Frenzy. For the past 18 hours I've been in a frenzy trying to nail down the right selection and order for new beds and mattresses. Two nights ago, my mom's bed was literally falling apart as the slats fell out. My mattress is so hard my side hurts at night. The kids complain – and they have the most comfortable mattresses. I keep trying to coalesce around a plan, only to recoil from decisions so impactful on the state of the house that I don't want them made hastily. Yet time is of the essence.
Urging caution on choosing things that are solely IKEA just for the convenience, my friends Conlan and Sharon (whose amazing wedding was only a week and a half ago) helped define the color range that would work with the house and encouraged me to find other potentially more interesting Greek furniture sources online. So I did just that into the night – finding a few promising stores with nice variety that sell online. I shared my findings then, to my amazement, Sharon send back a series of collages representing styles and vibes for the two bedrooms based on items she found from the collection of websites I sent.
Besides finding this somewhat radical boutique bed and mattress shop on Rhodes, I also stumbled across the site for one of Greece's largest mattress manufacturers, Linea Strom which has a surprisingly thorough array of choices including some. very luxurious ones (use Chrome's translate feature if you're going to check it out). Besides giving me hope for comfortable mattresses, it gave me a clue: There's a Linea Strom sign over a small furniture shop here on Patmos which has limited inventory of seemingly irrelevant items. I thought that was the shop's name. It turns out they are an authorized retailer. Moreover, they have catalogs upon catalogs of furniture from which to choose and have delivered to your door, coordinated by locals. There's a distinct advantage to that.
Then she showed me her main catalog for wood furniture and to my shock, it was pretty good and well priced. Beautiful woods in modern, but not overly modern designs. Because it's made by a regional manufacturer, they can customize to some extent – finish color, size, storage drawers under beds… a number of useful variations. Despite the very nice store owner needing to call the manufacturer for every price and answer to any question, my head was turned.
The one downside is the furniture manufacturer in question carries only two types of Linea Strom mattresses – not the higher-end ones I might prefer. But a call to Linea Strom later, I learned I could just order directly and match it to the bed frames myself. They're having a half-off sale on the model I want.
So, what I feel confident about now is that I'll scrap the beds and mattresses from my Ikea order and go local.
Christina from the furniture store discovered she lives up the street from me and was then kind enough to send several catalogs home for me to review with my family. The four of us spent the early afternoon first discussing what a catalog is and then pouring through them to find what we thought was best. Ailyn's selections filled two sheets of paper. Sennen's filled two post-it's. Mine was half a post-it plus what Christina had already wrote down for me.
I feel like we're hours from a final decision.
Sennen and Ailyn (especially Ailyn) found catalogs novel and were happy to review sofas and chairs in the attempt to imagine the living room. In their minds, there may be a swing in the foyer. It's altogether too soon to come to any conclusions on the common areas. All the same, reams of ideas have been taken down.
Of course, by the time we were done with our catalog party and had negotiated which bed frames the kids could agree on for their room/guest room, the hour was much later than expected for going to Lampi Beach. Sennen had hoped to work and head straight to Lampi – which didn't happen quite that way. So, he was fine to let go of beach time for the day. Ailyn was not. We decided to go to the small beach in front of town, near the Marina where a lot of locals take their kids. I sat at the cafe on the sand writing this and calling mattress companies.
Ailyn, on the other hand, had her cultural breakthrough moment. She befriended a few local girls while swimming – one of which speaks native English thanks to her British grandmother and British-Greek mother. After swimming on her own, with some reticence to connect, one of the girls approached her – and from then onward, I found her creating sand castles with the girls one minute and having dunking contests the next. One giant step for Ailyn, one small leap for Patmos-American relations.
"Daddy, I think I know the story of how I made friends. This one girl, she came up to me and she doesn't know English but she brought me up to the beach to her parents who do speak English. They told me she doesn't speak English but that she wants to play with me. So she communicates with me by making gestures and brining me around to different places. She brought in another girl and we all played. Really like having friends. It's hard enough to make friends in your own language – or to make friends in general – but it's really hard to make friends who speak another language. Like, I don't know their names. One girl said her name, but it was hard for me to understand and now I've forgotten. I also don't have their information and don't know how to invite them for playdates. But I want to go back tomorrow and see them again."
I told Ailyn I could take her back tomorrow, talk to the other parents and see what I can do to facilitate playdates off the beach. And of course how proud I am that she reached out and made friends across cultures. She is a VERY socially adept person who can make herself known to anyone.
Unfortunately, beach time didn't last too long today. This our most scheduled day yet – a haircut for Sennen at 5:30, a kids' activity session at the local gym with Coach Thanasis at 6 and the furniture store this evening (I have to at least return the catalogs). Plus I have work calls at 5, 6 and 9. It all feels so rushed for Patmos!
In the end, whether it's figuring out how furniture shopping works, finding a gardener, scheduling a haircut with a barber who has no real sense of time, working for Greek employers who want you to "put some heart into it and not work so much like a machine" (Eirini's feedback for Sennen), making friends on the beach or joining in a pickup soccer game – it's all about slowly reaching across the divide and transcending cultures. We may all be here to enjoy, maybe even to work, but as much as anything else, we're here to learn.
And God willing, as soon as we can get a delivery (which needs to happen before August because the Greek furniture makers close for the month of August), we'll also be here to get a good night's rest.
