The Sounds of Greece

In many tourist shops in Plaka, visitors can buy "The Sounds of Greece," a CD that bounces with bouzouki music or moans with blues-like rembetika. A CD of sounds heard on any day in my Greek village would be very different.

My CD would start with a symphony of chirping, birds welcoming the new day at 5:30 in the morning. I'm a light sleeper and always wake up to check the clock. As I try to go back to sleep, I hear the goat sound.  While I know that sheep, not goats, "baa", it is baaing that comes out of the goat living in the garden below my house.

Dog sounds -- yelping and barking -- echo through my village some of the day and much of the night. These are dogs tied up near chicken coops to scare away the foxes. I find it sad that some dogs live their lives this way, but Greek villagers don't seem to be willing or able to come up with another way to protect their chickens.

July and August bring a wheezing, buzzing sound in the afternoon -- the crickets who only stop their cacaphony when the sun goes down.

Another daily, but intermittent, animal sound is men chatting in one of the two cafeneions just above my house. These two competing cafeneions attract different regular clienteles. Fortunately, they sell enough coffee, beer and retsina to both stay in business. Cafeneion sounds are loudest around 10  a.m. over morning coffee and after lunch and a nap, say, from 6 to 9 p.m. The only thing that bothers me about cafeneion sounds is that none of them are female. Local women do not sit in cafeneions, although a few foreign women do. Since there is no other diversion in our village, foreigners tend to drink a lot. While I have never seen anyone drunk, I'm sure many foreigners are developing cases of cirrhosis.

On Fridays and Saturdays, I usually hear Greek sounds that resemble tourist CDs -- taped bouzouki music playing at the three tavernas just below the village. The music reminds me it's the weekend and it always stops around midnight. It provides a sort of Aegean lullaby when I'm in bed early.

The one village sound I dislike is the loudspeaker on the trucks that deliver food and goods to the village. The sound is exceptionally loud, but then we have many old, deaf pensioners in the village. While I try to ignore the sound, I hear myself listening for shouts of "carrots," "sardines," and "cherries."  Occasionally, I buy something and save a trip down the hill to the supermarket. I guess that makes the jarring vendor's microphone worth it.

I'm embarrassed to tell overnight visitors coming to visit me in the village to bring ear plugs, but for the summer I have stocked a good supply of plugs for them and me.