Finally, the last part of our Greek adventure! On Easter morning last Sunday, April 20, we arose bright and early to head to the Greek island of Corfu --
But hold on, before I get ahead of myself. First, some background. Why Corfu? And what would we be doing there, after a trip through the other islands and other parts of Greece? The idea for a trip to this island first arose in late January or early February, when one of the other Rhodes scholars from my year sent out a group email -- it was her birthday the week of April 20, she said, and also the last week of our spring break. Thus, she would love nothing more than to have a laid-back week of hanging out near a beach in Greece to celebrate. Would anyone care to join her? I took some time to think about it, then decided to combine the Corfu vacation with the other trip Emily and I were planning to Greece. Wrapping up a busy trip and busy break with a few days of downtime sounded good to me.
Around eighteen people signed up to go to Corfu, and the other Rachel planning the trip found a villa on the northernmost part of the island that we could all stay in for an unbelievably cheap rate. It had a pool, and was a short walk from the beach and the Greek town of Kassiopi -- what more could we want for a laid-back week? Most of the others coming to Corfu were traveling straight from the UK, and straight back, but since I'd met up with my two friends in Athens we had decided to go there from the mainland via a bus. The only problems were: 1) the bus was scheduled to take a very long time, like 8 or 9 hours on twisty Greek roads, 2) we were not quite sure how to get up to the villa from the main bus station in Corfu Town, 3) the bus schedule and bus info was very sketchy online, as indeed many Greek local travel schedules are, and 4) it was Easter Sunday. At the last minute we decided to book a short flight from Athens to Corfu instead. I'm glad we did -- we ended up arriving at the villa before everyone else, all of whom had left Oxford at 2:30am that day to get to Corfu!
Back to our story. Corfu, more than anything else, was a great week to get even more pleasure reading done while spending time with friends. No one had much of an agenda after a busy break of either traveling or working on research and exam studying in Oxford, and we took the time to sit by the pool, read, and hang out for several consecutive days. And cook dinners together as a group in the villa, or walk into town to try the different Greek restaurants there by the harbor. And go for walks and go to the beach and do more hanging out and more reading. I read almost three books in the time I was in Corfu, and slept a lot and ate a lot besides. It was like the "veg-out mode" portion of my break that I usually get at home on my leather couch with my dogs, and in that way it was wonderful. The Corfu group was rather large, meaning that I faced the task of going from a fun far-ranging trip with a single friend to the chaos and hubbub of trying to understand a big assortment of people, but I managed okay most of the time. (I am still not sure I will be going on a large group trip again in the near future, though, after being on two in the last six months alone! Everyone was great fun and great company both times, but groups are not my thing.)
The weather was iffy during the week we were there, seeing as Corfu is the greenest island in Greece, covered in olive trees and other lush plants -- which means that it gets a lot of rain to maintain its flora. We did get some nice afternoons of sun, though, and I came back to Oxford to friends telling me, "Wow, you got tan!" (Yes, I have become very pasty whilst in the UK.) The terrain on Corfu was very different from Mykonos or Santorini, and had many more rolling hills covered with greenery, as well as many spectacular beaches laced with green trees and white rocks and Mediterranean blue. It was incredibly beautiful; just look at the photo below. Across the sea from Corfu was the southern coast of Albania, which most of the other people in the group decided to visit via boat on Thursday. (I decided not to, because of the cost of the trip and because I had already been to Albania earlier this break -- anyhow, the day dawned cold and rainy and nasty, so while sitting inside the villa with my books I wasn't too sad about my decision.)
On Friday, our last day on the island, we took a boat trip down the coast of Corfu. Someone arranged to rent a boat for all of us, and the driver brought food and drinks along for the day. We got to see the towns scattered alongside the island for an hour or two, while sailing through the clear waters, and then we turned around and navigated to a cliffside cave. There, a bunch of people opted to jump off the boat into the water and swim and go into the cave and cannonball off of high cliff rocks. I decided not to: cold water, taking off my cochlear implant and being amongst that group without it, possibly losing my contact lenses in the process, being cold the rest of the day in cloudy and windy conditions? No thanks. I got to serve the role of official boat photographer, though. Afterwards (a time in which the people who had swum were, indeed, very cold), we sailed to a secluded beach, where we went ashore and had a BBQ lunch, then sat out on the beach the entire afternoon. That night, thoroughly tired out by our day in the sun and sea, I crawled into bed straight after dinner to pass out before our flight back to Oxford the next morning.
Thus concluded my trip to Greece -- with some good old-fashioned beach reads and conversations with friends. And the books I read this break, you ask? Here they are: the end of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I started back in Oxford; Kate Atkinson's Life After Life; Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, which many friends had been telling me about; and the first part of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which I am still finishing. Lots of books there I had been meaning to read for a while! All in all, the trip was a fantastic holiday and time to think, breathe, read, explore, see monuments and world-renown sites I had wanted to visit for years, soak in many Mediterranean sunsets, and enjoy the company of people I'm very fortunate to know. I'm already feeling nostalgic. The next few weeks will keep me in the UK as the Oxford term gets underway, so onward to my dissertation-writing and the rest of the academic year!
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