HONEYMOON DIARY Pt.3

Dead Alien Babies, RamRods and Bad Hairpieces
MYKONOS, GREECE – Day 10
May 9, 2008

Ah, the beautiful Island of Mykonos. We went ashore and fell in love immediately. Ok, seriously this time, this is the place we want to move to. First we thought it was the Tuscan countryside, then we thought it was Santorini, but there is just something about this place that is so serene and beautiful that made us not want to leave. There is water everywhere you look (I know, duh, it’s an island), but this water is the clearest and the most beautiful blue I’ve ever seen. It made me want to dive in with my clothes on and not even care.

So we walk around on the seaside dock area with fishing boats everywhere and happen to see one boat in particular with what looked like dead alien babies hanging off the masts. After closer inspection, (and spotting a sign on the restaurant behind us that advertised ‘dried octopus’), we deduced that they were actually octopuses hanging out to dry. Yeah, I know pretty clever of us right? Anyway, not something you see every day in Tampa. I thought it was kinda creepy, but kinda cool too.

Then we decide to go find all these windmills we kept hearing about on the brochures and such from the cruise ship. We can see them in the distance, so it couldn’t be too hard to get to right? Hey, here’s a alleyway, wonder if it leads towards them. So we’re walking down the passageway that leads into the town itself, and we turn a corner and come across one of the strangest and funniest signs I’ve seen in a while. It’s a sign for the Scandinavian Bar and Disco!! Of course it is. What else would you expect to see on a remote Greek island? (As a side note, I just looked up Mykonos on Wikipedia and it says Mykonos is known for its “cosmopolitan character and its intense nightlife.” I’m not sure what ‘intense nightlife’ means, but it sounds frightening. Anyway, we were there during the daytime, so we didn’t get a chance to experience that particular side of the island, may have been a good thing considering what we found when we turned the next corner. We may have been a little our of our element.

“Hey honey, am I seeing things or is that a gay nightclub… called… RamRod?” Why yes it is. Hahaha. That may be a little too descriptive. We haven’t laughed that hard in a long time. Maybe that’s what they meant by ‘intense nightlife’.





So we keep walking and realize we have no clue where we are or if we’ll ever find these windmills, and it’s getting around lunchtime, so we turn another corner and find this great outside Greek restaurant right on the water. Perfect. Lori orders another delicious Greek salad, or as they call it in Greece, ‘a salad’. I order the spaghetti, because if I can order weiner-schnitzel in Rome, why wouldn’t I be able to get spaghetti in Greece? But seriously, if you’ve never had Greek spaghetti, I suggest you try it. They put their own flair on it with a touch of nutmeg and cinnamon in the sauce. Yummy and yummy! I hate to disappoint you, but this time instead of the homemade wine, we opted for good old fashioned American Cokes (well, they didn’t have Coke, so we ended up with Pepsi).

So after the awesome lunch by the relaxing seashore, we head up a hill and… The Windmills!! There are several huge old windmills on the side of a small cliff that were formerly used to grind grain, but have since been retired. Some have been converted into houses which is kinda cool. So Lori immediately went to the edge of the cliff and seeing a patch of grassy land informed me that this is where we were going to build our new house. Hey I’m cool with that. So we climbed down the hill and stood by the crystal clear water and just took in the atmosphere. We probably could have stayed there forever, but we had to get back to the boat before it left us there. (Which Lori informed me was ok by her.)

So as we are walking back through the winding narrow streets, we happen by a shop window and I about snapped my neck doing a double take. Without going into too much detail about it… the picture I’m sure says enough, we spot this statue. What the…? People actually buy this? Well, I guess it would definitely be a conversation piece. “So Mabel, I was at knitting club this week and… uh, Mabel, you want to tell me about that thing pleasuring itself on your coffee table?”

We make it back to the boat (after some more Gelati, of course) and reluctantly get on board. We immediately change into our swimwear and go up on the sundeck to watch the view of the island in the distance as we depart our beloved Mykonos. Yes, Pope Snappy started taking several random pics of Lori and I guess I got carried away when I told her, “Yeah that’s a good pose… now look forlorn… now act like a cat, meow…” which is how I ended up with this shot.

Oh, I’ve just gotta tell you one more thing before I close. We went to see the doppelganger band play on the ship tonight and this guy sitting in front of us had the worst, and I mean the worst toupee you’ve ever seen. Oh geez, if I had only had my camera. This thing was BARELY hanging on his head. Then he got up to dance. Holy crap, we laughed our asses off just hoping the piece would fall off, which somehow never did. I told Lori that the band should bust out with, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re gonna rock your hair off!!” Maybe another one of those, had to be there moments, but it makes me laugh. Anyway, enough for one day. See you tomorrow!!



Parthenon, Greek Einstein, and Creepy Egyptian Dude
ATHENS, GREECE – Day 11
May 10, 2008

Well today starts off with another excursion, and a guide with a very thick Greek accent. And she literally said “ah” after every word for some reason!! Could-ah you-ah imagine-ah if-ah I-ah wrote-ah like-ah this-ah the whole-ah diary-ah? Yeah, now you feel our pain. (Hah! I just realized that last word would be pronounced ‘diarrhea’. Yeah, apparently I still have the humor of a 12-year-old). Anyway, at least I could understand her, unlike our tour guide in the Amalfi Coast. She was just annoying, but I can deal with that.

We get to Athens and walk all the way up to the top of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is. The Parthenon was a temple built for the Greek goddess Athena. When we were walking up to it, we just saw the front pillars, and not that it looked small by any means, but I guess I had pictured it bigger than it looked. But then we walked around to the side of it. That’s when you can really tell the size of it. It was pretty impressive, mostly because of how much they’ve been able to reconstruct of it.

The view from the top of the mountain was great too, and it didn’t hurt that it was a beautiful, sunny day out with a great breeze. Actually, now that I think of it, we’ve been extremely fortunate that every day we’ve been over here has been like this. After wandering around some more, we headed back to the bus to see the Panathanaic Stadium.





The Panathanaic Stadium was built to host the 1896 Summer Olympics, which were the first Olympics of the modern times. I thought it was pretty cool to see that it was in such great shape. It was actually used for a couple of events in the 2004 summer Olympics, and was built on the spot of the original arena, which was functioning around 300 B.C. I was also able to get this panorama if it, which really shows the enormity of it.

Then we got back on the bus and went to the Athens museum and saw a lot of artifacts and statues and such. Afterwards the bus drops us off on a corner block of downtown (next to a McDonalds, of all places. And no we didn’t eat at McDonalds. We try to avoid it at home, so why would we want to eat it overseas). Anyway, the street we walked down was extremely busy and extremely active. We walked a little ways, and we heard this beautiful, calming music coming from some street performers up the way. So we get up to them, and we listen and watch them for a while, when Lori says, “Do you notice anything odd about this?” Huh? It didn’t hit us for a while, but they were clearly Native Americans playing Native American music. It was just kind of an odd site to see in the middle of a busy downtown street in Athens, Greece. Or is it just us? Oh well, either way, we keep walking, and come across this creepy guy. I guess he was supposed to be a mime or something, and I couldn’t figure out why he was dressed like an Egyptian Pharaoh, but he was creepy either way. We walk on a little more, and I spot "Greek Einstein". I don’t know if this picture does him justice, but man did this guy look like Einstein, relatively speaking. It’s hard to take a direct picture of someone without being totally obvious that you’re doing it, so this picture was taken from far away with the zoom all the way in. Anyway, that pretty much concluded our excursion. Can’t say anything really exciting happened on the boat tonight (that I can talk about *wink wink*), so I’m going to close this and say goodnight. Tomorrow should be pretty cool, we’ll be in Olympia.