Athens and the Greek Islands - Muckupnos or was it Mykonos?

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Athens and Mykonos

I arrived in Athens after an uneventful flight, managed to navigate the metro and met a very metro Italian man called Francesco who tried to convince me to go out with him. I found the hostel without any dramas and then searched the Athens directory for a camera store so I coyld buy a battery charger for my camera. Luckily there was one two streets away! Phillip found me a temporary solution and I was happy to depart with the assurance I wouldn't be without my slr for the Greek Islands. He was also an avid traveller and we chatted for nearly an hour about our various adventures. I spent the afternoon walking around town and found a super cute church and although Athens is covered in graffiti and rubbish, I enjoyed my walk. Back in my hostel I head up the 6 flights of stairs to the rooftop bar which had the most incredible view of the acropolis. We had our busaout orientation meeting and I met some lovely girls before we wandered town in search of a grocery store and frozen yoghurt. I went back to the hostel and was going to bed when lo and behold Kelly walked into my room! I had met Kel back in Valencia, Spain and we realised we had booked the exact same dates for the Greek Islands. We had a mini reunion in Florence one night but this was going to be our amazing girly adventure together. We went back up to the rooftop bar for dinner and drinks. Bring on the Greek Islands!

We had to meet our guide at 5am next morning to catch the first 6 hour boat to our first 4 night stop in Mykonos. The wind was so strong and blustering it was having its own party! Our fav comment: " I'm so salty you could use me as seasoning!". It was on deck we met Jem and Grace, a younger due from Melbourne travelling together for nearly the same nights as us! They had 4 nights on each island except Ios, where they had just two. It was going to be a little strange for us as most people on tour chose two days on each Island and the busabout guides stay with the 2 day people so we would only have Marissa for the first two days and then get a new guide every 2 days for our whole trip.

We arrived in the 'beach resort' of Mykonos to tiny cabins, in chicken coop style accomodation and camping showers. Hmm resort?! It was fine, Kel and I went straight to the beach, appreciated the muscular men staunching around and had a swim to begin our chill out session. We did discover the fish here liked to eat the dead skin off your body. One was particularly gentle and was named George, but another positively gnawed at as so we named him Jaws. They were quite small maybe a bit bigger than the size of my thumb, but seemed harmless enough. A quick try of the camping shower, a trip to the bar and we were ready for our first night on the town. Marissa took us to the windmills where we were almost blown away by the extreme winds, found some shoos, lost Kelly, found our restaurant, found Kelly and had dinner (which was average). Before Marissa took us on the pub crawl she explained the secret hand signals / dance moves that we could use for a laugh.

There was
Awkward Turtle: to be used in awkward situations when things got weird.
Awkward turtle has babies: even more awkward situation, really weird.
Sexual tension panda: this one is obvious.
Releasing the panda: obvious
Save me! Shady palm tree: when you need rescuing....she hounded us on this one...we MUST remember it.
Hottie lama: when you see someone attractive and want to tell your friends.

We also had Code words.
BFB - Big fat babe
BFBFF - best face book friends forever
Hot guy Clock - hot guy at 2 o'clock!
Fo Mo - fear of missing out
DGT - don't go there

We hit the bars, got a free t-shirt, got sick of creepy men of which 98% were creepy or seriously sleezy. Shady palm tree was used on more than one occasion and to avoid the Italian stallions groping hands. I also managed to cut my foot quite badly on a piece of broken glass when some guy pushed past us rudely and then waited for over an hour for a taxi back to the resort in the early hours of the morning. I also have in my notes that Will, our NZ friend took a girls skirt to wear? I am sure this would be a great story if I could remember the details. It was hard to sleep as it was so windy so we gave up, went and got breakfast and went for a swim, where I promptly cut my other food on something in the water. Jaws the fish was pleased I was bloodying the water and providing him with fresh meat. We had a lie on the beach and a good sleep in the sun. More swimming, more sun, then a shower and into town for lunch with the three girls. We were making quite an awesome foursome. We had our first mousaka which was devine, some wine and then shopped. We had to stop Kel from patting stray cats, of which there is one or four on every corner of Mykonos town centre and then annoyed the lady in the juicy couture store by trying on matching tracksuits. Haha

We then lost eachother for a while and I found a super cute dress, then found the girls and we had silly photo shoots in the tiny white alleys, wind swept photos and general crazy silliness which is good for the soul. As Kel and I are both muso's the singing soon followed and we had a complete rendition of "find me somebody to love" in cat voices. We had made it out to the point by this time and the wind was still ravaging and blew a hat off a lady's head! Rescue attempt made by the gorgeous Grace. More yoghurt, more shops with matching dressed and we met Pelican Petro the local mascot who lives on Mykonos. I bought another dress and then we returned to the bus (driven by a 7 year old?!) wait no, thankfully we had a real driver, got back to camp for giros dinner, cruisers, hilarious chats with our new druken Canadian friend Charlie and some crazy boys from NZ who were "nasty" who did a very good impression of being camp and heard from Marissa that there shouldn't be any flesh eating fish in the water....oh dear!

Next day was another yoghurt, museli and honey breakfast followed by a trip by the four of us to Paraga beach, the next point over, where we did more of the same. Swim, sand, sun, reading. There was an attempt made to use Boy o'clock by one of us yelling "I think it's 10 o'clock now isn't it?!" to the other girls sittiing on the sand which was amusing as another tourist then tried to tell us the "actual" time of day. We also played Kelly's game of cut and paste where if someone says something suggestive, by accident, it is out of context, then you can say "cut!" and then whoever has made the comment has to later paste the suggestive sentence into a completely unrelated conversation when the owner of the 'cut' orders them to 'paste', thus making it awkward and hilrious. Some good 'cuts' of the day were: "I need bigger balls", "Give it a good whack", "Just wait till I get my pants off". We didn't end up pasting much...it was funny enough to see what interesting sentences we ended up 'cutting'. On the beach there was an Italian group of guys next to us playing ping pong, Jem and Grace also had a set of bats and we made our own attempt. Ping pong on the beaches is so popular in Italy and Greece, we managed a rally of 8 when we began counting in the various languages we knew how to count in, but they obliterated our tiny tally.

We decided to go into town to meet the new busabout guide Josh, but we ran into some random Aussies at the bus stop who tried to crack onto Kel by kissing her in the middle of the street and then managed to let their beer can explode while we waited. Aussies and Italians have a bad rep in Mykonos and now we could see why. Some Italian guys on the bus tried to chat up Grace and Jem and offered to take us all out for dinner but we went for souvlaki instead. Kel and I needed hair moose so we decided it would be fine to take with us tied to our handbag. We met Josh and the new busabouters in a bar and had some major issues with another tour group called fanatics who's guide was blind drunk and was being grossly inappropriate. Definately a new low for Europe trip standards. We headed to another club, shared a bucket between us and danced happily til we remembered the hair moose left at the previous bar....quick adventure back to get it and then we were our way to the next club where we bought glow sticks from small children, we were at the 3rd club by the time we realised again the moose had been left behind...so back to get it. By the time we reached the fourth club you would think we would have learned....but no, again the moose was dancing around where we had last left it behind. Arg. Finally it, and us, arrived home at some time next morning. Haha

Our final day was spent at the beach where I tried to stand on the stupid fish trying to eat me, all to no avail of course. We journaled or read books while chilling at the resort cafe, ate more giros with Charlie, met some new friends Richo and John and spent the rest of the evening in the water chatting. We got dakeries in the evening, more chats on the beach, group photos by auto timer of which Richo chose to ruin! Haha We grabbed pizza for dinner, amazingly fresh 'diovola, paradice, special and prostiutto'. We watched people having a 'good time' on the beach chairs, watched one Italian stallion go back to the club and get a different girl for round two. Omg. Played Charlie's game of 5 questions, a game of beer goggles, fungis mungis, cut and paste and then had crepes before going to bed. Unfortunately our new friend Amelia decided to eat John's crepe and then John was super angry and tried to convice us to drop her. Haha an amazing fun night of what we named 'larikenizing around'.

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