October 20, 2017:
Last time it was fried eggs and bread. A journal note from Athens says, "14 fried eggs in 3 days." Mostly from a small taverna in the Plaka called "The Milk Shop". Fried eggs, bread, milk: cheap, familiar, unthreatening.
Not entirely true. There was also a lot of khoriatike: the country salad of cucumber, tomato and feta available everywhere. It's unclear to me in hindsight why I would ever have ordered that, since at the time I hated cucumber and tomato, and was certainly suspicious of cheese not originating with cows. But I can say with certainty that by the end of those ten weeks I was so profoundly alienated from cucumber that I couldn't face another for years.
Despite the limits of my then childhood diet there were revelations that stuck. The food was fresh, and flavorful in a way none of us had ever experienced at home. American fruits and vegetables are unprecedentedly bountiful but typically they ripen in transit, leaving two thirds of their taste in the truck. Greek food had more flavor, a reality brought home to us powerfully in Crete, where a single slice of orange from the tree packed more wallop than a crateful of oranges from Florida. Everyone in our group marveled at the experience.
At school I was learning to like food. Mexican: check. Chinese: yeppers. It was a slow process of internalizing the experience of flavors and textures beyond the spaghetti and mushy canned corn to which my Ozarkian home diet had been limited. But it was step-by-step, so that sudden immersion in the cuisine of another culture was pretty heavy therapy, and I sought out the familiar whenever possible, like running home to mama.
I can tellya though one specific milestone from that trip which stuck for realz. January 27, 1980 in Palermo, Sicily, while exploring the stunning Greek sites around the island: Mark's first pizza. "Now that's an eye-opener and no mistake" — Sam Gamgee. Followed a week later by artichoke-heart pizza conjured by the GF somewhere on the Left Bank of Paris. I remember that as the single best consumable I've ever experienced.
This evolution was completed decades ago. Greek cuisine, and Mediterranean food generally, is my hands-down preference over all the options California has to offer. So that this trip today is like two weeks in earthly heaven, where I'm fantasizing continually of buying a flat somewhere, in Athens or Nafplio perhaps, where I'd do nothing but eat and write and play guitar day and night while waiting out the end of the world.
Time for lunch.