Greece. Letting Me Down Again (Part 4)

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I have to say that Jessi is pretty smart. I mean she had a great GPA, profs always liked her, she got lots of scholarships and has managed to be basically fluent in German in less than a year. Which, I suppose, makes for an intelligent person. One would think anyway. While in Ios one night we had to make arrangements for accommodations in Santorini. For what ever reason, I thought it was a great idea to write an email, while letting the some what drunk Jessi and Jono do the choosing. While they were flipping through places I saw the name "Tony's Villa" and laughed. Tony's Villa doesn't exactly imply a nice place you want to visit. It implies the mafia (or as it's known in Greece, the Mapia), and meat balls, and someone named Mama coming and hitting you over the head with a rolling pin as young children steal your gold watch. I laughed at the name and continued to write my email.
Well it turns out that Jessi LOVED the idea of Tony's Villa. Unlike George, Tony had a pool, the pictures seemed decent, and Jessi's other favorite part was that it was ONE WHOLE euro cheaper than George's. I was really happy with George, Jessi was less impressed and convinced Jono and I that trying something new was a great idea. I just trusted her and kept typing.

So we arrive in Santorini. As is the Greek standard, they are not done paving the port. It's about 35C and there is heat radiating off the tar. As per usual, when we dock there are about 20 some people from hotels/villas with signs and advertisements either there trying to pick up people who have made reservations with them, or trying to recruit people to come and stay with them. We look for Tony. He's not there. We ask. Everyone knows Tony, and they say he left for a while but should be back shortly. We wait. We eat a spinach pie. We wait. Jono goes and asks at one of the tourist shops if we can call Tony. The guy looks in FOUR phone books and can't find Tony's number anywhere. We ask the other hotel owners and they assure us he'll be back in time for the next ferry to arrive. We go to a cafe, which sits nicely on the steaming hot tar, and we order cold drinks and wait as our arms melt in the extreme heat. The woman who works there and who has to recruit people into the cafe can't stand on the tar, it's melting her shoes. I'm not kidding. It was that hot. She did an "I'm walking on hot coals" sort of shuffle.. I guess that's sort of a literal statement.
Eventually, TWO hours later, Tony arrives.

Tony is not just a man. Tony is a Legend. His shirt says so. In fact, all his shirts say so. It's embroidered on the back of them. It's not just called Tony's Villas. It's called Tony's Villas--The Legend. Don't believe me? Check it: http://www.tonysvilla.gr/.

So finally we arrive at this legendary hostel. We walk to our room to drop off our stuff off and Jono shortly there after follows Tony to pay. This is the first place in Greece that makes you pay upon arrival, every other hostel makes you pay when you leave. Bad sign number one. But the legend continues. Jessi and I stay in the bedroom. I have to go to the washroom.. and I do.. and the toilet doesn't flush. Nice. Legendary. There are also a bunch of exposed wires hanging by the mirror, which is extra problematic because this bathroom is not only missing a shower curtain, but the shower floor isnt' raised. It's basically a facet/shower head mounted on the wall, and the drain isn't even located there, but a meter away by the sink. I know I love to have showers and water flying with exposed wires hanging around. Inside the room itself was no better. Unlike our two story palace at George's, this was a tiny room with just two beds (again one double that I would be forced to share with Jessi)---the room was actually smaller than my bedroom at home. There was also DIRT on the beds. Little black bits of dirt. Legendary. There was also no air conditioning. Angry, obviously, Jessi runs out to stop Jono from paying, but is too late. I'm not there, but I'm guessing she tells Tony that we're not happy with the room. Tony follows them both back to the room, where I'm sitting slumped on the floor (I believe I have a touch sun stroke or something because I'm not feeling well). Tony explains that the reason the toilet doesn't work is because we didn't turn the water on. That the dirt on the beds is really bits of flowers that has just flown in through the windows from the open windows. He assures us it's clean. Legendary. There is something about the look in his eyes that makes you want to believe him. He does seem sad and over worked some how. His wife, who we meet later, is bitchy. His son has Down Syndrome, so you want to like Tony. You want to support Tony. But the shape of this room is hard. Eventually he tells us he has other rooms open... for more money.

Our lovely hostess, aka Tony's wife, actually rips us off a few Euros when we changes rooms. We all know this and try and argue for a minute, but then give up... we're tired, and we don't want to deal with the Mapia!

Our new room is better--but is NOT like George's. It's got one bed on the main floor (with a mosquito net for some reason, even though we had yet to see a single mosquito the entire time we were there), and then another bed in a "loft" which was basically just a raised platform on top of the bathroom, that you accessed by a ladder. We made the man slave.. aka Jono.. sleep up there. I tried plugging in the air conditioning, it didn't work. Legendary. The bathroom also reeked of chlorine, even more than the pool. We're pretty sure that salt water came out of the taps. At one point, when i was getting into the shower, Jessi was trying to use my hair blower but it was being tempermental, so when she went to unplug it she got ELECTROCUTED!!! She felt the shock run about half way down her body and screamed loud enough for me to throw my clothes on and run out of the bathroom to see if she was okay. She was alright, a little bit freaked out, and her arm felt weird.. but she was alright. Man slave gave her a massage later and she seemed alright the next day. Even though she spent much of that night fearing her heart would stop at any time. legendary

The pool was also LEGENDARY, as it was about the size of two hot tubs and was housing several dead flies. Dead flies? But we hardly saw any bugs at all. Except for at Tony's. There was a reason for that mosquito net after all. Apparently all the bugs in Santorini converged on Tony's Mapia Villa. None of us slept well at all that night, we were too hot, and being assaulted by bugs.

One thing we did like about Tony's was the KITTENS. There were some kittens, probably about 2 weeks old. They were not being cared for by Tony or the mother cat really, so we played with them. There were three of them, and three of us, so that was perfect really. Expect two of them seemed to have really bad eye infections, and we're pretty sure they weren't going to make it too long with out some help from the vet. We're fairly certain the Mapia wasn't going to splurge on a vet....

I'm guessing that Guelph Ontario is a member of the Mapia.

The next day happened to be Jono's birthday. Because I am now telling you what we did on this day, and it was his birthday, as my gift to him I will only call him by his name... and not man slave. Because that's just how nice of a girl I am. Jessi got up early and pretended like she was remotely sneaky and went out and bought us a bunch of pastries, and a candle and we surprised him with breakfast by the mapia pool. After that we went to our favorite car rental place and rented a car for the day. The day before, we also walked back to George's with our tails between our legs, and begged for a room. When we said we were staying at Tony's he said, "I know what those rooms are like!" Lucky for us, he gave us our old villa back. So after renting the car we packed up our stuff, and moved back to our home with George.

For his big day, Jono wanted to go back to the beautiful red sand beach and then have a nice dinner some where. So we threw Britney, Rhianna and Duffy back in or CD player and headed toward that stunning little cove. Many members of team rib cage were present (aka the skinny girls in bikinis that made me fee bad about myself). But we had a great day there. Including more of our favorite pita chips. After we went and cleaned ourselves up and while Jono was in the shower I went and worked on the second half of his gift. Right by George's was a place that could take photos and put them on mugs or tshirts. So I took my camera and got one of the best pictures I took of him and asked them to put it on a mug. I also asked them to write "I wanna be a rock star" on it (a quote from the horrible nickelback song that we listened to as a joke as we drove around). Then we headed to Oia to watch our very last Santorini sunset. I mean I hate sunsets, and birthdays so I was generally unhappy. At one point, there was a train of DONKEYS that came by... so that was fun! I also hate fun. Greece, letting me down again. Jono loved his gift.. and that made us both happy.

We had another amazing dinner, and took our last walk around Oia. I may or may not have cried. I mean, I'm not really a crier. I blame the mapia. It was just the most beautiful place, if you were leaving, you'd cry too. We all cried. I'm ratting the other two out.. because it's true. We took our last drive through the mountain roads, and went back to George's for a couple of bottles of wine to celebrate the birth of Jono!

The next day we sadly returned the car and listened to Britney for the last time, shopped a little (which we had done a bit the day before as well), and spent our last few hours on the black sand beach drinking fruit shakes. Also admiring that beautiful girl who worked at our favorite beach bar, she still mocked me for my lack of a tan. We considered asked her if she wanted to go out for a steak dinner sometime... the three of us would buy.

Lucky for us, it wasn't George II to drove us back to the port this time, but George himself. We said a very sad goodbye to George, and mentally prepared for a ride on our favorite boat.. THE FLYINGCAT 4!!!

The boat ride, well for Jono and I, was much better this time. Jessi struggled a bit... but compared to the first one I felt much much better. We arrived in Crete (Heraklion, again) rather late, checked into the same hotel we stayed at on the first night, and went to dinner at our favorite place from the last time we were there. It was almost like a whole in the wall, but had some of the best food we ate. Including a new dish we had never tried called dachos.. which was amazing. It was sort of like a greek style bruchetta i guess.

The next day Jono and I tried to do laundry, but everything was closed because it was Sunday. We then had to move hotels. After that we decided to do our second cultural activity in Greece and went to some ruins in Knossos. It was a really hot day.. and so we went through them pretty quickly. They were interesting though--even though much of the information seemed to be the subjective conclusions of an archaeologist who discovered them. Basically every plaque that would explain what you were looking at started with "Stan decided that this building was for the King"---with no real basis to back it up. We found that pretty hilarious.

Our last night we had a huge dinner at another restaurant over looking the ocean. Oh I forgot about the Raki. While we were in the islands, we kept seeing this drink called Raki, but never tried it. Finally, Jessi and Jono did on the night where I wasn't drinking. The shots were so strong they couldn't drink them and asked for orange juice to mix them with, which is when I tasted it. Even in the orange juice it did not taste good. That night at the restaurant in Crete as our free desert, we got some fruit and a small bottle of raki. This is the second time this had happened, as we had done shots of it just the night before at another restaurant. It tastes so putrid that you take one shot and your whole body burns, your eyes sting and you laugh your butt of because you have no idea why anyone would drink the stuff. It's AWEFUL. It smells and tastes, and I'm not pulling a Lana exaggeration here and I'm not trying to be funny, exactly like rubbing alcohol. I'm not kidding. So faced with this small bottle, after just having drank another liter of wine, we consider not doing it. I demand that we do as it's our last night. So we do. For a few minutes I can't see. We all feel gross. BUT the little bottle isn't empty. I demand we finish the bottle, meaning we all get about another half shot. We do it. Then we all laugh our butts off again. And feel gross. That day we had seen little bottles of it for sale, I really wish we had bought some as a "gift" for someone, I really wish you could understand how bad this stuff was.

So drunk and sad we walk around Crete for a while, and eventually head back to our hotel and drink some wine on the balcony for a while before starting to pack up our things properly. The next morning we're up by 7am, and take the local bus that runs to the airport. We're there very early, and all feel a little hung over and very tired. When the plane takes off, I have to really try hard not to cry. I watch the scary screen that shows the pilots view during both landing and take off, an try to scare the tears out of me. It sort of works. I manage to fall asleep for about 20 minutes on the plane.... Once we land in Frankfurt I make possibly the biggest and saddest mistake of my trip, and begin one of the longest travel days of my entire vacation....
But all I knew as we took off was that I was leaving behind one of the best experiences of my life... and didn't know what a long day I had a head of me just yet. All I could think of was how sad I was to leave this dream destination....

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Comments

[nicknack]

what happened to 3?
Hey bunny? Count much?