08/10/2026
I told you I'm writing a book and this is the very very rough chapter one...... Work in progress!
On January 22nd, 2022, we showed up at the airport in San Juan with a seven-month-old, a few suitcases, and no plan. Just waiting on the curb for our in-laws to pick us up, on our way to start a new life.
I’ll never forget that drive—heading from San Juan airport through Carolina, through Río Grande, all the way home to Luquillo. I just sat there quietly, looking out the window and taking it all in. The difference, the roads, the bumps in the road, the broken infrastructure, the colors, everything on the way.
I was just sitting there trying to process the fact that I had basically decided to start a whole new life.
A few years before that, after thirty-five years in Australia, I said: boom, let's leave, let's start fresh somewhere else.
Started in Connecticut, got settled, finished the house, did all that. Went through the pandemic, we made a baby, and then decided: hey, let's just start it all over again. Fresh, clean slate, do something different.
We were chasing a different life. We didn't want to live a regular life. Nothing about our life up to that point had been stock-standard regular anyway; things had always been a bit out of place.
Sitting in that car, it was a completely alien place. I had no idea what I was going to do, no idea what to expect. We came with just enough money to maybe, maybe buy a little house. Or so we thought before we got here.
Where does that story really begin?
To understand that, you have to go all the way back to the island of Rhodes, Greece, to Siana village.
In 1907, my grandfather Ioannis was born there. And that’s where the story actually started, because Vasilios and Magdalena were born there too.
That was my grandparents on one side, and my future wife’s grandparents on the other. Both families born in the exact same village in Greece. Back in those early days, Siana was just a little backwater winemaking village up in the mountains of Rhodes with no roads to get to it, locked away and hidden for centuries, just doing its own thing.
Eventually, my grandparents made the trip all the way out to Australia, and my wife Kristin's family made their way all the way out to Hartford, Connecticut.
Landing in Australia didn't mean fitting in, though.
I grew up around people with names the regular person struggled to pronounce—self-made, entrepreneurial immigrant types. I grew up in the "wog" world, which was very different from the Aussie world.
My mom shopped at European supermarkets, always stocking up on stuff that kids at school had never heard of before. When we went visiting with my mom's friends, everyone spoke Serbian.
Then on the other side, going to one of the hundreds of weddings I went to growing up—usually averaging a thousand people—everyone spoke Greek.
So I grew up in Australia heavily disconnected from white Australian culture. I never quite fit in; I always felt out of place. And yet, I also felt out of place among my own people, too—not being fully integrated into the Greek culture, and not fully integrated into the Serb culture.
I was always living in this weird neither-world between cultures.....
