Places In Film | The Boatbuilder’s House

Within 24 hours of landing in Greece, my phone broke.
It doesn’t really matter how, it’s a long not-interesting saga that I won’t bore you with.

(A foresight I wish a couple I recently got cornered by at a party had. They’d backed me up against a table and for thirty minutes they made me stand there listening to their latest technological issues with Apple. When I think of what it means to feel claustrophobic and trapped, this moment defines that for me.
Hot tip: Do not think your Apple store experience is a fun party anecdote. It’s not. We have all had some horrific Apple store experience. We don’t want to relive it through hearing about yours. But I digress.)

What’s important is that I found myself in a foreign country without my phone and a slight panic settling over me and the following thoughts:

Bare minimum— How was I going to navigate a place I had never been? Especially when it came to navigating on planes between islands?

How was I going to check into my Airbnb and communicate with the host?
How was I going to message my parents to let them know that I was alive?
How was I going to take videos and pictures and write (a thing I primarily did in the notes app on my phone in those days).

Fortunately I was technically not traveling alone. I was there with some friends, but we were going to part ways for part of the trip and it took some figuring as to how I would navigate the aforementioned concerns in addition to parting and reconnecting with them. In the end, one of them let me borrow her phone since she was going to be staying with the others.

Looking back, it feels impossibly trivial to have had these concerns. There were of course years before cell phones that people got around in the world just fine.
But the fact of the matter is — We are dependent on them now and our world is absolutely not set up for navigating a whole lot of anything without one.
It’s made nearly impossible actually.

There is now a more or less required app for pretty much anything and everything. And how else are you going to stay in touch with people?
Home phones are all but extinct, and I don’t remember the last time I got an actual hand written letter.
Getting around? Good luck memorizing the directions to a place you’ve never been with the short term memory we all have these days.
(I do have a US map in my car but I can absolutely count on one hand the amount of times I have used it… and printers are also now hard to come by so no printing off directions from Mapquest ala my early driving days!)

It’s just the reality of the world we now live in.

Especially if we are talking about the logistics of navigating to an Airbnb on Santorini from Athens.

Which is where this story takes a turn, a turn towards a little house that I was hell bent on going well out of my way to go stay in and see with my own eyes.

I had all but planned this trip around this specific place.

And that place was: The Boatbuilder’s House.

To give you some background on my draw to this house: My father builds boats, not just boats, but wooden boats. And the original owner of this house in a little village on Santorini was, in fact, the last wooden boatbuilder on Santorini.

Originally built in the 1800s, he had used this house as his workshop many years ago, hoisting his finished vessels over the white clad walls and into the streets to be turned sideways and carried through the narrow alleys and down to the sea.

A romantic vision played out in a few photographs his family, who now rent the place out, had left throughout the home.

I had booked myself two nights there and after some faulty navigation (and continually typing the wrong password into my friends phone), I had made it.

I give this extensive background to this story because this was one of the more meaningful times, in my recollection, since 2011 and first owning a smart phone, that I was without my phone for days on end.

And because of that, this place, this experience, has a heightened glint of permanent brilliance in my memory. A bookmark that in the five years since that trip, I can easily flip back to and recall very viscerally sounds and tastes and feelings.

While Greece as a whole is truly a place for all of the senses, I contribute the vividness of this experience largely to: Not having a phone.

I am unable to find which journal I was writing in at the time, but I do remember writing voraciously while I was there. I also remember a lot of candlelight, greek yogurt with pomegranate seeds and honey and, of course— red wine.

I have always loved traveling alone, locally and abroad, and this time was no different. I got up early and walked around the island when there was little to no one else awake. I felt like I had the whole pink sun kissed place to myself. This wondrous little corner of the world was healing in a way I didn’t know I needed at the time.
The recipe for which was—

Silence.

Solitude.

Slowness.

Simplicity.

Four things that feel as though I am fighting tooth and nail to implement into my life now.

But as I sit here on Sunday, doing my best to bring about a little of each of the aforementioned into my afternoon, I recall this little house, and the few short days I spent there, and the hope and promise of that type of peace and way of living being possible once again.

I just need to turn off my phone.