I came to Crete because I was blue.
I married my husband Giannis Galanakis in 1997. I remember the first thing he said to me. It was ‘Giannis, but call me GG’. I had asked him his name. That was always the first thing I asked. When I enquired where he came from, I didn’t understand his reply, and anyway the music was too loud. I made him repeat it twice, then let it go.
I was working as a dancer in a bar in Pattaya. The bar was called the Dollhouse-A-Go-Go and was located in Walking Street. It probably still is, though I haven’t been down that street for years. My job was to dance on a small stage—a bar really—for which I was paid a small amount. I could augment my earnings by appearing topless, by sitting with the customers and persuading them to buy me drinks, or by going with them to their hotels for whatever they wanted.
I never knew that not to involve sex.
That was OK; the bar attracted a reasonably well-behaved set of customers. I could sit with anyone I wanted to and be bar-fined by anyone I chose. If a man was too mean with the drinks, I’d quickly pretend that I was needed on stage. If he wanted me to go with him and I had a bad feeling—if he was drunk or smelt bad—I’d fast-forward to my period or, if that didn’t work, tell him I had herpes. That always did the trick.
This flexibility put me in control of my career. The ones I didn’t turn away became my boyfriends. The relationships I had with my boyfriends were very varied. Some lasted half the evening, others all night. Occasionally, a boyfriend would take me to Ko Samui for the weekend, or to Chiang Mai for the week. We’d go elephant-riding or white-water rafting and take photos of each other smiling against the scenery like young lovers. Some would later send me money from Amsterdam or Rome, others would write soppy emails in terrible Thaiglish, some of which I would show to my friends for a laugh.
When Giannis Galanakis walked into the bar, I was 23 years old. I had been working at the Dollhouse-A-Go-Go for three years and was close to giving up and going home. I had a dream, encouraged by my mother, that I would find my husband in Pattaya, but nobody I met in the bar came close. I worked seven days a week from evening to early morning so I had no other opportunity to meet men. The rest of the time I slept in the room I shared with a girlfriend from the bar. When I wasn’t sleeping I was washing my clothes or eating from street stalls. I had no time at all for a social life. My only chance was to find a customer who could see me as more than a quick fuck or, at best, a temporary wife.
Giannis was sitting with his brother Emmanuel. While I danced in front of him, he looked at me tenderly. I went to sit with him. After a while he spoke to his brother and then he took me for dinner in a Thai restaurant on Road Two, after which we went dancing at Hollywood disco. He was a very gentle lover for a man of his build. The next day we climbed up to the Big Buddha to look down on Pattaya. The buildings appeared so ordinary from up there; it was hard to imagine what went on inside them. A week later Giannis hired a car and we drove to Surin where I introduced him to my family. I cried when he left. When he came back the following year, we were married.
Many men come to Thailand to live in paradise and abandon the duties of home. GG wasn’t like that. After we were married, we lived together in Isaan largely out of our combined loyalty to my family. We settled in Khorat—as Nakhon Ratchasima is known to the locals—close enough to my family in Surin and far enough away to allow us to lead an independent life. Also, we thought the schools would be better in the big city.
All the time GG would dream about the beauty of the Mediterranean and the glories of Crete—its mountains, the encircling sea and its turbulent history. In the evenings, we would sit outside our house, with a few lights on around the garden, and he would speak to me softly from his heart about his boyhood in Almiridha, playing football with his three brothers, teasing his two sisters. The sky in Crete would be bright with stars, he told me.
It made me look up.
As a young boy he went to sea with his father to haul up the octopus pots and lobster traps, but only at the weekends as his parents were determined that all their children would benefit from a proper education—an opportunity that had been denied most of their generation in the poor village. Crete was his distant paradise; Khorat was where he started his own family, so the foreign city became his home. Isaan was in his head, but Crete stayed in his heart.
GG felt a strong need to come from somewhere, not only a place but also a time, preferably long ago. If someone asked me: ‘What are the experiences that have shaped you?’ I would mention the births of my children, my marriage, possibly the evenings I spent under the house with my mother, debating family crises and the various rows that were taking place between my brothers and sisters about land, planting and the harvest. Giannis would say, ‘Driving the Turks from my country.’
Or it could have been the Germans or the Venetians; there was always someone to be driven out.
My husband defined himself in terms of history, thousands of years of it, stretching back like an unrolled carpet. Over this time, the people of Crete have endured repeated invasions, occupations and battles for independence. This communal experience had been distilled into a precious liquor which was dripped at birth into GG’s veins. He was who he was not because he was an accountant, a football fanatic or even a son or a father, but because he was a Cretan, an inheritor of a legacy of struggle and suffering.
When I took my children to the aquarium near Iraklion, we learned that an octopus can control its eight limbs independently. It can show emotion by changing colour and has eyes very similar to our own—an example of parallel evolution. Like other molluscs, it has blue blood. GG’s father Christos caught octopus off the rocky coast of Almiridha in the way his father had taught him, and countless fathers before that, by dropping earthenware pots on to the seabed, tied together with rope like gems on a necklace. A pot makes a good hiding place for an octopus and it will stay inside even when it is hauled up to the surface. Christos would land his catch and pound the animals against a rock to tenderise their flesh. He would hang them on a rope to dry, like starched laundry on a clothesline. The Minoans caught octopus in the same waters in exactly the same way thousands of years ago. There’s something in the sea, GG would say, that endures and cannot be denied.
Giannis was surprised about how little I knew of my own country’s past. I hadn’t a clue about Thailand’s kings, apart from the present one and perhaps Rama V, who is well known to all Thais and revered to the point of worship by many. ‘What were you doing in school?’ he’d ask. Really, I couldn’t remember. I suppose we must have been taught Thailand’s history, but none of it sank in, not deep enough for memory. At home, there was never any talk of the past. We lived for the present, not the past and not particularly the future.
My parents didn’t save, they lived from day to day, sure that in the years that the rice harvest came up short we would be helped by my uncles and aunts who lived nearby. It was the same for all of them. They would assist each other at times of planting and harvest. They charged for their labour, but the money was quickly repaid when the favour was returned. The agents who bought our grain were fierce negotiators with eyes like knives, quick to criticise the slightest drop in quality, though my father worked hard to achieve the best crops of jasmine rice, the hom mali for which Isaan is so famous.
Even at times of bountiful harvest, when my father would come home with great wads of 1,000-baht notes, even this apparent wealth didn’t lead to greater security or a better life. There were five children to feed and clothe and all the expenses of running the farm. The next payday would be 12 months off. It’s only recently that my father has tried to squeeze a second crop from his fields, but the later yield is invariably smaller and less dependable than the main harvest. When I was a small girl, the box where my father kept his money was always empty before the next payday came around.
Part of living only in the present is that I didn’t have GG’s appreciation of old things. For me, a modern house, purpose-built, is preferable to a second-hand one. It’s clean and undamaged and you don’t have to think about breathing the air of others. GG saw things very differently. For him, a new house or a piece of modern furniture had no patina, no accumulation of experience. An old house, he argued, showed the wounds from the generations of families who had lived there. How could you look at the scarred skin of a whale without wondering about the fearful threats it had seen off in the ocean? It took him a decade of gentle but repetitive encouragement before I came to realise he was right.
[Continues...]
The Night is a Starry Dome is included in The Last Boat to Samui, now available in bookshops in Thailand, and in Mist on the Jungle, available as a paperback and e-book from Amazon.
I married my husband Giannis Galanakis in 1997. I remember the first thing he said to me. It was ‘Giannis, but call me GG’. I had asked him his name. That was always the first thing I asked. When I enquired where he came from, I didn’t understand his reply, and anyway the music was too loud. I made him repeat it twice, then let it go.
I was working as a dancer in a bar in Pattaya. The bar was called the Dollhouse-A-Go-Go and was located in Walking Street. It probably still is, though I haven’t been down that street for years. My job was to dance on a small stage—a bar really—for which I was paid a small amount. I could augment my earnings by appearing topless, by sitting with the customers and persuading them to buy me drinks, or by going with them to their hotels for whatever they wanted.
I never knew that not to involve sex.
That was OK; the bar attracted a reasonably well-behaved set of customers. I could sit with anyone I wanted to and be bar-fined by anyone I chose. If a man was too mean with the drinks, I’d quickly pretend that I was needed on stage. If he wanted me to go with him and I had a bad feeling—if he was drunk or smelt bad—I’d fast-forward to my period or, if that didn’t work, tell him I had herpes. That always did the trick.
This flexibility put me in control of my career. The ones I didn’t turn away became my boyfriends. The relationships I had with my boyfriends were very varied. Some lasted half the evening, others all night. Occasionally, a boyfriend would take me to Ko Samui for the weekend, or to Chiang Mai for the week. We’d go elephant-riding or white-water rafting and take photos of each other smiling against the scenery like young lovers. Some would later send me money from Amsterdam or Rome, others would write soppy emails in terrible Thaiglish, some of which I would show to my friends for a laugh.
When Giannis Galanakis walked into the bar, I was 23 years old. I had been working at the Dollhouse-A-Go-Go for three years and was close to giving up and going home. I had a dream, encouraged by my mother, that I would find my husband in Pattaya, but nobody I met in the bar came close. I worked seven days a week from evening to early morning so I had no other opportunity to meet men. The rest of the time I slept in the room I shared with a girlfriend from the bar. When I wasn’t sleeping I was washing my clothes or eating from street stalls. I had no time at all for a social life. My only chance was to find a customer who could see me as more than a quick fuck or, at best, a temporary wife.
Giannis was sitting with his brother Emmanuel. While I danced in front of him, he looked at me tenderly. I went to sit with him. After a while he spoke to his brother and then he took me for dinner in a Thai restaurant on Road Two, after which we went dancing at Hollywood disco. He was a very gentle lover for a man of his build. The next day we climbed up to the Big Buddha to look down on Pattaya. The buildings appeared so ordinary from up there; it was hard to imagine what went on inside them. A week later Giannis hired a car and we drove to Surin where I introduced him to my family. I cried when he left. When he came back the following year, we were married.
Many men come to Thailand to live in paradise and abandon the duties of home. GG wasn’t like that. After we were married, we lived together in Isaan largely out of our combined loyalty to my family. We settled in Khorat—as Nakhon Ratchasima is known to the locals—close enough to my family in Surin and far enough away to allow us to lead an independent life. Also, we thought the schools would be better in the big city.
All the time GG would dream about the beauty of the Mediterranean and the glories of Crete—its mountains, the encircling sea and its turbulent history. In the evenings, we would sit outside our house, with a few lights on around the garden, and he would speak to me softly from his heart about his boyhood in Almiridha, playing football with his three brothers, teasing his two sisters. The sky in Crete would be bright with stars, he told me.
It made me look up.
As a young boy he went to sea with his father to haul up the octopus pots and lobster traps, but only at the weekends as his parents were determined that all their children would benefit from a proper education—an opportunity that had been denied most of their generation in the poor village. Crete was his distant paradise; Khorat was where he started his own family, so the foreign city became his home. Isaan was in his head, but Crete stayed in his heart.
GG felt a strong need to come from somewhere, not only a place but also a time, preferably long ago. If someone asked me: ‘What are the experiences that have shaped you?’ I would mention the births of my children, my marriage, possibly the evenings I spent under the house with my mother, debating family crises and the various rows that were taking place between my brothers and sisters about land, planting and the harvest. Giannis would say, ‘Driving the Turks from my country.’
Or it could have been the Germans or the Venetians; there was always someone to be driven out.
My husband defined himself in terms of history, thousands of years of it, stretching back like an unrolled carpet. Over this time, the people of Crete have endured repeated invasions, occupations and battles for independence. This communal experience had been distilled into a precious liquor which was dripped at birth into GG’s veins. He was who he was not because he was an accountant, a football fanatic or even a son or a father, but because he was a Cretan, an inheritor of a legacy of struggle and suffering.
When I took my children to the aquarium near Iraklion, we learned that an octopus can control its eight limbs independently. It can show emotion by changing colour and has eyes very similar to our own—an example of parallel evolution. Like other molluscs, it has blue blood. GG’s father Christos caught octopus off the rocky coast of Almiridha in the way his father had taught him, and countless fathers before that, by dropping earthenware pots on to the seabed, tied together with rope like gems on a necklace. A pot makes a good hiding place for an octopus and it will stay inside even when it is hauled up to the surface. Christos would land his catch and pound the animals against a rock to tenderise their flesh. He would hang them on a rope to dry, like starched laundry on a clothesline. The Minoans caught octopus in the same waters in exactly the same way thousands of years ago. There’s something in the sea, GG would say, that endures and cannot be denied.
Giannis was surprised about how little I knew of my own country’s past. I hadn’t a clue about Thailand’s kings, apart from the present one and perhaps Rama V, who is well known to all Thais and revered to the point of worship by many. ‘What were you doing in school?’ he’d ask. Really, I couldn’t remember. I suppose we must have been taught Thailand’s history, but none of it sank in, not deep enough for memory. At home, there was never any talk of the past. We lived for the present, not the past and not particularly the future.
My parents didn’t save, they lived from day to day, sure that in the years that the rice harvest came up short we would be helped by my uncles and aunts who lived nearby. It was the same for all of them. They would assist each other at times of planting and harvest. They charged for their labour, but the money was quickly repaid when the favour was returned. The agents who bought our grain were fierce negotiators with eyes like knives, quick to criticise the slightest drop in quality, though my father worked hard to achieve the best crops of jasmine rice, the hom mali for which Isaan is so famous.
Even at times of bountiful harvest, when my father would come home with great wads of 1,000-baht notes, even this apparent wealth didn’t lead to greater security or a better life. There were five children to feed and clothe and all the expenses of running the farm. The next payday would be 12 months off. It’s only recently that my father has tried to squeeze a second crop from his fields, but the later yield is invariably smaller and less dependable than the main harvest. When I was a small girl, the box where my father kept his money was always empty before the next payday came around.
Part of living only in the present is that I didn’t have GG’s appreciation of old things. For me, a modern house, purpose-built, is preferable to a second-hand one. It’s clean and undamaged and you don’t have to think about breathing the air of others. GG saw things very differently. For him, a new house or a piece of modern furniture had no patina, no accumulation of experience. An old house, he argued, showed the wounds from the generations of families who had lived there. How could you look at the scarred skin of a whale without wondering about the fearful threats it had seen off in the ocean? It took him a decade of gentle but repetitive encouragement before I came to realise he was right.
[Continues...]
The Night is a Starry Dome is included in The Last Boat to Samui, now available in bookshops in Thailand, and in Mist on the Jungle, available as a paperback and e-book from Amazon.
RSS Feed