Fond Memories.

When I was younger, my family travelled a lot.
In Holland it's considered nothing out of the ordinary to have a holiday somewhere in the Mediterranean area, France, or any other Western European country during the summer vacation. The Dutch culture tends to have a very strong mentality of 'getting away' from the crowded cities, and flocking en masse towards less crowded cities in order to fill them up again. Once a year there would be a mass exodus; an event which I have coined The Dutchaspora.
Think of it as a Diaspora with clogs.

My personal Dutchaspora journeys have taken me to some wonderful places, including Portugal, Germany, France, England, and Scotland, but one country in particular left a very memorable impression on me. Greece.
We stayed on the island of Corfu, in a hotel filled with like-minded tourists. I have never been an extremely social person, but as a young boy I suffered from a crippling disease known in English as shyness. I like to think that changed a little, if only slightly, on that holiday.

This was quite a long time ago, but I still remember a lot of the finer details very well. The beach was great, even though I was apprehensive at first about swimming in the open sea. My mother had a rather unfortunate encounter with something quite similar to this when she waded out into the water.
This, of course, meant that I desperately tried to remain afloat without ever touching the ground when I was out at sea. Throughout my three-week stay, locals reported several sightings of a small mammal-like creature flailing around madly, and shiftily looking down into the clear water in search of predators.
(The worst predator I saw during the course of the holiday was a man with a ponytail who charged me around $20 NZD for a poorly manufactured Inter Milan jersey.)

In the short time that I stayed in Greece, I had made three very good friends.
There was another Dutch family staying in the same hotel as us, who had a son who was a few months older than me. Knowing that I had someone my age to talk to in Dutch was reasurring, especially since we shared one common hobby:
Defending ourselves from flying ants.
While I am not an expert on the finer points of ant life, I do know that in certain species the males grow wings at a certain time of year in order to help fulfill some kind of colony-oriented goal. To two young boys with water pistols, they served only as moving targets. We had the time of our lives, triumphantly declaring victory every time we incapacitated an ant (who was always either an alien invader or a Nazi Messerschmidt aircraft) for a period greater than two seconds.
We never spoke again.

The second friend I made was Vasili, a Greek man who owned a taverna on the beach.
He was extremely interested in Native American culture, and wore a necklace which depicted an Indian Chief. He reminded me a lot of a character in an unwritten book, and was one of the kindest people I can remember meeting.
One thing that my father said later still stays with me:
He was a great human being, but not a businessman.
Vasili would give guests free food, drinks, and he spent more money on keeping his tavern than he earned. I didn't speak a lot of English, and I'm unsure of how much he spoke, but on my last day in Greece I gave him a Lego figure of an indian chief.
He gave me his necklace.

On that same day, I woke up early to spend my last Greek coins. My parents were still asleep, so I walked down the road towards the local shop.
I wanted to buy them something nice, and decided to buy two bottles shaped like a cannon and a female Greek wearing traditional garments.
I also bought a loaf of bread.
The shopkeeper stared at me when I proudly put these items on the counter, and I thought I must have looked at him in some strange way, because he appeared to be on the verge of laughter. I was not sure whether I should have felt proud or embarrassed. Now I realise why he had looked at me the way he did - the two bottles contained extremely strong alcohol known as Ouzo. I had bought enough booze to kill a small elephant.

One thing I have learned from my time in Greece is that memories are some of the most amazing things that us humans are capable of having. Oscar Wilde once despondently referred to his experiences as 'no more than a memory', but I ask: what do we ultimately have, besides memories?
I've lost Vasili's necklace, and I've long forgotten the name of my brother-in-arms, but years after all of this happened I am still moved by all of these encounters.
Sometimes a small memory can be as effective as a lifetime in bringing back feelings, and I consider myself very lucky to have so many of them.
I would go back to Corfu if I had the opportunity to do so, but I am not sure if I ever will.