Turning left out of our property, I found trains of slow-moving, meandering people. Cruise ship passengers are often older and it makes sense they may need some time to make their way. Only, once one chain of people passed, another was close on its tail. I had to move nimbly to make my way to the ATM and produce truck. It took me a moment to realize what I was hearing German – everywhere.
It turns out, there are three cruise ships anchored offshore right now – one HUGE German language ship called Mein Schiff (I guess they really appreciate the Senator from California) which is part of the TUI line – a joint venture between a German travel company and Royal Carribean. There are also one older, more modestly sized Turkish ship – Blue Sapphire, and the “ultra-luxury” Seabourn Quest, part of Carnival’s top-tier brand offering more intimate, high end experiences.
This explains why among the din of German, I occasionally heard Americans, French and Turks.
It became clear that as soon as we finished our morning errands, it was time to get out of town and into some water. The group chose Pleiades today, enjoying both a swimming pool over Sapsilla Bay and great food. Most importantly, in our two-desserts per week allotment, Ailyn has been saving hers for the Chocolate Oreo Pancakes she has been eyeing for some time. It’s a stack of real American pancakes slathered in Nutella, cookie butter, and chocolate-filled Oreo crumbles. It was the brunch she has been dreaming of and totally hit the spot.
Before we could go, we needed to get our dinner ingredients and more critically, a package containing Ethan’s Aveeno Eczema Therapy lotion. I ordered a resupply online through Skroutz – the Greek answer to Amazon. Ethan ran out of his Aveeno supply yesterday and hobbled through the evening on a lesser, local brand of eczema lotion. As the pharmacist told me when I bought it last week, “It still moisturizes well it just doesn’t have the same mentality as Aveeno.” The British educated pharmacist called Aveeno “lovely” and was sad they don’t carry it anymore for lack of sales, but that it really is the best in his opinion. That was when I placed the online order.
As soon as Ethan put on the new Aveeno, he said, “Ooo, that feels good….” like the door mouse having jam put on his nose. Regular use of Aveeno seems to keep Ethan’s skin in good shape. We then transferred some of the new lotion into the hand-carry sized pump he’s been using and got out the door, into the car and literally took to higher ground.
Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA and author of NYT Bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel offers a number of intertwined theories on how our world came to have its current distribution of wealth and power. Most central to the paradigm his posits is that human societies move through stages of development that are linked to their economies – Hunter/Gatherer, Agrarian, Industrial, Post-Industrial. Just as individual humans have developmental stages such as infancy, childhood, and adolescence – all inescapable and sequential – so do human societies. Underpinning these are resources such as domesticable plants, domesticable animals and mineral resources – especially metal ores. Societies that advanced further usually had more of these things, those who didn’t usually lacked them (for example Australia had zero domesticable plants or animals prior to European colonization, making it impossible for Australian Aborigines to develop any kind of social structure other than hunter-gatherer).
Though these basic developmental factors explain much of different countries’ rates of development and relative successes in advancing quality of life, ambition and innovativeness also play a part. Not every society is as open to change, creative or driven as another. Professor Diamond (who I was fortunate enough to meet and have dinner with three years ago!) believes there’s a certain percentage of more creative, forward-looking cultures and they are roughly distributed globally. Let’s say every 6th culture is one of those more forward-looking groups.
This gave Europe wings. Of any continent, Europe has the largest number of distinct cultures per square mile. It’s culturally dense. This have it the best odds for creativity and change which was then fueled further by inciting competition within the countries that may have otherwise been slower to change and less creative-minded. For example, let’s say Germany was more prone to advancement and change than Italy. Germany’s industrial and military development left Italy and the Italian states preceding the current Italian state to accept new ideas and develop in ways it might either not have done or would have taken longer to do. But with Germany as a neighbor, Italy couldn’t afford to fall too far behind economically or militarily.
One could hypothesize Britain pioneering the Industrial Revolution and gaining naval supremacy likely gave France a jolt. And if France advanced, then how lazy could the Netherlands afford to be? Given all these countries had a strong agricultural package of domesticable plants and animals as well as iron ore they eventually learned to turn to steel – the countries of Europe were especially well positioned to develop in new ways, whereas domesticable plants and animals couldn’t even survive in the Congo.
When I’m on Patmos, I often think about Professor Diamond’s belief that Europe’s many cultures were its asset in this way. Because in another sense. it’s weird.
For example, why are Germany and France so different despite being neighbors? How did Greece not only remain Christian, but retain a common cultural identity across its mainland and 220 inhabited islands despite living for 400 years under the Ottoman Empire? Why did Albania – also a longtime Ottoman possession – largely adopt Islam while Greeks resisted it so adeptly? Why was Britain so adept at empire building in the 19th Century while Italy (one the center of an expansive 1,000 -year empire) was so inept at it?
The questions could fill volumes and for each one, multiple volumes have been written.
Yesterday at Agriolivadi, a group of people formed a circle in the water, half-waded-in. They talked and then eventually divided into a men’s circle and a women’s – not unlike Italians. Then the men began playing a game with a ball – quite energetically and aggressively, which wasn’t so Italian. Our friend Vanghelis, the waiter on the beach this year, said he thought they were Turkish and when I was swimming and close enough, I was able to get a better listen. Turkish indeed.
The funny thing is Turks and Greeks don’t look so different. Often, they don’t look so different from Southern Italians either. Or Bulgarians, for that matter. The distance between the Greek islands closest to the Turkish coast are usually an hour or less ferry apart. You can see one coast from the other. At one point, those tiny straits didn’t matter. In Ancient times, Turkey was part of the Hellenic world. In the Medieval Period, the Ottoman Empire swallowed the Byzantine Empire including present-day Greece. Turks have lived as Greeks and Greeks as Ottoman subjects for most of history. Today, a hour’s boat ride represents a wide cultural gulf. It seems so arbitrary.
Not that this is in any way unique to Turkey and Greece or to Europe. The Annamite Line between Vietnam and Laos/Cambodia or the US border with Mexico (as contrasted with the Canadian border) are huge cultural dividing lines – some more linked to politics, others to topographical barriers that fostered organic cultural divergences.
Still, when walking around Skala on a breezy summer day, the vibe of a German filled town is quite different than a week ago when it was British-occupied. A boat full of Turks creates a different atmosphere than when a Ponant Line boat like the Jacques Cartier drops off high-end French tourists.
Certainly, any of them bother me when they walk slowly in front of me when I’m trying to get a large watermelon home from the produce truck. I’m not sure why any culture can’t see large watermelons.
But overall, I try to remember the panopoly of vibes and cultural paradigms that sometimes feels confusing or discordant is responsible for the success of Western Civilization (and a lot of bloodshed too). The distance between France and Switzerland may be a mere 274 miles (less than I drive to Thanksiving), or France and the Netherlands 431 – not much different than Los Angeles to San Francisco – but the cultural differences are ginormous. Yet the diversity of perspectives, the competition among them and push the gave to advance economies, technologies and human welfare are tremendous. Achtung, Baby!
