I had a huge lunch yesterday (at Nikolas's Restaurant, which I highly recommend), and wasn't all that hungry when dinnertime rolled around, so I decided to stop at my favorite souvlaki place here, Lucky's Souvlaki (which I also highly recommend), to grab a quick gyro pita. By the way, I want to make a quick notation here that gyro is NOT pronounced "j - eye - row", as people say in the U.S. It's pronounced "year - oh". And a more delicious meal for 2 euro you'll never find. I just love them.
Well, anyway, I got my gyro, but it didn't end up being quick! I ended up hanging out at Lucky's for a couple of hours. I've stopped there a couple of times for a snack, so the staff recognizes me by now. Lucky, the owner (that's a nickname, and somehow it suits him), had brought a giant plastic water bottle filled with his homemade amber-colored wine, which he kept pouring for me (free, of course, and tasty). I'd intended to stop at one, but that proved to be quite impossible -- Lucky wouldn't hear of it. Then he insisted that I try some souvlaki meat that had just come off the grill, with just a sprinkle of fresh lemon juice, to go with it, along with a freshly grilled pita to go with it, and his homemade hot chili sauce. All great, and all free.
Lucky was also drinking his wine -- and dancing and singing and flirting outrageously with me and his other female customers -- as he grilled the beautiful souvlaki meat, and kept refilling the glasses of any customer who seemed to want wine. I left a couple hours later, slightly tipsy, and grinning from ear to ear. I took a few pictures of my friends at Lucky's, which I'll post when I get home. I'm thinking I'll head back there for lunch today, before I head for the airport. (I'm flying to Athens this afternoon, en route to Olympia.)
As I got ready for bed last night, I started thinking -- why is it that it was so delightful and fun to have Lucky and the guys in the souvlaki place flirt and ply me with free wine (and for that matter, the staff in many of the other restaurants and bars here in Greece -- the Greeks are very hospitable and it is very common to get a free drink and/or dessert), and yet so creepy when, for example, the hotel owner is doing it? What's the difference? I instinctively feel the difference when I see it, but what is it exactly?
I've decided that it comes down to this -- Lucky, while he was flirting and dancing and plying me with wine, was clearly not doing it just because he was figuring that I was likely to sleep with him. He was doing it because he was friendly and fun and hospitable. Perhaps (probably) I got some extra attention because I was a not-too-ugly woman, but he clearly wasn't doing it just to get some action later on. Also, I wasn't the only customer benefiting from his hospitality. He clearly has a large contingency of happy regular customers, and I don't wonder.
The hotel owner, on the other hand, was treating me entirely differently from his other customers (the Mississippi family got no free wine, for example, although they stayed in the hotel for three nights), and kept trying to corner me alone and ask me out to dinner. Also, he kept making generic remarks on the "openness" of American women -- and trust me, from the context it was clear that he wasn't talking about our honest and straightforward characters. (I said that I thought American men were quite "open", and he said "I am not gay. I don't care about the men." That's when I began to see what he was getting at . . . .) In other words, I felt that he was doing it only to get some extra action later on, which he rather seemed to expect as a quid pro quo for the wine and attention. And at the same time that this feeling made me very uncomfortable accepting the wine and attention (which I had no problem at all accepting from Lucky, for example), it also felt rude and difficult to decline it. (By the way, I forgot to mention that the first night, the hotel owner had recommended a place for me to go to dinner. Then he called the restaurant and told them to send me free drinks on him. That was a bit too much for me.)
By the way, I think the hotel owner finally got the idea yesterday that I wasn't going to sleep with him, and he no longer offers me free wine or even free coffee. He's still polite, of course, but the special attention has ended, for which I am grateful. I think I may have helped matters along by sending two very pretty young girls I met yesterday, who asked me if I knew a good and not too expensive place to stay on the caldera, to my hotel. Oh, don't condemn me! There are two of them, so they can play buffer for each other! It's only creepy when you're alone. When I got back to the hotel last night, the two girls were in his office drinking wine, and the owner looked as happy as a pig in clover. So now I think everyone is happy -- the girls get free wine, the owner is surrounded with pretty young girls, and I get left blessedly alone.
Soon it's time for lunch at Lucky's!
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