Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
He walked around the bike, tinkered with it for a minute, and then stood back and replied
as though he were ordering a coffee, “One thousand euros.”
One thousand euros! I tried moving the conversation to my rudimentary Greek, but that
didn't help much either. Apparently, it would cost a thousand euros in any language. I ex-
plained my journey again, but Gianni just shrugged his shoulders and went inside. Well, so
much for Greek solidarity.
I continued to wheel my bike through the streets of Thessaloniki and realized that, in my
shock at Gianni's quote, I had forgotten to ask what was wrong with the bike!
More people started honking at me, and a few even started yelling again—my people
really love to yell. All I needed was to find that one person willing to help me out. In the
end, I found three. The first was an old Greek chap who helped push the bike out of the
road and onto the path of another mechanic, who became my second angel. Once I arrived
there, I met my third: an American woman who was getting her car fixed.
Spiro was a gentler mechanic than Gianni, listening to my explanation with compassion-
ate eyes. After I was finished, he smiled: “Let's me look.”
He knelt down and tinkered just as Gianni did, and finally stood back up. “Your plug
sparking are badness,” he explained.
“Can you fix them?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders, “I fixing cannot do fully for you.”
I asked him if he could fix it at all, and he said that he could do a patch-up job. A patch-
up job was fine by me, as long as it was a free patch-up job.
I walked out to where Anna, the American woman, was waiting for her car.
“Have you worked with this mechanic before?” I asked her, explaining my dilemma.
“Do you think he might do it for free?”
“He might,” she replied. “But let me ask him.”
Anna came back out of the shop with a big smile on her face. “He said to give him an
hour!”
Give him an hour! I would have given him a week!
As I waited for the bike, and Anna for her car, we began to talk about my journey.
Anna's parents were also from Greece, but she had been raised in America.Though she had
lived her whole life in Chicago, she felt that it was her parents' homeland that felt most like
home.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
