A Hypothyroid Health Journey: Fiona Goes to Corfu, Part 2

Life in Corfu

It’s after midnight, and the road home is completely dark, but I know the bumps and dips by heart. I’ve walked through this blackness often.

Tonight, there’s a tiny light flickering in my path, which looks like the glinting eye of a dog perhaps. As I approach it, it has a rhythmic glow: on, off – on, off – on, off, and there’s something enchanting about it, but I’m still not sure, as I reach my doorstep, what this tiny light was.

Coincidentally, the next morning, Spiros and Sofia (who own the mini-market up the road) ask me if I’ve seen the fireflies yet. It’s early May, and these miniscule star-like bugs will soon saturate the olive groves at night. In a week or so, my way home will become a magical stroll through a carpet of stars. These bobbing, reddish bugs are male fireflies, all aglow in an effort to attract females during mating season, and at the end of the month they’ll disappear as suddenly as they appeared.

Corfu is bursting with life: blue and yellow housemartins flit and dive under foots, gathering mud and dry grass to build their upside-down honeypot-shaped nests. These carefully constructed new homes will soon house baby birds who’ll sing for their food, yellow beaks prized wide open, like enthusiastic little choirboys. Even the snakes are surfacing from under the earth. The hotter it gets, the more snakes I see on the road, squashed flat by the early tourists in their small, brand new hire cards, or by the crazy Greek drivers. I have a terrible fear of snakes, and it doesn’t help my phobia when the villagers assure me that the ones about 5’ long, thicker than your fist, tobacco-colored, are definitely not poisonous.

Not a day goes by when I don’t feel grateful to be here. Waking up without the alarm, having my coffee in peace, just following the gentle rhythm of the day - - no schedule, no errands, no commitments is sheer luxury. It takes a while to get used to the erratic, unreliable way of doing things in Greece, but once you learn patience, and to go with the flow, you can handle it.

After my walks and afternoons at the beach with my book, I make it a ritual to visit Andreas, the handsome, bohemian son of the owner of Jimmy’s Restaurant, the taverna with the best food and the best people in Pelekas. Andreas is a musician who works on his music in the winter, and works extremely hard in the restaurant from May – October. Like most Greeks, he works 7 days a week throughout the summer, without a single day off, at least 12 hrs a day. “We work double in summer to be free in winter” he explains to me, as he sits with me for a cigarette break as I have my early evening glass of wine before the restaurant fills up.

Evenings in Pelekas are spontaneous: you might bump into friends and join them for dinner, or sit and chat with one of the bar owners before they get busy, or watch the sprinkling of tourists in the small square while the Greek boys scoot by on their Vespas, and the old men sit at the bus stop and watch the world go by, still wearing their winter jackets even on these mild evenings.

As the days pass, and the sun sets later and later, it dawns on me that this blissfully simple and somewhat escapist life that I have cannot last. I have no income, and although I live frugally, I feel slightly uneasy about my finances. Like a swimming pool slowly draining, I need to fill up my cash reserves again, so I can have peace of mind until the autumn. I need to find a job on the island.