poli oreo

In Ikaria, in Greece, in the nursing home, the first thing we saw when we walked in was this old woman with milky eyes and hands like bent chicken claws grasping at the air. She frightened us; we did not think this was what we'd signed up for. Her mandibles chewed a set of words over and over, Greek words, and we college students huddled in the doorway. We were both terrified of going near her and terrified of ending up like her, alone and demented in a piss-smelling fluorescent nursing home on a rocky wind-swept island.

And then Argie walked over and put a hand on the old woman's nightgowned back. "This is Stamatoula," she smiled at us, and the old woman reached up to touch Argie's face. We shrank away in sympathy, but Argie stood as Stamatoula caressed her cheeks, repeating the phrase. Her whitened eyes stared at something in the corner as her hands saw.

"What's she saying?" we whispered, embarrassed at our fear.

Argie listened, and then: "The Virgin Mary bless you."

And then: "Very beautiful."

This, over and over. The Virgin Mary bless you; very beautiful. 

We crept to her, eventually, and learned not to fear as she bent her head in our direction, seized our hands with one bent cold papery claw and saw our faces with the other. Her gums smiled as she blessed us. "Poli oreo." She would hold on for hours, and luckily, we learned to let her.

However often Stamatoula repeated it in those two weeks the group spent at the nursing home, I can't remember how to ask for the Virgin's blessing. Still, "Poli oreo", being shorter, has stuck with me. Very beautiful - it comes to mind at times like today, when, oppressively aware of my 24 hours left in Munich, I walked up the train stairs into Marienplatz and was greeted by the leaves, lit by sun and dancing against the clouds.

Poli oreo, I thought, and then it hit me why this was what she'd gotten stuck on - why Stamatoula, so Alzheimer's-riddled and close to death, could only repeat it again and again until her voice grew scratchy.

When you know you'll be leaving a place soon, you don't have a choice. You can only say how beautiful it is,  all of it, all the faces and trees and moods, and give it your blessing. You grasp it close, see as much of it as you can, and then let it go, however hard it is to disentangle your fingers.

The Virgin Mary bless you.

In which I gloat about my birthday.

On the Sunday before my birthday, my highly evolved boyfriend

took me on a magical journey to that most German-sounding of cities, Garmisch-Partenkirchen! I had no real reason for wanting to go to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, apart from wanting to say the name repeatedly in a German accent. I had heard there were mountains, but apart from that it was just a passing fancy, which Nader indulged because - as I reminded him repeatedly - it was my birthday.

It's about an hour and a half south of Munich, on the Austrian border. It's a straight, easy journey by train, and we spent it drinking coffee and not-very-sneakily eavesdropping on the loud American tourist boys in front of us. 

When we got there, we sort of just aimed ourselves at the mountains and started walking. We had no clear goal (unlike the tourist boys, who were going to CLIMB THE HELL OUT OF THAT ZUGSPITZE), and I think that's why the journey turned out to be so, well, cinematic and epic. (That or the copious amounts of alcohol we consumed on the way. But, I mean, the pictures are pretty great, so we can't be making all of it up, right?)

It would seem like it'd be pretty easy to find a mountain to climb - you just aim yourself at it and ascend - but we had some difficulties finding ze nature at first. The signs pointing to the hiking path seemed to have been messed with by small children, and we actually wound up wandering through a cemetery at one point, our hope slowly dying as we pondered the tombstones and sought in vain for the path. 

And then this cat wandered out, and we knew we'd be okay.

When the cat moseyed off to do whatever errand it'd set out, that morning, to accomplish, we abandoned the cemetery and came across a fit little old German lady. 

"Um, excuse us," Nader asked all politely and young German man - ically. "Is there a hiking path around here?"

"Oh, many," the lady said, and looked at us like, You idiots. She told us we were pretty close - that if we'd just gone left instead of right at one junction, we'd be out of the town and on our way up, and then she told us that there was a beautiful lake up there, too.

A lake sounded awesome. It was hot, and we had backpacks packed too tightly with provisions, and swimming sounded like the best. "Yes," we said, "yes. How far?"

"Oh, thirty minutes," she said.

When little old German ladies say "thirty minutes", they mean thirty minutes for them, not for us. After an hour of hiking uphill, we were absolutely exhausted, our calves nowhere near used to this level of exercise. Little old German women kept passing us, whistling as they swung their walking poles, but we were pooped and ready for the lake - and thank God, it was finally there. 

"I'm just going to dive in," I said. "I will swim in my clothes. I don't care. I totally can't wait." I was picturing a pristine, blue mountain reservoir, you know, exactly like everything else in Germany.

It was kind of murky, but it would do - we scanned the shores, looking for a free place to spread our blanket and crack open our picnic backpacks. We were right up against that wooden fence in the picture, leaning our arms on it and planning the afternoon, when all of a sudden I happened to look down.

"Nader," I said, attempting to control my voice so IT wouldn't sense fear, "look at that fish..."

A massive brown fish had just swum up. Far from avoiding us, it was looking at us. It expected something. It was waiting. I could only assume it knew of our plans to jump in, and had in turn planned to devour us, toe by toe.

"Oh god," Nader said, "they're coming..."

And all of a sudden there was another fish, and another, and suddenly there were hundreds of them. Their fins cut the water like sharks', and their mouths gaped at the surface of the water, fist-sized orifices with big yellowed lips and (I think) teeth that gnashed.

We started to giggle, this "Amadeus"-type mad fear giggle, and threw bits of sandwich at them to placate them. It only encouraged them, of course, and despite their lack of legs, we were convinced that they'd soon climb out of the water and mug us for the contents of our backpacks. We must have been there for half an hour - it was horribly amusing. 

 We wandered on, and eventually did find a picnic spot. I can't believe we didn't take any pictures of it, but it was incredibly magical - a waterfall, a pond, a fallen tree making a curtain of leaves. Here is Nader with part of our lunch:

Inspired by that part of our lunch, I felt obligated to explain him the plot of "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider", which, as a German-Iranian, he had never ever previously encountered. I believe his world expanded that day.

 ("Down came the rain and washed the spider out!")

We stayed there for I think two hours, just talking and eyeing the ground for snakes, before the sun started to set and we decided to head back down the mountain, belting Monty Python songs as we attempted to brace ourselves on the slopey trail. 

A lot of things happened on the way down, too.

(TINY F***ING FROG) 

Halfway down the mountain, inspired by nature, we took it upon ourselves to shoot a Timothy Treadwell-inspired documentary video. (I tried to upload it here, but it wouldn't work, which is probably a good thing for my online reputation and future career.) Here is a screenshot instead, along with one of TT himself, so you can compare:

If you've never seen Grizzly Man (and you should!), Timothy Treadwell is this guy who would repeatedly go into the Alaskan wilderness and just shoot documentary footage of the bears / monologues about himself being the sole protector of the bears. He often wore sunglasses and had the best bangs I have ever seen. Of course, the bears he was protecting eventually ate him, but his spirit lives on in people who take it upon themselves to shoot parody videos of himself talking about himself.

Just as I, as TT, reached the height of my speech - "I am, like, the fearless protector of all wildlife!" a German couple and their dog, striding happily along, appeared from out of nowhere. I froze, and the woman just said, "Es muss sein!" which I think translates to "You gotta do what you gotta do."

We didn't see any snakes while we were actually in the woods, but on our way back, we passed the lake and saw a ten-year-old child (poised eagerly in the picture) go, "Papa! Papa, I've caught something!" Aw, a fish, we thought, and watched eagerly to see one of those fishes get their comeuppance. 

Instead, his father reached into the child's net and pulled out a meter-long freaking water snake. The only reason I didn't go running and screaming was that we were behind a chain-link fence. The kid's mother came out of the house and went, "Are you, like, a hundred-percent sure you want to be doing that?" and the kid's father just sort of waved the snake around as its head tried fitfully to bite something, anything, off of that guy. He did eventually throw it back, and I'm sure the snakes and the fish are now planning their terrifying revenge.

When we eventually made it down the mountain, we ate some well-deserved spaetzle and drank some well-deserved bier.

The mountains, ever-obliging, were perfect and Lord-of-the-Ringsey for our train ride home.

All in all, it was a lovely lovely day, and because I've blogged so much about it I'm going to shut up about it now. The fact is though that all birthdays should be an epic adventure filled with too much food and booze, and mine, this year, certainly was.