Oh Greece, I'M ALL YOURS!

Boozin' on Mythos as I watch another sunset. Oia, Crete

(This blog is a bit of photo warfare actually. Hope nobody minds that, but it was difficult to discriminate photos once I entered my Greece holiday trance...)

The thing about living in Europe is that, almost on a whim, you can just snap up incredibly reasonably priced tickets to another city or country, and jet off for a weekend! This has been largely my aim since I resolved that I would be returning back to Australia in July for work. Although that plan has now evolved into staying put here (phew, thank goodness- I really did never want to leave so soon and I was already having nightmares about being back in Melbourne!), I still plan to explore as much as is humanly possible on my (shitty half-time) salary and dictated by time constraints to do with said shitty salaried job. 

I’ve recently been to Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Stralsund (all cities within Germany, for those not so familiar with Geography, tch tch!)... all incredible cities! 

AND THEN I WENT TO GREECE! Wow. No, I mean really, wow. Greece has always been a destination I knew I had to make as I came out of my mum’s womb thinking about saganaki and dolmades. And lamb. Sloooow cooked lamb. 

A sample of some Greek morsels... Therisso, Crete

I could not stop eating. A roadside Taverna

So, as a little 30^th birthday present to myself, I bought myself tickets to Greece for a 2 week sojourn. I’d planned to travel alone, as I’ve largely been doing, but was incredibly stoked when a good friend of mine from Melbourne, Mel, decided to meet me there. Her fantastic organisational skills and thorough research on the places we’d planned to visit were the perfect accompaniment to my [absence of] organisational skills and [absence of] any research... Yeah, I guess I’m a bit of a parasitic traveller when it comes to the hard yards of planning. But you know, sometimes people just like to organise things, and through doing that, they feel as though they’re helping. And they are helping! They’re helping the lazy likes of me! 

So off I went. Initially into Heraklion, Crete, where I picked up a little car from the airport and followed my nose into outback Greece for my first feast of the holidays. Having not driven for a year or so, oh yeah, AND NEVER having driven on the wrong side of the road like these folk insist is normal, the experience was a bit choppy and stressful, but mostly only in retrospect. At the time, I thought it best to feign utter confidence in my own ability, which I think was actually a good strategy! I fooled myself into believing I was a king on the road! Luckily for me (??), my GPS seemed to function in accordance with food rather than geographical coordinates. This meant that although it took me some hours to find the city where I was staying, at least I got a feast fit for a king in the process which functioned to feed the angry, impatient and stressed hate monkeys I started to sense were on their way into my psyche. 

Clearly my GPS knew I was hungry for my first Greek feast when she brought me into the middle of outback Greece! First I thought she may have been in cahoots with some kidney thieves planning on selling my kidneys on the Greek black market to boost the economy!

Finally, with a lot of stopping in chaotic, illegal parking areas, I managed to flutter my eyelashes at enough hairy Greek men to be guided to my first hostel of the trip. This was a city in Crete called Rethymnon. Here I spent the next two days solo before I planned to meet Mel. During this time I ate a lot, I walked a lot, and I drank a lot. I was starting to really look forward to Mel’s company actually, as, for once in my life, I seemed to be getting a bit bored and restless. 

Rethymnon!

Another fortress (apparently 'not a fortress it's a fucking palace' according to my highly esteemed Greek colleague, Niki)

ENTER MEL! At the perfect point, Mel arrived and the true adventures began. A seasoned pro in the car by this stage (I’m sure she’d attest to that??), I picked Mel up from the airport and off we went. First to some old, fortress thing (Knossos or something? That was a bit boring), then to feast on Greek food, then to the city we planned to bunker down in, Chania. 

SO happy to see this motherfucker! Naww, look at her, doing research, and planning and shit... We're at the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete, Knossos, still considered Europe's oldest city. Heraklion, Crete

Stray cat on me lap! GROSSSSSSSSSSSS says Mel!

Although our little room in Chania stank like faeces and slightly resembled a dungeon, with holiday excitement and some creativity (read; delusion), Mel and I managed to turn the place into a little home. It would be where we stayed for the next 5 nights.
Things got a bit hairy then! 

AS A consequence (yes, I think ‘consequence’ fits much better here than ‘result’) of the research Mel had undertaken, Mel broke the news to me that I had been blissfully ignorant of... YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FLUSH TOILET PAPER DOWN THE TOILET IN GREECE! You’re supposed to throw it into a bin due to sub-standard plumbing?! Holy shit! Had I possibly just flooded the city I’d been staying in for the 2 days earlier? And furthermore, what the fuck?! That is disgusting! I’m a biologist! I know all about...bacteria n’ shit. Excuse the pun. 

So, as you can imagine, psychologically, I regressed slightly at this point. But, with an immense amount of daily counselling from Mel, I managed to get through the ensuing days. 

Our time together in Crete was incredible. Every day we jumped into our little car, Panda, and jetsetted around the amazing island that is Crete. We hiked gorges, we lay on pink beaches, we explored small country towns in the mountains where we stole fruit from orchards, we hunted wild goats, we found our way into the backyards of old Greek men who plied us with Greek booze, we explored the beautiful old cities, we marvelled at all of the penis paraphernalia ubiquitous throughout the island, we took cooking classes where we learned how to become Greek mumma’s¹, but most of all, we ate. Yes, we ate like there was no tomorrow! 

Dicks, dicks, dicks, dicks, dicks! Soooo many dicks!

 

Stocking up on the essentials... ouzo           ...and a fuck tonne of beer!

Kri kri! Wild, Cretan goats! Actually, I'm pretty sure these were just a farmers normal goats, but nonetheless, Mel and I and convinced ourselves that they were the elusive Kri kri!

 

 

Stolen fruit is the sweetest!

 

Chania! The Venetian Port.

 

And then we caught a ferry to Santorini! Wow. I mean, for want of a better descriptive word, wow sums it up. This island, previously volcanic, is exactly what you picture when you picture Greece. White houses with blue window frames scattered down a cliff face. Incredible. A veritable fucking visual feast. But, with such beauty of course, comes Americans. Far too many tourists for my liking. So, trying to keep our distance from the cluster-fucked inner city, it would be fair to say that the majority of our time in Santorini was spent with our boobs out on beaches all colours of the rainbow. There’s a red beach, a white beach, a black beach, a blue...hang on, nah, no blue beach. But anyway, beaches! Wow. And sunsets! Wow. Best fucken sunsets you'll ever see! And more food. Glorious, glorious food. 

The holiday was fast coming to an end, and even though I knew it then, I could never have anticipated just how sad this would make me. So, at the ungodly crack of a sparrows fart, I was up, up, up and away to Athens, sans Mel. She had plans to meet family back in Crete, so I was going to be all alone again in Athens. I was not looking forward to that so much actually. We had gotten on together so well, as though we’d resonated with one another perfectly.
But then, by chance, in Athens I stumbled into a vortex of incredible adventure and debauchery, and actually, thinking back, these next 2 days alone in Athens would turn out to be 2 of the best days of my life!

Not convinced by the city of Athens initially, I wandered around the day I arrived mesmerized and overwhelmed nonetheless by the history and formidable key sights (you know, all that Greek God stuff? The Acropolis, the Parthenon, wow, wow, wow?!), but slightly hot and bothered after my early flight. Without the organisation (and sunscreen) I had come to expect through Mel, my day was panning out to be pretty haphazard (and burnt), and I very quickly realised I could no longer read a map (could I ever?) Finally I decided to head to my hostel and check-in properly. Upon doing so, I stumbled into a very enthusiastic and polite Canadian chap who, as it was his first time travelling Europe, jumped on me as soon as he saw I was leaving the hostel, and asked if he could come along and join me for my next meal. He was a cool dude- a pilot by trade, though inexplicably also shit at reading maps. We wandered around the city for a while trying to digest the mass of food we’d eaten, and ended up punctuating the afternoon with beer stops and ouzo... Never a good start to an evening, it might be argued. Eventually we ended up drinking beers next to the Zeus monument, and with a view of the Acropolis atop its hill, I was starting to appreciate Athens more and more. Actually, I was becoming pretty enamoured. 

The next part of the story gets weird. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, since, by definition, a ‘Sports Bar’ will likely host (or at least air) ‘sport’ themed things, and a bar filled with sport is the last kind of place on earth I would choose to visit for a beer, but, somehow I ended up in...yep, a ‘Sports Bar’! I blame both the ouzo for that as well as that incredibly damned persuasive Canadian. Not yet lucid enough to accept where I was and just keep drinking beer without protesting, I protested a lot and quickly realised I had to skull the beer I’d just purchased and make my way back to the hostel to sleep. It was 1am or so, and I’d been up since 4am. So, off I headed. Then all of a sudden it dawned on me that I had no idea where the hostel actually was, so, thinking very quickly (??), I asked a chap who seemed to be also leaving the place, if he was going back to the hostel. Turns out he actually wasn’t, but rather he was heading out to Gazi, one of the ‘spots’ to go and party in Athens. He invited me to join him, but I was not having a bar of that, realising at this point that I was sleep-deprived, sunburnt, and half-cut. So, he offered to point me in the right direction of the hostel, and on we walked. We chatted and chatted, and happened to hit it off like old buddies, so we stopped to get some travellers and all of a sudden, I was off to Gazi with my new friend. 

That night dissolved into a blur of stripes, laughs, beers and photos, and all of a sudden I’d scored myself a wonderful, personalised tour guide for the rest of my time in Athens. This lovely chap, who looked remarkably like Johnny Depp, hailed originally from the States (yeah, but somehow his accent sounded so cool!) but had been living in Athens for 11 years and as a result knew an incredible amount of...stuff! He knew allll the places to go, allll the things to see, and allllll the history to boot! We went to cool restaurants, we drank beers in cool bars, we watched the sunset on the Acropolis and we ate and ate. And drank and drank and drank. They were the halcyon days...I’ll never forget em’. 

And then I came home to Berlin. And don’t get me wrong, I clearly LOVE Berlin. But damn, it aint no Greece!

¹= As a birthday gift, Mel was incredibly generous with organising these cooking classes with a skilled Greek chef, Soula, in  a small village, Vamos, in Crete. We spent the day cooking the feast we would eventually almost kill ourselves gorging on (not in moderation).