice beachside resort, the most expensive hotel of our entire trip.  We needed it.  We put the kids to bed and went down to the restaurant for a bite to eat, after which I filled the bath with hot water and bubbles, and sank down into it.  Our Mesta bathroom had a tiny shower and, like many of the Croatian and Greek bathrooms we have had the pleasure of using, had its hand-held shower head mounted at waist height.  Great for the environment, but not so effective for relaxation.  And really difficult if you want to shave your legs.  My butt kept bumping into the olive green shower curtain of unknown provenance.  So the bathtub was a real treat. 

When I was 4 years old, my family took a 9 week camping trip.  My sister Leslie was 8 (Jody was not yet born).  We had a VW camper and we did a complete lap around the continental US.  We had a portable Coleman stove and a cooler for food, and ate only twice in restaurants.  We didn’t stay in a single hotel. When the fish were biting, we stayed put for awhile.  When they weren’t, we kept driving.

Perhaps this early experience predisposed me to think nothing of a 6 week road trip with Alec and the kids.  When I mentioned our plan to a friend in Barcelona in the spring, she seemed surprised—“Wow, that’s a long time!” she replied.  I wondered, for a nanosecond, if maybe we were crazy.  I’m convinced that we are not crazy, and it has been a great trip.  But I admit that recently I’ve been wondering whether my mother every got any alone time during that entire 9 weeks. 

Photos of the Day

Mesta's Web

There was a period, between 1975 and 1992, when the Greek Ministry of Tourism targeted a number of traditional towns for preservation.  The idea was not to create massive development, but to bring a small amount of tourism to these towns in order to help sustain them without damaging what was already there. It sounds a lot like slow cities.  Mesta was one of the towns the government targeted.  But somehow, the effort ended nearly 20 years ago, and only vestiges remain.  Although you see a handful of tourists when you walk through the town, most are day trippers who come for an hour or two, maybe a meal.  Hardly anyone stays here.

This has its problems and its benefits.  On the down side, the people who rent out their apartments do not have a good sense of what travelers need.  It took us days to figure out how to get our laundry done, for example.  Our kitchen lacks a coffee maker, a cutting board, a sharp knife (we bought a knife weeks ago and have been traveling from place to place with it).

But on the positive side, the village has not turned into Disneyland, as so many cute, small villages have.  It is a real working village.  Most of the people here have always lived here—their homes and land have been passed down for generations.  And there are not enough of us—tourists—to ruin the place for them.  As a result, we feel welcomed.  Having spent a week here now, we already feel ourselves becoming a part of the web of relationships that is Mesta. 

Our neighbor across the street brought us a cucumber from her garden one day, and told us to pick the herbs growing in pots on her steps whenever we wanted.  The woman who lives diagonally from us, Maria, runs the little market near the town square; she lent us her grill.  Lemoinya, who lives right next door to us, poked her head in our door on the first day.  I sat and “talked” to her for awhile out on the bench in front (I speak no Greek and she speaks no English). The next day she brought over a paper towel filled with freshly shelled almonds.  I brought her a copy of the picture of the two of us, below—she had been so delighted to see it on the screen of my camera—and she invited me in for coffee and cookies.  I sat with her in her immaculate room, a kitchen along one wall and a couch along another, with a table in the center.  Then she insisted on bringing a cup to Alec; he sat out on our stoop and drank it with Socrates, her husband.  Yesterday, we stopped at the market for cold drinks on our way to the beach, and Panayotis, the man who had taken C.C. and Milo fishing, happened to come in.  He motioned for us to wait there, and took off on his scooter.  When he returned, he had two gorgeous shells for the kids—from the smell of them, the shells had been recently inhabited.  We boiled them when we got home, and now have to figure out how to get them back to Brooklyn.

Having spent time in eight different countries in the past year, it’s easy to be tempted into making overly simplistic comparisons that could cross the line into stereotyping.  And yet it is interesting to note just which cultures one feels most drawn to.  I am attracted to the warmth of the Greeks we have met, and this is perhaps most in evidence in the way they deal with our children.  The Greeks we have met, both here in Chios and in the Peloponnese, have been very physical with the kids. Everyone tousles their hair, squeezes their shoulders.  C.C. and Milo are often kissed and hugged by near strangers.  Having spent the year in Spain, they are somewhat accustomed to the physicality, but it’s so clear that it is not what they come from.  Waiters, shopkeepers, and neighbors do not routinely embrace our children in Brooklyn.  So I’ll miss this little town, which has wrapped us up like a warm blanket.

Photos of the Day

Mastic in Mesta

Perhaps the thing that Chios is most famous for is mastic, an aromatic resin harvested from the mastic bush.  Mesta is one of three mastic villages on Chios, the other two being Olympi and Pyrgi. Although these bushes grow across the Aegean, Chios is the only place that grows it commercially.  Apparently, it is only here that the trees produce the valuable resin.  For centuries, mastic has been used in paints, cosmetics and in cooking.  People also like to chew on it, and an interruption in its production in the early 19^th century caused a brutal revolt in Istanbul.  At one time, a kilo of mastic resin cost the same as a kilo of silver.

I had read about mastic before we got here and then, coincidentally, heard a spot about it on The Splendid Table podcast sometime during the spring. “That’s where I’m going!” I thought.  The woman interviewed for the spot talked about mastic’s indescribably unique taste, its suitability for both savory and sweet foods.  I had never heard of it before we planned this trip, and I was eager to try it.  Indeed, it seems to be used in just about everything here—chewing gum, juice, seltzer water, liquor, ice cream, soap, and body lotion.  You can also get little pills that are supposed to be good for a stomach ache.

On our first night in Emporios Bay, we ordered a bottle of mastic flavored sparkling water.  Alec took a sip and slid the bottle over to me.  I couldn’t read his expression.  I took a swig—indescribable is right.  It tasted like someone had bottled “musty basement.”  I was sorely disappointed.  We tried some of the gum, which is a bit better, although weirdly textured.  I have no desire to load up on mastic face cream or shampoo, but I would like to taste it in a sauce or a sweet. 

Yesterday evening, Vasilio gave a “mastic tour”.  Much to Milo’s dismay, we all decided to go.  “I don’t want to go on any mastic tour!” Milo declared.  We started in the town square, where Vasilio told us about the pirates who came to the village hundreds of years ago and left with women, children, and mastic.  We walked out of the village through the locals’ gardens, and C.C. and Milo picked eggplant, tomatoes, and cucumbers from Vasilio’s plot.

Then we crossed the road, entered another field, and came upon what looked like an enormous shrub, about 15 feet tall and 15 yards wide.  A break in one end allowed us to enter into it and discover that it was actually about 30 mastic bushes, planted in four neat rows.  It is harvest time in mastic land, and Vasilio demonstrated how the resin is gathered.  First the farmers scrape and sweep away the leaves from a wide circle around the trunk.  C.C. and Milo were happy to demonstrate—city kids for whom farming tasks are still fun.  Next, a layer of calcium carbonate—a very fine, white powder—is thrown under the tree to cover the clean circle.  This allows the resin to drop without sticking to the dirt.  By now the kids looked as though they had been dipped in flour sacks.  The farmer then makes a series of small cuts—a couple of inches long—into the trunk and branches of the tree.  When you do this, and we did, you can see the clear resin begin to come to the surface.  The farmer makes 10 or 15 a day throughout the harvest period, and the resin drops to the ground.   We discovered the hard way that it is extremely sticky until it’s completely dry.  Once dry, the farmers scoop it into sieves, which help to separate out the dirt.  Then they throw what’s left into buckets of water; the leaves and pieces of bark rise to the top, and the resin sinks.  They scoop the resin out and remove any dirt.  All of this for 80 euros a kilo—a pretty labor-intensive practice for something that tastes like musty basement.

I haven’t given up, though.  I plan to buy a little container of the powdered stuff and experiment with it when I get home.

Vasilio had set up a table in the middle of the mastic grove laid with a range of tasty local treats—amazing bread baked in a wood-fired oven, the tomatoes and cucumber we had picked, salty cheese, almond-stuffed figs, olives, and a pickled green that comes on many of the salads here, all washed down with a raisiny local wine.  We chatted with our tour buddies—a man from France, a young couple, and then walked home as the sun began to set.  “That mastic tour was really cool,” Milo declared, having completely forgotten his earlier protest.