Kristin Tsalapatani — A Letter from Australia

Manoli, yiassou,

 How are you and how is the family? If you're back from diving now, how was the season? Hope everyone got back safely and you all got paid well by those bastard merchants for your hard work.

 I'm ok down here, got a good job as a builder. Making good money to send back to the family up there. Living in a nice clean little place — it's a boarding house with four other men in it. So I don't have to clean and cook. The landlady does that. She feeds us during the week — pretty boring food though!

Problem is there's nowhere much to spend our free time. Of course we can go to the beach on Sundays but it's usually packed full of people. They have what they call "pubs" here - drinking holes. But they're not so nice, just a place to get drunk in. No retsina here, not even wine, so it's beer. Just beer, beer, beer. The men drink fast because the pubs close at 6. Can you imagine? So they get drunk pretty quickly as there's no food either. Just beer. The walls are tiled, even on the outside on the street so they can be hosed down after a drunken night.

 There's no place to sit around with some mezes. No place to sing and dance. No place to sit and play backgammon — they don't even know what it is here! No place to sit and chat and watch the world go by.

On Kalymnos, men can sit and watch the world go by… with a coffee, a cigarette, a walking stick, a sponge and a moped: all the necessary equipment for life.

It's a sad life. There is no life here. Just jobs to make money and getting drunk on Friday and Saturday nights at these pubs. The restaurants served food at 6 so if you stay at the pub until it closes you miss out. You can maybe find a meat pie or fish and chips at places called "milk bars", though they don't sell milk. They wrap your food in sheets of newspaper and you find a park bench and eat it there.

 So if you've had a good season and made some money up there on the island, I'd forget about coming down to Australia. So far away and no life. Just money.

 Greetings to all the guys,

Iannis