Expat Life, Hospitality, and Olives
“As we chuckled, she nibbled a bit on her own salmon and then finished off the olives. She was full of life. And, being the quintessential Greek grandmother she was, she loved others through food. Now that I live in Spain, where people often eat five meals a day, I follow her example and keep food at the center of my hospitality efforts.”
Everyone in my family loves olives, thanks to a long heritage from my Greek great grandmother. There were always bowls of the briny treats on the dinner table, and my grandpa purchased them in enormous tins to accommodate our large gatherings. You could call them our “Big, Fat Greek” gatherings, but the truth is our family is much more international than that. My Greek great grandma was adopted as a little girl by a French family living in Istanbul. She married a Russian man and raised three boys who all married foreigners, and she immigrated to the United States with her middle son, my grandpa, who had married an American from Washington State. She babysat my mom and uncle while my grandpa finished school and moved with them across the United States, another item to check off in her bucket list life. We called her Grandma Valya, a pet name her Russian husband had given her.
One of my favorite memories is from when my husband and I were still dating. Our family was having a weeknight staple: grilled salmon, rice and Greek salad. My husband arrived late because of traffic, and we had already started eating. When he came in, we served him a plate and he sat down to eat next to Grandma Valya. She was putting Kalamata olives in her mouth and spitting out the seeds with such speed, her pile of olive seeds grew faster than I could make my salad shrink.
Taking a break from her olives, Grandma Valya looked at my future husband's plate, still full of salmon and rice. She looked at him, then back at the plate, and then shouted, "I get you more!"
She set another salmon fillet on top of the one he was working on and declared warmly, "we love you!" (But her accent made it sound like, "we laff joo!")
As we chuckled, she nibbled a bit on her own salmon and then finished off the olives. She was full of life. And, being the quintessential Greek grandmother she was, she loved others through food. Now that I live in Spain, where people often eat five meals a day, I follow her example and keep food at the center of my hospitality efforts.
Grandma Valya spoke five languages: Greek, Turkish, French, Russian and English. Throughout my life, I heard her use her language skills in many different places. Food was almost always involved. In my mind, I can still hear her harping on my grandpa or my great uncles in Turkish, their heart language from growing up in Istanbul, as she wrapped meat and rice in grape leaves for Turkish dolmas.
She greeted friends and kissed the cheeks of people named Artemis and Nicholas at the Greek Orthodox church in Seattle as they prepared the campus for their annual St. Demetrius festival. During my first international trip, I witnessed her conversing comfortably with her dear brother and sister-in-law in Athens as we sat down to a five-star meal prepared by this miracle relative of mine, an actual chef named Kiki.
She met a Russian woman at the bus stop and invited her for tea and raspberry jam.
When I was a baby, she would sit me on her lap and sing French nursery rhymes.
When she passed away in 2002, the same year I moved away for college, we had a large, loud gathering at my grandparents' house. Grandma Valya’s legacy is almost all men - three sons who had five sons and one daughter among them. It wasn't a wedding, but it wasn’t a funeral either. She had lived a long and happy life, and people who hadn’t seen each other in years were together again. It was a big, fat, multilingual party. My grandparents' long time neighbors came to pay their respects. They rang the doorbell and waited a while for someone to hear. I opened the door to see them standing there with a bundt cake, just like in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Everyone at the gathering got a chuckle at that.
Years later, my husband and I would serve a Greek lunch at our small wedding. We purposefully planned an afternoon wedding so we wouldn’t have to serve much food, but in true Greek fashion, there was too much! We had piles of Greek olives left over for weeks.
I now live in Spain and I cannot find the Kalamata olives of my childhood anywhere. But with hectares of olive trees, Spain has provided a number of delicious varieties to replace my old favorite. Even now, when I put out a small bowl of Spanish, briny green olives stuffed with anchovies or onions, or stuck on a toothpick with a pickle, I think of my great grandma and her love of olives. But beyond a love of olives, Grandma Valya taught me to welcome strangers, try to speak their language, and to feed them well — all things that prepared me for expat life.
What seemingly mundane details of your life helped prepare you for expat life?
