No Sleep Til Niki - not this time

We got up a bit late, enjoyed a quick breakfast and headed back to Athens. I collected my things and set off to Larissa Station to get a ticket north to Thessaloniki and then on to Skopje (Macedonia). I was too late for the morning train and would have to wait until midnight. So began the cascading travel modifications I’ve been making for the past week or so.

I used the opportunity to catch up with some of my new friends around the city. My first stop brought me to the awesome home of Kostas and Fotini. They recently started to rent a four story building which they are using to host workshops, classes and more. It’s quite incredible. From the wind turbine building shop in the basement, to the expansive hall for yoga classes, presentations, movies and more, the massage space, Fotini's herb space and tea room to rooftop soon-to-be-garden, it was an inspiring, evolving example of urban permaculture. We sat down and shared photos and thoughts over tea, and I used their sun drenched rooftop to finish drying my still damp (but now clean) clothes from a couple days before.

It was great catching up with Fotini and seeing what an amazing oasis they’ve begun to grow in Athens. We went our separate ways around 2pm, and I went to the city center to lunch and relax a bit before meeting with Kristos at the Saligari site.

At 6, Kristos and I connected outside the McDonald’s at Syntagma Square and headed over to the parking lot-turned-community park that a number of activists had taken over after it had been boarded up and cleared of some of the city’s oldest trees a year or so ago. The park was full of life - both plant and human, and it was very clear that it was an asset to the community. That said, it faces it’s own share of problems being located in what Fotini had deemed, ‘the asshole of Athens’. Kristos brought me by to show me the cob structure he had begun there.

He had returned from the workshop at Lefkada to find it had been vandalized - not exactly the most welcoming home coming. We talked about design ideas for the roof and finishing and were joined by Ilias and Rosa. After an hour or so there, we said our goodbyes and parted ways. Again, so good to know that there are bastions of light in a place full of so much decay.

With another four plus hours left before my train, I found a cafe, ordered a fancy coffee shake, enjoyed it in the fresh air under an umbrella, and finally made my way to the train station. I passed a few more hours there, boarded the train, found my seat and slept through till we arrived in Thessaloniki in the morning.

Nea Makri Pt. 2

Another slow morning as the kids were whisked off to school. We said quick goodbyes, and I then had the house to myself for a few hours. When Stamatina returned, we shared photos and reflections until she had to leave to pick them back up. I set out around 1:30 to meet with Nicos Anastasoupoulos in the center of Athens.

As I struck out in Athens for the first time since returning, I found it all a bit overwhelming. Having been nurtured by an enriching, sheltered community of kind, caring people for the previous week that felt like a month, it was a bit disheartening to return to the reality of megapolian life. Our little cob construction seemed like less than a blip on the enormous flat screen TV of modern global capitalistic society - but I clung to the recognition of the dendritic expansion of skills and good will that I know will result from our time together.

I forgot Nicos’ metro stop, guessed it wrong and had to make my way back around. We met and caught up over a sumptuous feast of tiny friend fish, tzatziki, french friends, salad, calamari, wine… He told me about the interesting challenges of his new unpaid post as the director of a national park in Nea Makri - home to an endangered species of pine - with a challenging set of reproductive needs. The cones and seeds are activated by fire, something human management tends to suppress. Thus, in its absence, the pines are failing to regenerate. So the question then becomes, how to maintain the population? It’s the classic conservation-mindset catch-22. When we start to manage ecosystems, taking them out of their natural reproductive ecology, we create considerable work for ourselves. It seemed to me that the problem is much greater - not so much just this one endangered forest, but the fact that now it’s up to us to ‘preserve’ this tiny fragment of a much more widely damaged regional ecology.

After a few hours, it was time for us to head to Nea Makri for my evening presentation on natural building, permaculture and our workshop the previous week. I caught some welcome sleep on the bus ride and our stop cam e a bit early for my liking. It was an interesting community space - great for events like ours. Stadium style (kids-size) seating, a bar, a stage… About twenty people showed up with about ten familiar workshop participant faces. The talk seemed very well received and we got some wonderful feedback from folks, learning a bit about some of the similar building buildings traditions from other parts of Greece.

Afterwards about ten of us went out for dinner and wine (a veritable feast) along the water’s edge. Great food, good conversation, friends and wine coalesced into a valuable exchange. I sat next to Dimitris Tsangis, who ironically enough, I had contacted a week earlier through a connection with the UK’s Permaculture Magazine because of his interest in finding a teacher to host a Permaculture Design Course in Greece. Very very small world.

Nicos and I got a ride back to his place in Nea Makri where we went to sleep around 1:30

Sit-Up Sleepin' - Monday, April 12

I woke up around four or so to friends gathered around telling me I’d been snoring - but on top of that, I’d actually fallen asleep ‘mid-sit-up’ - as in my hands held my head slightly elevated off the floor. Apparently it only lasted for a few minutes but perhaps it spoke both to m absolute exhaustion coupled with my deep desire to connect and engage with friends. I shifted to my bed to finish up the night in a bit more comfort.

Come morning I set to work cleaning up and organizing the site. The wind had again shifted from the south (it had been primarily northerly all week except for the second or third day of the workshop, when it came from the south). Gradually our extended ‘family’ arose and we tidied things up all around. It was a leisure-filled start to the day and I was reminded again that we were on Greek time.

We worked hard to make the incredible desserts (cherry cheesecake and banana crumble-something) disappear and by two or so, we were off. A few stayed behind on the island to explore and camp, but Alex, Stamatina, Hermes, Anna and I all made our way back to Athens.

I was exhausted and found myself fading in and out of consciousness. About half way, we stopped at a sweet little taverna for souvlaki and beer. It was a very nice break along the way. Across the street, next to the community spring, sat a few strawberry farmers, and I recalled my desire to buy some the week before on the way into Lefkada. I picked up 3 kg for 5 Euros and we were back off.

Alex made relatively short work of the rest of the trip. I’ve grown much more comfortable with his driving and our occasional stints of 180 km/h. We arrived in Athens just as the sun began to go down. We all retreated into our own spaces to relax, reconnect and resume our recently forgotten personal lives. I spent hours catching up on the e-mail backlog now nearly two weeks old. I was sound asleep sometime between three and four am.

The Workshop

Details to come...

Monday April 5th - the day before (the workshop)

Another gorgeous day. It started off at a reasonable hour and I basically got right at it foundationing. I got a couple of mixes ready to go, started laying out stone and then met up with Alex for our morning cup of coffee. As I write this, I'm sad to think that this was likely our last ritual for the foreseeable future.

We got right into it, Alex filling in the spaces between stones with me following behind, setting the second course in mortar. I had to let things get a little sloppy but there was time for little else. I had hoped to get into town to get on-line and upload some of these blogs posts but I didn't have any time for that of course. Not much to say really except that we went on with the foundation pretty full on for the next three hours or so, taking our breakfast break around 11:30. It was hard to believe the day was passing that quickly.

Alex had remarked at a change in the weather, highlighting the fact that it was pretty unlikely to see 10 straight sunny days this time of year (the past four had been gorgeous - we had six more to go before the workshop is over). I told him not to jinx us but as the day moved on, the northerly/easterly breeze and on-coming clouds seemed to indicate that our luck might soon be running out. I couldn't help but feel a bit of desperation as we strove to finish the lagging foundation (well, it wasn't exactly lagging, it just seemed to keep growing).

Most of the rest of the day was/is a blur. We stopped for an excellent lunch around 3:30 or so I think and that's when the first carload of folks arrived. Five Athenians - Teo, Maria, Maria, Kostas and Fotini. It was reliving to see things starting to come together. We talked a bit about the building and then set to cleaning up, moving all the existing stone off to the side of the site and roughly grading (removing the rubble) from some of our prime building sites.

Before I knew it, we had a full on crew - I'm still not sure how many people are here. It's hard to tell but the number must be well over 20 at this point. They all seem great and I can feel it's going to be a great week. I bounced from conversation to conversation after our evening meal and through tea and felt like an absolute outsider being one of the only ones not smoking (not really, but I did notice that I seemed to be the only non-smoker here.)

I should be in bed so I think I'm going to get there. Looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings.

Sunday April 4th - Wallin Lefkada Style

I heard the alarm go off for another hour or so with so many snoozes that I kept thinking it must've been me, but it wasn't (I've been pretty alarm free for the past week). I got some ridiculous song stuck in my head - I'd rather not try to recall it (or even ask how it got there) for fear of reviving it. This morning it was a bit earlier than the past few - 8:30 or so which seemed pretty reasonable. Alex was up and had made some Greek coffee for us which I have been grateful to receive each morning though I can't help but pine for a big ass 20 oz cup of it, followed by a refill or two. Ugly American? Ok, fine!

The weather was beautiful; moderately warm with blue skies all around. We started off moving wall building stone from the pile in the driveway to the building site, strewing it all around so we'd have some choices once we started building. I wanted to catch up on some internet stuff I'd left unfinished from the night before, so I wrote a message to some of my friends an colleagues back home trying to remotely help plan our Burlington Permaculture Fruit Tree Giveaway (good thing this is a 'working' vacation) and then putting together a tree order for one of my clients and trying to figure out how to send it to the company electronically. Things took a bit longer on the internet than I'd anticipated - big surprise - and before I knew it, it was 10:30.

Alex and I kept moving stone and not too long thereafter, I began placing it, roughly laying out our building's perimeter walls. It was exciting to start to see the building grow, but it grew a bit daunting as I began to see how much more work we had to prepare. Alex graciously offered to continue to lug stone over while I set to setting out the stones. Trying to balance aesthetics with practicality and speed was a challenge as I couldn't help but feel well behind things and a bit stressed by the fact that the workshop started in less than 48 hours. Much of the day is a blur at this point so I'll spare you the details.

I basically did my best to lay out the first course of the foundation - about 50 cm wide (18 or so inches) and as high as I could make this first course - 12" or so. I tried to vary up the stones every so often to create visual interest, use the one appropriate hammer to do a bit of shaping so they'd fit better, use the nicest stones on the south, west and east exterior walls with the ugliest ones on the north and do it all as quickly as I could while still feeling half decent about myself. It's some type of local limestone which I found really interesting to use - it had a pretty blocky form and broke fairly irregularly with the hammer - pretty similar to the Panton stone I've worked with back home. I did enjoy the occasional fossilized shell and other ancient relics embedded in it.

It got pretty hot today and I think the sun started to get to me at one point. I made the first test brick using the silty clay that we have access to here and then encouraged Alex and Stamatina to do some more. We tried 1:1, 1:2, 1:2.5 and 1:3 (clay to sand) and while we don't have any dry bricks yet to check, I believe we have an effective winner - 1:2.5. Seeing as how the clay is our most inaccessible material, this ratio works great as it'll stretch the clay that we do collect and bring back. Thankfully Alex spent several hours in the afternoon loading up the back of their family wagon with clay he harvested from the old local source in the village - a place people used to go to get clay for their ovens and which they actually call 'clay'. We've been talking about actually using daily or so trips to the clay source as an educational tool during the course, bringing students to the site and collecting it with them so as to optimize the use of our time prepping the foundation.

Once I'd gotten the entire base of the wall roughly set, I started mixing some mortar and doing my best to play wet stone mason. Equipped with some beautiful lime putty from the local building supply, our mix was 1:cement, 1:lime, 6:sand. We made do with a partially broken plastic trough for a mixing rig and a hoe of some sort to mix with. About 3 liters of water seemed to create a perfect consistency.

I then set about resetting each stone I'd laid out, leveling it and setting it well in the gravel base (to economize on mortar, I chose to set the stones in the gravel bed, rather than mortar them in. Gravity seems to be a plenty strong force to keep them from moving - especially considering there'll be several tons worth of cob on top.) I felt like I was re-inventing the mortar wheel and after watching progress move incredibly slowly, I started to feel defeated, with 13 more lineal meters left to go in the first course. Stamatina must've detected this and asked if I'd like some fresh squeezed orange juice - like she squeezed it. Well, I bet you can guess what the answer was.

This definitely helped but I still wasn't going to get much done at this pace. So I set Stamatina up with mortar while I mixed up another batch and proceeded to move ahead of her, setting each stone along the way, making sure it was 'level'(ish) and stable before she reached it. It was really the first time so far that we'd had a chance to work and talk and it was very relaxing and enjoyable. I'm really glad we had a chance to do that. She'd been spending the earlier part of the afternoon burning up some of the remaining brush around the site and roasting the lamb for our eastern celebration. When Alex returned from his first clay trip, we broke for lunch and enjoyed a veritable mini feast with juicy lamb (Stamatina - a staunch vegetarian even eats it for the easter celebration), and other goodies - I've since forgotten - but it was really good and it dramatically improved my attitude.

After that meal and a bit of strategizing about tomorrow (students should be arriving in the afternoon), we set back to work and proceeded to continue with mortaring and stone setting until the light no longer enabled me to read the bubble in the level. We did well (or at least the best we could). Equipped with clay and most all of the materials we should need for the workshop, tomorrow we'll be putting the finishing touches on the foundation stemwall with Alex and Stamatina laying mortar while I start to fill in the second course. We're definitely taking it down to the wire and I'll be so excited if I have a few hours of 'doneness' before the students start to arrive. It's been pretty full on ever since I've been here.

I headed straight in for a shower and while I chose not to use my salty seawater soaked loongi towel from yesterday's trip to the beach, the drip dry wasn't all that unfulfilling. I devoured some leftovers and wine, talked a bit about work, determination, dreams and burnout and then I set to trying to catch up with all the blogging that I've fallen behind on so far this trip. I've got a few minutes planned with my racquetball (shoulder massage) and then it's time for bed. One more day of prep. The four day foundation!!

Catch up or give up?

So I've fallen so dearly behind on my blogging and don't have the real time to catch up I've come to realize. I'm in Macedonia at present and really want to be present and not on a computer. What I had/have done is written down bullet point recollections of my days in England and early days in Greece with the hopes of properly fleshing them out when I have time. Well, that might never happen so I'm just gonna get em up and see.

Here goes!

Monday the 29th - Prickly Nut Wood, UK

Back in the coppice

Start with Splitting Firewood

Move to snedding/brash fires with the guys

Lunch

More of the same

Head to Lickfold to make flight reservation to Athens - pricey but straightforward

Back for dinner with Ben and Bea

Night

Tuesday the 30th

Day in the copse

Run a GPS area calculation on the cant - 3.3 acres

Snedding along the edge while Kris fells and crosscuts

No Ben till late

Making progress in the woods slowly but surely

Rainy for quite a bit

Ben comes by late and we sned together and reminisce

Call it a day

Run to the brewery in town (run by Ben's friends) - say hi to James and try out the Flor'Ale

Beautiful light and a nice short drive

Back home for a quick meal

To the pub - Lickfold to confirm my passport for my flight

The place is dead - and so is the beer

We switch to bottles

Head home and Ben and I scheme till 1-2.

Wednesday the 31st - UK/Greece

Pack and shower

Goodbyes to Kris and Nick

Ben and I set off for Haselmere

Stopped to see in-cycle hazel coppice - 3 years old

Goodbyes

Got on train - cutting it close - 11:40 for 12:40 flight

Transfer in Guildford

Transfer in Red Hill

Arrive at Gatwick

Chaos at Easy Jet

Long ass line - skip to front

Security, then no gate number

Rush to gate - plane leaves late

Typing up Maria's report and lease proposal

Flight to Athens

aisle seat, No views - caught a glimpse of the Alps

Arrive and all is good

Money, ticket, wrong train right

Back to Agios Dimitrios - got a crepe and juice

Hopped on bus but got off a mile too soon

Walked back and enjoyed the groundcover and green

Scent of jasmine before the last turn

Catch up with Yianni

Watch Ben Hur as I take care of e-mails and chat

Up late late - finishing lease proposal, e-mails, Maria's report

Night at 3:45am

Thursday April 1st - Athens - Lefkada

Slept on in til 10

Finish up some nettin (that's internettin)

Yianni drove me to bus stop

Bus to Station

Bus full - gotta wait till later

Lunch - souvlaki - 1.60 Euro - then frosticcino mocha

No go on 1pm bus

Got on 1:30

Reading Natural Farmer - nutrient dense food production. Great stuff!

Bus trip - sleepy meander with lots of traffice

Gorgeous sun and warm weather across Peloponese

Stop at snack shack for mystery pastry & chocolate bar

finish maria's report

Arrive in Lefkada at 7:30

Got picked up

Food shopping

Back to house

Materials and project update

Dinner and catch up

Bed

Friday April 2 - Lefkada

No foundation!! Yet

Start digging

Keep digging

Coffee, food

Materials and tools run - very interesting to see the way things are done there. Everything will close for the eastern weekend so we gotta get it done

More digging - boy do I love digging

Dinner/wine

Catch up

Saturday April 3rd - Lefkada

Beautiful morning

Greek Coffee and Strategy with Alex

Start filling trench

Drill Pipe

Lay out drain pipe

Line Trench with fabric

Backfill pipe and tamp around

Fill trench completely

Lunch

Finish filling

Quality time at the Beach/ It's Spring

Dinner

Movie - Polar Express

Easter Night at the monastery up the mountainside - very interesting ceremony - passing/sharing the candle flame that traveled there all the way from Jerusalem

Pretty

Candle

Egg Breaking - egg eating

Warm Milk with Honey