Kalymnos

Hello!

Now I’m sitting on the patio outside the apartment we rented in Kalymnos absorbing the nutrients in the salad and drinking cheap Greek beer.  One of the skinny white stray cats that lives around here is walking around but won’t let me pet him.

A couple weeks ago I spent a day seeing the tourist sites in Athens that I was excited about and the for the past week or two Naomi and I have alternated climbing with volunteering at Piraeus Port in Athens where there are camps of refugees.  I’ve written much about that and I want to write more, and I’ll share it when it’s ready.  It’s a lot for me to experience and consider and process emotionally (and how it will affect me practically), and that’s why I haven’t been writing much on here lately.

So it seems like we have had a really full, multi-faceted trip, which I’m grateful for, and which raises some questions for me.

(Even writing about questions as trivial as how I want my future climbing to look makes me anxious and impatient to answer more pressing questions like how can we change the world and do I or does anyone else even matter; can any of us make this a better place?)

My day today consisted of my own tiny amount of paradise.  We woke up late, walked to the crag, it was really freaking hot but it’s fine and we’re happy to tolerate it, we climbed a few hard routes on some of the fantastic and amazing tufas Kalymnos is known  for (fuck yeah! Woo!), realized that we weren’t tolerating the heat and humidity as well as we thought, found free drinkable water (the tap water is super salinated), took our gear back to the apartment, dealt with some stuff we had to deal with, walked to the beach in our swimsuits with open beers because we do whatever the fuck we want, swam, drew, thought about stuff, came back to the apartment, and had salad and another beer.  So, that’s rad right?  There are even cats.  (There is a lot of tourist souvenirs that are cat oriented in Kalymnos, which… duh.  And thanks.)  (Oh goodness.  Speaking of cats, there are three cats on this terrace witg me, and they are all playing a game where they kill/catch and walk around with cockroaches in their mouths.  They are 100% little angels.  It’s really funny to watch.)

I mean, the next few days are going to be very different from what we’ve been doing: spending a lot of time experiencing a different culture and finding a cause we cared about to work for and sharing our time between all those things.  And this is different than the other climbing trips I’ve been on, which were camping based and during which not much else occupied me at all.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Naomi always has goals, like trip goals and daily goals and route goals, and I don’t.  I don’t usually like to come with expectations or specific hopes, especially with climbing since that hasn’t worked well in the past.  I’m wondering if I want to be more goal oriented as a climber or traveler.  I don’t really have life goals either.

So this is the shit I’m thinking about, finishing my beer, watching the moon pass through the sky as cats play with cockroaches as if they were toys on our shared patio.  Seems to me like there aren’t really answers because those weren’t really questions, and I’m not about to put value judgements on everything with “should I…?” questions.  I’m gonna sleep hard and climb hard tomorrow and maybe write about it.

Peace

Jenn