We went to the same Fish Taverna for lunch and had another feast, this time with cuttlefish in its own ink and strawberries drowned in cream.

Martin and Holly went off on rented bicycles, and Alice and Camilla and I walked. We found a temple to Dionysus, built around 300 BC, and made an offering of a mallow flower and a fig. The conversation, of course, turned to orgies and drunkeness. I said I was too old for such things (if I ever wanted them at all), but would like good sex and a sip of wine now and again. We wondered if, the more repressed a culture was, the more extreme its outlets become. Ancient Greece, in which the women were shut up at home all the time, had the Maenads. Modern Japan, in which all social interactions are ritualized, has the lolicon that we found so shocking when we visited. Finally, we realized that we would have to leave Dionysus in order to have a more seemly conversation, so we did.

One of the Greek Orthodox churches was open, so we went in and admired the many icons and wall paintings. Outside, olive trees, feral cats, and oranges, with the sweet sound of doves.

That morning, a gypsy woman and her daughter had come through begging, and in the afternoon, we found their temporary home, under one of the rubber trees that the Italians had planted after the devastating earthquake in 1933. The tree is at the base of a fortress built by the Hospitallers in the 1400's overlooking the harbor. We sat at an outdoor café sipping cloyingly horrible iced teas, chatting and looking at fishing boats.

Up the stairs from the harbor is a mosque dating from Ottoman Empire days, and the very tree that Hippocrates taught under. It was part of the Egyptian tradition mentioned by Imhotep, where, after a ritual, you sleep under the tree and report your dream to the physicians, who then know how you are to be healed.

Woke early. Martin had been sick in the night, and was still tottering about as we bustled around him. We clattered off to the train, then the bus, then the airport check-in in Bologna. 

RyanAir is a cheap people mover, cramming us into a teeny plane cheek by jowl and then selling bottles of water for 3 Euros en route. When we landed, there was the sound of trumpets.

Greece is luscious. We'd forgotten about vegetation! Italians are not all that impressed with stuff like trees and lawns, preferring cement and formality. But in Greece, the pastures were knee-deep, there were orchards everywhere, and it suddenly felt like home again. Geraniums, wisteria, olives, oranges, jacarandas, palms – all the plants of my childhood! I hadn't even known that I missed them until my heart leaped in joy at the Greek countryside. That sense of deep home alone paid for the trip.

Kos is a  tourist town, with lots of whitewashed buildings, bikini shops, bars, leather and jewelry shops, and the residents sprinkled in between. 

Our landlady told us that the best years of her life were spent in the USA, when she was ten through twenty, but then she met her stupid husband. When her son was born, she packed her stupid husband's suitcase and threw it out the door. The time for pushing women around is over, she told him. You talk and I listen, but then you have to listen to me, too. She paused. Her stupid husband is changing, she said, but slowly. He lives in Athens, which is a crazy place to live, lots of crime and unrest. Kos is better but the USA is the best.

We went to a fish restaurant where we were positively pampered by the proprietor. April 1 is the first day of the season, and we were his first foreign customers, he said. He recommended assorted fish plates, and so we had lightly breaded fried sardines (good except for the very strongly flavored head), chopped grilled octopus in olive oil, calamari in garlic sauce with fried potatoes, and boild nettles with lemon, salt, and olive oil. For dessert he gave us halva, which here is semolina cooked with sugar, cinnamon, and olive oil into a mouse-shaped cake.

We lingered to talk about personas. You have many parts of your brain which contribute to conflicting voices and impulses. When you shape a persona you are choosing which voice to give active expression to, and hence, slowly but concretely, shaping your character.

Someone suggested that a persona is a lie, but I think that it is a lie only in that you can't express everything simultaneously. You are not obligated to do a data dump every time somebody hangs out with you - in the narrowest sense, you are merely an artifact in other people's lives and they are not equipped to handle more than one fully realized brain at a time anyway. To make the social compact work you have to manage how you come across to people, which necessarily means you edit. In more intimate relationships you have time to reveal more, but there is not enough time in the world to ever reveal everything, not even to yourself. We are layered and infinitely varied.