In Purgatory Everyone Likes Crepes: My Time at a Greek All-Inclusive
I can’t remember the last time I was actually hot. It’s a thought that keeps looping through my head as I stand next to a children’s play structure in a Greek all-inclusive waterpark. The sun is beating down on an international community of mostly parents drinking watered-down cocktails out of plastic cups while their children scream and run in circles. Surrounding this little paddock of plastic is a lazy river, filled with mothers and fathers staring blankly into the middle distance as they slowly orbit the water toys. It’s all concrete and aggressively bright primary colors, suffused with the smell of gyros being cooked by a Filipino staff behind me. Living in Denmark, it’s rare for the sun to shine directly on you. Typically, everything outside looks like it has a blue filter placed over the lens—like how TV shows put a yellow filter over the camera to establish that you are now in Mexico. Sometimes in Copenhagen you might get hot, but then it will immediately start to hail on you, and you suddenly have a different, worse problem. Greece, by contrast, feels like the sun is noticeably closer to the earth. It feels personal, like a heat lamp pressed against your skull. My daughter has been playing peek-a-boo with a cute baby on a bench next to this water playset for long enough that I feel a moral obligation to go over and say hi to the mom. She’s a nice woman, watching four kids at a waterpark alone with a casual calm I actively envy. I’m a little stressed keeping eyes on just one, but she has four kids ranging from around ten to two, running around and disappearing beneath the waves, only to emerge just before I would panic. She has a small sunburn on the small of her back that I assume she either can’t reach or forgot—a small, raw triangle of red. We chat briefly. She asks where I live; I ask the same. I’m surprised when she answers Russia, mostly because I don’t get much exposure to Russians in Denmark. I clearly make a face without meaning to, because she quickly adds, "Their father is off fighting in the war." Ironically, I think she added this to head off me judging her as a single mother. Instead, revealing the father is a Russian soldier has made the part of my brain that regulates politeness completely short-circuit. What is the social etiquette for the wife and children of a military power you don’t support? I’ve never even considered this question, standing here in my swim trunks, my too-pale stomach exposed to a hostile world. I don’t want her children to be orphans, obviously. Neither she nor they did anything to start this conflict. But I’m worried that expressing vague positivity will end like my conversation with an Israeli in Copenhagen who took my neutral statement, "I hope the conflict ends soon," and responded with a wink and, "It will, with Trump at the helm." "I hope he comes home soon," I say, keeping my face perfectly neutral. She nods and resumes throwing a ball around with her children. She seems completely unaffected by thinking about her husband, which I think is actually the strange magic of the all-inclusive resort. It is a geopolitical anesthesia. The world is burning down, but here, the ice cream machine is still running. On most topics, I don’t consider myself a snob. I enjoy a Michelin-star restaurant, and I enjoy a nice slice of 7-Eleven pizza at 2 AM. I'll finish a thick, sad Classic of Literature and then immediately pick up Space Marines vs. The Metal Skeleton Wizard on the Moon . But on travel, I’ve always looked down on the all-inclusive crowd. Sitting one rung above a Carnival Cruise on the ladder of human decay, the all-inclusive always seemed like the most cynical way to say you had legally stepped foot in another country. My first real exposure to this was in Puerto Rico. I would leave my bespoke 20-room boutique hotel and scoff at the barbed-wire fence surrounding the American mega-resort down the road. "Why would you fly to the Caribbean to eat at a steakhouse?" I’d say, dripping with scorn to my wife, who would nod as we walked through dark neighborhoods on our way to eat dinner in someone’s actual living room that Google Maps called a restaurant. As I traveled the world, I saw these giant compounds everywhere. I swore I’d never become one of those placid, sunburned people wandering around a sculpted grass lawn, slightly buzzed at 11 AM. So imagine my surprise when I found myself finishing my second tequila sunrise before lunch, staring at a too-blue pool. The resort’s "activity crew" was out on Crepe Island—so named because it had a full crepe station on an island in the middle of the pool. "Really, it's a crepe peninsula," I say to nobody. Nobody cares. They are aggressively not paying attention to anyone else. This is not a community. A line of unlicensed, Disney-and-Nintendo-adjacent costumes are paraded out, with "Merio" closest to me. Kids kept trying to give Merio a high-five. I don't know if it was the suit or if the guy inside was just sick of his job, but he kept waiting too long to high-five the kids back, inevitably wacking them in the face or the back of the head as they moved on. Over and over, an excited child would run up, followed by a bizarre, lagging delay before the inflated hand would strike. "At some point, that's just hitting kids," I said to the ether. The woman next to me put her AirPods back in. My wife had booked this trip as a reward to our daughter. Having been a remarkably good sport as we dragged her to such famously child-friendly vacations like "A Sheer Cliff Overlooking Icebergs in Greenland" and "Endless Climbing Up and Down Stairs in Florence," we wanted to give her a chance to just be a kid. When we asked her what her favorite vacation was, she responded with zero hesitation. "Lalandia," she’d say, before resuming coloring in her coloring books with so much force you could see the head of the marker get pushed back inside the plastic casing. Since Lalandia is effectively a massive, indoor all-inclusive in Denmark, we figured the same concept in Greece would at least be a warm alternative. We boarded a chartered flight direct to Greece, my first time on a flight where everything was delivered in Danish. I felt like a spy hiding among the locals, fearful they'd discover the American among them. Safe from prying eyes, I was pleased to watch the Danes engage in behaviors they usually made fun of us for. Loud conversations were had, crunchy snacks were aggressively unwrapped, and general uncouth behavior typically shunned was suddenly fair game at 30,000 feet. Upon landing, the tour coordinator told my wife and me that we had to "run" to make our bus. My wife took off for the toilet; I grabbed the kid and the big suitcase and sprinted for the van. We then sat in the van waiting to take off for over an hour. What I hadn't realized in my heroic rush to the van was that I had left a small carry-on sitting in the middle of the airport. It was filled with snacks, coloring books, and also my wife’s wallet and passport. The first night at our all-inclusive was understandably tense. Variations on the word "idiot" were thrown around. The next day, we got the good news that the bag was safe and sound at the airport police station on the island of Kos. So while my family went off to the pool, I went to the lobby and called a cab. My driver arrived 30 minutes later and immediately asked, "Is it ok if you sit up front so we also take these beautiful people downtown?" The Scottish woman in the back blushed at this. I, lacking the social architecture to recognize warmth, simply thought: Wow, bold move saying that in front of her husband. I got into the passenger seat. This, as I realized later, totally broke down the driver-passenger social construct. After dropping the charming Scottish couple off in the downtown area, my driver started telling me literally everything about his life. For the next forty minutes, I learned how his brother had been a firefighter, then one day went on vacation to Vietnam, fell in love with a Vietnamese woman, and opened the only authentic Greek gyro restaurant in Hanoi. He had a booming, theatrical laugh and was poured into a skin-tight polo shirt. "Why are you going to pick up this suitcase your wife lost? DO WE EVEN NEED TO ASK?? HAHAHA! WOMEN!" Then he’d get deadly serious and remind me, "Children, they're the most important thing." I had spoken maybe six words at this point in the trip. I forced a laugh, silently calculating the statistical probability of being murdered and buried in a Greek olive grove. It would be a beautiful place to die, though I worried they’d use a photo of me from this trip—pale, squinting in a baseball cap—for the Netflix documentary thumbnail. Some true crime podcast would inevitably conclude I had it coming. At one point, he pulled the cab over to show me a flat patch of grass. "This is where I saved the island from a wildfire," he said proudly. I couldn't see any sign of fire; it just looked like a normal field with the grass crushed. I didn't say anything, as up to this point, the conversation had been delightfully one-sided. I had mostly sat sweating through my shirt, nodding. He told me how someone had thrown a cigarette out of their car, and it had started to smolder. He had stopped and used his legally required fire extinguisher to put it out. "It's good that I had this," he said, patting the dash. "This is why a robot can never replace taxi drivers." He then stared at me as if I were an assassin sent from Silicon Valley. "You betcha," I said, sweating. I wanted to assure him I wasn't there to replace him with an app. My amoral peers back home were already working on it, but I personally wouldn't kill his livelihood. Just people who looked and sounded exactly like me. I kept poking around silently instead, but then he caught me looking at the giant bulldozer sitting twenty meters away, its tracks leading directly to the field. I'm a genius like that. "Yeah, alright, also the bulldozer helped a bit to put the fire out. But mostly, it was my fire extinguisher." The bulldozer was merely an accessory after the fact. He then changed the subject by telling me that Tom Hanks had sat in his taxi "right where you are sitting." "Did you know Tom Hanks loves Greece and we love him? He is such a friend of Greece that we gave him a passport." Is Tom Hanks Greek? I thought, staring out the window. Why are there so many interior decoration stores? Is everyone on this island redoing their bathroom? "Tom is so nice, we love him." My brain returned absolutely no information about Tom Hanks, which frankly is typical of my mind. He clearly wanted me to respond with a Tom Hanks factoid, but all I could think to say was, "Yeah, his son was really good in Fargo ." "HIS SON? Who is talking about his son?" He took the conversation back over, explaining how Tom Hanks’s wife had sat in the back of the cab while Tom sat in the front. Weird choice, Tom, I thought, looking for a sign we were wrapping this trip up. When we arrived at the small airport, he parked randomly outside the main building, basically just the corner of the road that led from the airport back to town. "Wait, are you coming in with me?" I asked, confused. He nodded, saying it would "take way too long" if I went in by myself. Suddenly we were concerned about efficiency. He marched us in, knowing everyone who worked there. I found myself in a small police office that definitely didn't understand the separation of church and state. There was a massive crucifix on the wall, and each police officer's desk was covered with a Jesus mousepad and a large picture of the Virgin Mary. My cab driver and the police officer negotiated the release of the suitcase in front of me without bothering to involve me. At some point, I was told I could take the suitcase and get out of here. Nobody had asked me any questions except to quiz me about the contents of the bag. On the way back, we stopped for tea because, truly, what is a taxi meter at this point? We'd been in the car together for like two hours. He told me how his mother-in-law had almost died from a heart attack. "It's good that she could get to Athens in time," he said. He then told me how during the off-season he harvests olives from his family farm and has them pressed down the street. "It's heaven working the fields with your family." I imagined my siblings and I being asked to harvest olives in the beating sun and immediately envisioned four body bags in the shade of an olive tree. I nodded, staring out the window at a fire extinguisher store across the street, where what looked like a 12-year-old boy rolled a cigarette seemingly one-handed and lit it while sitting on top of a barrel. The long grass around the fire extinguisher store seemed primed for a fire. What happens if a wildfire hits a fire extinguisher store? I pondered, while my driver went on about the beauty of the Mediterranean or something I wasn't paying attention. Then we packed it up and went back to the hotel. "Thanks for a nice morning, Mark," he said fondly to me as I got out. My name is Mat. But I guess if you've saved the island from a wildfire, you can call me whatever you want. I got back just after Mini Disco. This was a one-hour dancing marathon for the kids in the semi-enclosed theater. With two fully manned drink stations on either side of the stage, it was an opportunity for children to dance while their parents drank like an asteroid was imminent. The songs stayed the same every night, but on this first night, we were going to learn a valuable lesson: Always buy the t-shirt. Apparently, while I was learning the ins and outs of the Greek cab business, a nice woman had asked my wife and daughter if they wanted to buy a t-shirt for the Mini Disco. My wife, smelling a tourist scam, had hard-declined. What she didn't realize was that the climax of the Mini Disco was a formal t-shirt presentation ceremony. Each child's name was called, they were presented with a t-shirt, and then they were allowed to hug Leo the Lion. My daughter didn't understand that she didn't have a t-shirt. So, when the name "Eleanor"—which is not her name—was called, my daughter hopped up and snagged the shirt. This meant my wife had to rush onto the stage, rip the t-shirt out of our daughter's hands, and hand it to the sheepish little girl whose shirt it actually was, all while holding a cocktail. It was a masterclass in parenting under the influence. The next day, we were on the hunt to put in an order for the t-shirt, having made the most serious promises parents can make to a child. After we chased down the red-haired French woman running the kids' merch table, we went to the main pool. She didn't seem surprised to see us come crawling back. I got the sense the first day she was doing the sales pitch, then after that she just waited for us to come to her. There is a weird etiquette to pools and British people. They will rush out the second you are legally allowed to put a towel down on a chair, meaning from 8 AM to 1 PM, there isn't a single open seat. The British treat pool chairs the way trench soldiers treated no-man's-land: as hotly contested territory worth dying over. But if you are lazy like my family is, you just wait. They start to leave the pool around 1 PM, and you can get a great seat with zero work. The next day, you repeat the entire cycle. That evening, kiddo got her shirt. It was a proud moment; she clutched her blaze-pink t-shirt to her chest and teared up with pride. Soon, the days started to blend together. At some point, we all got an emergency text message telling us about wildfires on a neighboring island. I assumed the resort staff would need to calm down the crowds, as you could pretty clearly see the smoke from the fire. The sky was turning a dark, orange-brown in the distance, and the air smelled like burning rubber. Nobody cared at all. A thousand people looked at a Greek text message they couldn't read, put their phones down, and picked up their beach reads. The apocalypse was met with a shrug. As an allegory for global warming, there is something particularly bleak about people dancing in a pool to 90s boy band hits as a thick plume of wildfire smoke shoots up into the sky. Thankfully, here nobody pretends to care about anything, so I was able to slip back into a soothing apathy. In a world that was constantly asking me to pay attention to some fresh horror, this was a place that asked nothing of you. Toward the end of the trip, we decided to head down to the small town and were dropped off at Dolphin Square. We started walking around, looking at Google Maps to see what we should look at. There was a Roman House, which is basically an empty lot full of pieces of old Roman architecture and a sign saying I needed to pay 10 euros a person. Since nobody was there to collect this 10 euros, the sign felt more aspirational than practical. Someone should pay this Greek island 10 euros, but not today, I guess. But I looked at the old rocks. My daughter was unimpressed. She looked at the ruins, looked at me, and asked if she could get ice cream. "Denmark has a lot of old stuff," she said, which, in her defense, is true. We walked around a bit more, buying little tourist trinkets. I'll never understand who buys the t-shirts that fill the small streets of these towns. Who is the demographic for a shirt that says "I heart my boyfriend"? And more importantly, where is he? Does he buy the t-shirt for you before you go on a solo trip without him? But we went to a small restaurant and had a proper meal for the first time in days. Despite the heroic efforts of the staff at the resort, it was actually hard to eat there meal after meal. The culinary philosophy seemed to be "cook the will to live out of it." Everything was either fried and dried out beyond belief, a hard puff pastry, or so bland you couldn't really tell what was going on. The lamb sorta tasted like the chicken, which tasted a lot like the pork, which tasted like a cry for help. At one point, we went to an Asian-themed restaurant on the resort, and I was served "duck with Chinese pancakes." The duck was well-cooked, but the pancake was an Old El Paso flour tortilla. I couldn't help but feel like the duck died for no reason. At one of these meals, where my daughter pounded another plate of french fries and pizza, a British woman at the table next to us told me how her entire family looked forward to this trip. She started to tear up as she explained that she and her husband had worked extra hours this year to make it so their kids could come with them. "It just makes me burst with pride to think about," she said. As she spoke, one of her kids sat beside her, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, staring at an iPad, and methodically eating an entire pepperoni pizza without making eye contact with another human soul. By the end of our week, I was eating meals of plain bread with watermelon and coffee. My daughter was consuming what looked like a kilo of Nutella, and my wife and I settled down for another cycle. We only ended up going to the actual beach, which was beautiful and maybe 200 meters from our hotel room, once. The ocean was beautiful, with rolling hills in the background, perfect warm water that was the saltiest water I've ever been in. It was like swimming in a giant, warm tear. Everyone but me hated it because it wasn't as nice as the pools. "Ugh, there are ROCKS!" my daughter shouted, upset at the audacity of the ocean for existing. Honestly, the rocks hurt a fucking ton, but I was too self-righteous to admit it. "Let's enjoy nature, everybody!" I yelled, bleeding from the feet. I thought by the end of my time with these people that I would come to think less of them. I expected to leave despising their complacency. Instead, I found myself weirdly protective of these folks. They are just trying to make some childhood memories with their kids, trying to manufacture something, anything that looks like a normal childhood in a world burning down. I won't lie, the all-inclusive life isn't the life for me. It is a place out of time, where the enjoyment of it requires a total suspension of your relationship to the outside world. But I do now understand the appeal of not being challenged. In a time when everything is being questioned and every tradition and norm is falling apart, this is a callback to frankly an easier time to be alive. And we ended up getting the t-shirt, which, when you break it down, is really the most important part.
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