Really Fresh Seafood

I am extraordinarily lucky to have a close and dear friend who also happens to be a nautical archaeologist. Think Indiana Jones in scuba gear. Not only is it kind of the coolest job description in the world, but his particular area of study (The Islamic Influence on Boatbuilding and Trade in the post-Crusades Economies of Europe) means that he gets to set up camp in some pretty nifty places. Exotic locale + friend who speaks language = the world's greatest vacations.

One of the few perks of working for a newspaper (or at least, of working for this newspaper) is that I get paid almost nothing, but that I get an outrageous amount of vacation. Between actual vacation, comp time and what the union calls "make-up time," I can, in a good year, end up with close to five weeks of time off. And I'm not even French! So the very first year that I found myself in that lucky situation, I made plans to visit my favorite exotic friend.

In the end, I spent nearly a month in Greece and Turkey, and there's not enough space in the world to chronicle how amazing it was. In part because of a scheduling snafu, I ended up spending four days alone in Athens at the start of the trip, and three days alone in Istanbul at the end.

It was the first time I'd ever traveled without a companion, and it was -- to my utter surprise -- extremely cool. I met a vast number of people, because I was forced to interact, and I did exactly what I wanted when I wanted to. No whining about the hours I spent in the Bazaar, no bored guy poking me because I'd been staring at that statue "forever." I felt all empowered and very Helen Reddy-like. I'm equally glad, though, that I got to spend the bulk of the time with my friend, because he -- and the rest of the trip -- were incredible.

One of my favorite stories from our time together (which -- hi! -- included iridescent butterflies, pirates, Europe's Largest Disco, shipwrecks, yachts owned by royalty, smuggling, weapons, haggling, road races, sheep, goats, camels, terrorists, temples, mosques, illicit bars, rugs, yogurt and lots and lots of apple tea) was the day we spent in a tiny little town called Gumusluk (there should be German-style umlauts over all those u's, btw).

We had been staying in a fairly large town called Bodrum, where the Museum of Nautical Archaeology lives. Bodrum caters to blue-collar holidaymakers from Germany and the U.K. who can't afford destinations like Ibiza, and reminded me, strangely, of Wildwood (or Brighton, or Santa Cruz -- fill in goofy, tacky, seaside town here) -- filled with chip shops that took pounds, breakfast joints that took euros, and lots of really awful discos.

Ten miles or so out of town, though, the neatly paved highway just ended, abruptly, as we started to climb the mountains, and we were launched onto dirt roads, and a world that had been essentially unchanged since the time of Christ. The transition was jarring.

We wound our way through the mountains and around to the other side of the peninsula -- a trip that, had there been any kind of, you know, roads probably would only have taken an hour or so -- and ended up in a small fishing village at, literally, the end of the country. Looking out across the Harbor, we could see the Turkish red flag and the sky-blue Greek flag planted on facing rocks in the middle of the Aegean, fiercely marking their territory.

We spent the day hiking around the town's one and only hill, which jutted out on a skinny spit of land between the flags. It was totally undeveloped -- the air rich with the scents of clover and thick with fat, drowsy bees -- and there were wild donkeys and goats and rabbits that would just sort of appear on the horizon and then dash away as we drew closer.

About three-quarters of the way around the peninsula, we stumbled -- again, literally -- on two older women sunbathing in front of the only cottage we'd seen for miles, face up on beach towels and totally nude. As we scrambled to apologize, one woman poked open an eye, and in the thickest Cockney accent I've ever heard, said "Oi! It's not like you're the first pair to see us in the altogether."

They actually sat up and threw on t-shirts and offered to picnic with us. They turned out to be old girlfriends -- one widowed, one divorced -- who'd tired of cold London winters and packed up stakes and rented this tiny little villa, site unseen, from a newspaper ad a few years before. I was fascinated: I wanted to learn their whole life stories, but at least according to some people, interrogation isn't polite.

By the time we returned to the harbor, it was twilight, and the sun was sinking as the tide was rising. There were about a dozen little seaside cafes, all cheek by jowl on the shoreline, and we picked a pavilion at random under an umbrella and sat, after taking off our shoes, with our tired feet ankle-deep in the warm, salty waters of high tide. We ordered illicit Turkish beer and mezes (little Turkish appetizers) and octopus.

Our waiter, who spoke no English, came out after a few moments and gestured us into the kitchen, where my friend and the cook had a very short, heated discussion in Turkish. After a few minutes, my friend turned to me and said, in English, "He wants us to know that their food is the freshest. We have to pick."

At that, he pointed to a shallow tub, filled with inky water, where a few fat octopi floated lazily. I pointed to one randomly (hey, do you know how to pick an octopus?), and the cook reached in briskly, wound up as if he were throwing the first pitch at Wrigley Field, and whacked the poor octopus's head against the corner of the prep table, killing it instantly. I didn't know whether to be horrified or impressed, but we managed to make it back to the table before we lost it completely.

Later, after a damn fine meal of the freshest octopus, the chef (owner?) came out to our table with a bottle of some licorice-y liqueur that I thought was ouzo, but apparently was not. He and my friend talked, and I contributed an occasional Turkish word I'd mastered (all four of them or so), and got steadily drunker as the night wore on. There were pockets of people laughing and dancing in each cafe, and we joined in an impromptu wedding celebration when the boats carrying the wedding party pulled up beside the harbor, where the bride's female relatives taught me to ulate, and taught the two of us to dance the intricate wedding dances.

By the time we left, night had fallen and we had to return, in the dark, over the mountains. We had only gotten about halfway up when we acknowledged the fact that neither of us should have been driving, period, let alone on dirt mountain roads in the dark. We pulled into a turn-off that overlooked the now far-off sea, and watched the full moon explode over the fields of pink and purple flowers below us. We talked for hours until we'd sobered up, and drove home listening to bad Turkish pop music spun by British DJ's "live" from the Bodrum discos we'd left behind that morning.

We returned to his villa by the light of the extraordinarily bright moon, and I thought for a moment that we had somehow left the world behind us in that little seaside town and were driving through an alien landscape by the light of a faraway sun.