The Inaccurate Tourist

28. Greece: Santorini, Mykonos

The story of my Greece vacation actually starts eight months earlier, when I arrived in France. I don't think I need to repeat how incredible the experience has been (please refer to every other log I've written), but there's been a constant low-grade anxiety and tension. It was especially obvious during the first days when I was trying to figure out how to eat and get around, and it came back in full force just before my dive vacation in the south.

But don't cry for me -- I think I adapted very well. My language skills have improved, the culture shock has (mostly) worn off, and I can live and enjoy my everyday life in one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world. It's difficult to explain how, nevertheless, how I never actually let the anxiety and tension go. I just got used to carrying it around.

The fifteenth of August is not a day to be visiting Europe, unless you want to see stores locked up like warehouses and empty streets. This is a Catholic religious holiday (Ascension, when Mary was called to heaven), and everybody leaves the cities to go to the seaside. Myself, I took the train to Belgium.

That is to say, I took the Thalys line to Brussels (a quick hour-long jaunt) and transferred there to get to Antwerp (also known as Antwerpen, which means 'thrown hand', and refers to the legend of Brabo cutting off the hand of the giant guarding the port. Also known as Anvers, which means Antwerpen.) Keith was there to meet me at the impressive Centraal Station. Keith is a co-worker from Vancouver, relocated to Antwerp, and he has a dangerous combination of wicked intelligence and wicked humour. We had lunch at The Canadian Ice Cream parlour.

A few hours later, we caught up with Glenn at the station. Glenn is also a co-worker and good friend from Vancouver. He had arrived from his flight to Amsterdam, and he expressed his dead exhaustion by performing dangerous acrobatics on the marble steps of the station. We asked him to consider touring Antwerp with us instead, and we went into the city to see some old buildings, a cathedral and a couple of squares (one featuring a giant, severed hand). The buildings are tight together as in Paris, but the roofs are connected differently. The Belgians also have a better sense of windows than the French.

We went to a local pub near the big square, The Dubliner (sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows Keith's name...) and had a beer with Tim and his Australian mates. Tim is not only a Canadian, but he comes from Tuktoyaktuk. We went to Tim's beautiful rooftop apartment with a large barbecue-perfect deck, after putting Glenn to bed (he hadn't slept for nearly two days).

The peculiar tension screw wound tight in my head unturned a bit.

Friday morning was your typical pre-Greece-preparation morning in Antwerp. We ate yoghurt and granola at a cafe, bought some biodegradable soap and searched unsuccessfully for someplace that could give us all a haircut. Keith filled us in on typical Belgian life, and warned us not to be fooled by the beautiful sunny Antwerpen day. We caught the bus to the Brussels airport and checked into our Virgin Express flight.

I believe in word of mouth advertising -- let me tell you that I was impressed with the Virgin Express travel service. The check-in woman let us weigh ourselves on the baggage scale and tried to guess our weight (my bag was 8.5kg including 1.5L of water, and I weigh 66kg (at time of writing)). She let us take our largish packs on as carry-on so we could boot it in Athens to catch the night ferry. They even served the best cole slaw sandwich that I have ever eaten (and I hope that it keeps this title). The rates were alright as well, especially compared to the discount airlines flying out of Paris.

The flight to Athens was three and a half hours long with a time zone difference of one hour. We stepped off the plane right into the proper bus and got to the port Piraeus for the fraction of the cost of the taxi. We picked up a ticket on the next overnight ferry to Santorini (eight hours away, the farthest of the islands in the Cyclades) immediately. We had the first of many tasty and inexpensive gyros. Everything was going so incredibly smoothly, and we asked ourselves, what could possibly go wrong?

The answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing goes wrong in Greece. We found our cabin on the ferry and went up to the deck to watch the bright, white moon on the water. The moon is higher, crisper, whiter and casts a longer reflection in Greece. The breeze is warm, and the deck is full of sleeping bags and backpackers, and a bit of irritating trance music. If you aren't opting for the cabin, you should grab a sofa or deck space immediately.

I slept well on the ferry, and we woke up to see the ship drop off passengers at Ios island. We went outside to watch the water and Greece in daylight and to arrive at Santorini. There was a line-up of hotel vendors at the port shouting descriptions of their places, but we had already reserved at Hotel Nikolas. They had sent a van and a man holding a sign to fetch us. He took us up the steep cliffs of the island to our hotel at the top. The hotel was pleasantly arranged red and yellow cubes with a brilliant blue pool. Since it was still pretty early, we waited by the pool for our room to be prepared, and helped ourselves to their breakfast. We got in touch with another Canadian expatriate living in Belgium and vacationing in Greece, Reid, who urged us to go rent our scooters and find some lamb to eat.

We quickly learned that the Canadian driver's licenses aren't sufficient for renting scooters on the Greek islands, for insurance reasons. Nearly any other country is good, except Canada. Reid got away with it by letting the proprietor misinterpret British Columbia (Canadian == BAD) as Columbia (South American == not Canadian == GOOD). If you're Canadian and you want to rent a scooter, which you should, you need an International Driver's Permit with the endorsement for small two-wheeled vehicles. It's simple to get -- all you need to do is go to the license bureau (the BCAA in BC) and wave some cash. I know this because I have my IDP sitting in my desk in France. We also learned that you can't always order roast lamb at noon in above-thirty weather.

So we went back to the hotel, unpacked in our room and sat by the pool for the entire afternoon, occasionally dropping in for a splash, reading and lounging. That tight screw in my head unloosened a bit more. This was fun.

We met Reid and Steve for supper in Fira town, about a twenty minute walk away. Steve is an American expatriate living and working in the Latin Quarter in Paris. Reid described Fira town very aptly as 'sugar cubes tumbling down a cliff'. The buildings are different colours of off-white, they are perched along and down the cliff face and there are uncountable terraces and balconies connected by winding passages and mysterious staircases. And they all have amazing views. Our meal was on one of these open-air terraces with the view of the bright, white moon over the volcanic island off the shore. We all ordered the lamb (although the waiter informed Glenn that his would be beef mislabelled as lamb), and my plate was excellent.

It was getting late so codgerly Keith and Glenn went back to the hotel to rest their weary old, old bones. I decided to accompany Reid and Steve to The Tropical Bar. It was a pretty small place, already crowded although 'the crowd' hadn't arrived yet, but it had a balcony. In fact, we managed to snag the premium spot in all of Santorini -- a small table on the balcony that overlooked the entire town. It was a great spot to sit and drink Johnny Walker Red (delivered by our Swedish angel, Jenny) and to talk to the Australians, the Greeks and the Greco-Australians. I'm not a particularly heavy drinker, but somehow I magically acquired a taste for scotch on the rocks that night. And despite trying to take it easy on the booze, they kept coming. We saw the moon set from high, bright, silver to low, red and dim over the volcanic island off of Santorini. Beautiful.

During the night, the DJ played mostly music from our high school days, and our JUNIOR high school days. Some of the songs had done the full circuit from being a hit, to being despised and mocked, to being forgotten, and then being played in a club for humour and irony (Ice Ice Baby). The DJ wasn't very talented -- I believe he changed songs by smacking his record player really hard. And when it started getting light, they kicked us out.

We made the walk back to our respective hotels, accompanied by a sunrise visible over the ocean on the other side of the island -- we had put the sun to bed, tucked in the moon and then welcomed the sun back in a single night. The sky was light blue, and the sun sat at the edge in pink and orange. The tension screw in my head had fallen out. The vise that squeezed the parts of my brain that worried about metro connections, groceries, water leaks and ironing had busted. I noticed their absence.

I snuck into our hotel room for my first nights sleep on Santorini. Less than two hours later, I woke up and put on clean shorts. I did some laundry in the sink, and when I hung it up on our balcony, the Greek girls across from us whistled and giggled at me (thinking I was still in my underwear, perhaps?) I went to go talk to them and discovered they had also pulled an all-nighter. We chatted fuzzily and they taught me some Greek phrases ('c'mere' baby' and 'No!') and they told me where to visit and avoid on the island (and how to dance when I got there).

The hotel staff had already cleared away most of the breakfast, but I managed to snag coffee and chocolate corn flakes, both of which I ate with coffee cream. Keith, Glenn and I went to explore some more of Fira town. Once again, we ate lunch on a terrace in the blue Greek sky.

Santorini was originally a large, round island, but it blew up a couple of thousand years ago (before insurance companies). The cliffs of what remained form a broken crescent in the water; Fira spills down the steep sides facing the ocean-filled caldera. Over the years, the volcanic rock in the middle has risen back out of the water, and is still active. Given more time, this would probably have been an interesting geological field trip.

We spent the afternoon on one of Santorini's black beaches, Kamari beach. It wasn't a sandy beach, but the pebbles were pleasantly smooth and were, indeed, a dark grey. I was feeling a bit tired, so I stretched out, fell asleep and stayed asleep. It was pretty bright and sunny day, so apparently somebody would spray sunblock on me occasionally. Later on in the afternoon, I finally waded into the Aegean sea and went for a swim.

For supper, we chose an open-air terrace in the blue Greek sky (for a change), and saw some fireworks launched from the volcanic island, and also from the top of Fira. That night we visited the 'happening' spot -- Murphy's. It was, in fact, packed full of people. They played the same music as the Tropical Bar (with a much more capable DJ), and it was full of British and Australians going aggro. No view of the ocean, but they did have Red Bull and vodkas.

We went to the Tropical bar again later to show the incredible view there, and it was pretty dead. So was I, so we went back to the hotel and went to sleep.

The next day (Monday), we bid adieu to Reid and Steve and took the fast ferry to Mykonos. This is a reasonably comfortable, one level, one room ferry that zips between the islands in half the time, so the trip was reasonably short. I was initially disappointed with the entry into Mykonos -- it had a reputation of being the 'party island', but it seemed to be very flat and sparsely populated. This time we found our hotel through the vendors yelling at the port.

Our hotel was about a five minute walk from Paranga beach, which had really nice white sand, beautiful blue water and a really comfortable and laid back atmosphere. We hung out at the restaurant on the beach for quite a bit of the afternoon, and then took a walk to Paradise beach, which is pretty much a single, huge night club catering to another beautiful beach.

The bus left Paradise beach for Mykonos town, where Ketos finally obtained his long awaited haircut. Glenos and I took a walk through the town and I realized my error -- on arriving in Mykonos, you can't see the town or the windmills. There are giant windmills overlooking the ocean (Mykonos has a warm, but aggressive wind), and the town is mysterious snaking passageways around white and blue sugar cube houses and churches. Santorini is stunning from the first view, but Mykonos surpasses it.

All the girlfriends got emailed from Mykonos, we ate gyros and wandered. That night we ate at an open air terrace at ocean level, and saw another amazing Greek sunset. Later that evening, we went back to Paradise beach to see if the party had started. It hadn't, but we decided to call it a night.

I should probably explain that both Paranga and Paradise beach were attached to major campgrounds -- which looked very full and very happy. If you're planning on visiting Mykonos for any length of time, I would recommend camping as an inexpensive alternative. On our way back to our hotel, we passed by the open-air lounge at the Paranga beach campground and we stopped for vodka tonics. The lounge didn't seem like much during the day, but the moonlight, the ocean and the lit pool gave it a great ambiance during the night. We chatted and told stories for much longer than we intended, and then headed back to our hotel.

Tuesday morning was uncomfortably sad. This would be my last day with the guys in Greece -- I had planned a slightly shorter trip than they did so that I could conserve vacation days to go back to Canada for Christmas. Keith did his best to convince me to stay, rebook my (non-refundable) flight and let them know at work that I'd be gone two extra days. I was having an amazingly good time -- a life-changingly good time. I had already booked my ferry ticket for 5:30pm that afternoon, and my hotel in Athens. The decision was excruciatingly difficult.

I did leave Mykonos at 5:30pm, after a day of sitting on the beach, swimming in the ocean and wandering around the town. Keith's arguments were entirely correct -- I did want to stay, this was the exact sort of experience that I want in Europe, I might never have the opportunity to be in Greece with Ketos and Glenos again... On the other hand... actually, I can't think exactly why I left. It seemed to make sense at the time.

The moral of the story is 'Never plan to leave a vacation early.' For some reason, the idea of taking vacation days outside the allotted (and unpaid, of course) didn't occur to me. It would have been worth it.

So I took the ferry back to Athens (five and a half hours) and walked at night at the Port Piraeus to my hotel and went to sleep. In the morning, I took the metro (with my loaded pack), climbed the Acropolis and looked at the Parthenon for an hour and a half. Athens is preparing for the Olympic Games in 2004, so most of the ancient works are under extensive restoration, so this last ditch effort to make this a cultural trip was pretty half-hearted. I caught the bus to the airport, flew back to Belgium, took the train to France and the metro back to my place.

Would you have stayed in Greece? Please don't comment on the fact that I haven't put up the previous two logs yet.

26. Versailles

The Goldstroms and I spent the Sunday at Versailles. This is one of the most incredible monuments left by the monarchy, conceived by Louis the fourteenth to surpass all the chateaux belonging to the nobility. It was originally a hunting lodge built by his father, and Louis XIV had the foremost architects, gardeners artists and engineers build it into a palace worthy to be the new home of the Sun King and the centre of France's court life.

We took the RER C train to Versailles. The Goldstroms each purchased the Versailles Passport from the metro, which includes the metro fare, the grounds and both of the tours through the chateau. I highly recommend the passport, since it saves you money and you get to bypass the lines (there's a separate door for the Passport holders). Your trip to Versailles will almost certainly be limited by your foot strength -- there's no reason to spend that time standing in the crowded line-ups.

The museum pass is good for one of the two tours in the chateau, but you have to pay for the garden and the second tour. Unless you are only going for the gardens, I can pretty much guarantee that the combination passport is the best way to visit.

On the métro, you should get a spot on the top, Seine-side of the double-decker train. You won't be able to see the Eiffel tower, but you'll be able to watch the Seine and some scenery, and you should be able to see the replica of the Statue of Liberty as you pass. The trip doesn't take very long at all, and once you're in Versailles, the walk to the chateau is fairly short and well marked.

We took the tour of the outer chambers first, flashing our Very Important Person Passports at the side door to skip the already outrageous line. The tour was pretty grand, and the chateau has been well-appointed with furniture and restorations from the period (apparently a lot of the originals were stolen or destroyed during the revolution). One of the rooms with an impressive Hercules painting covering the ceiling had an equally impressive display describing how the most recent restoration was performed and how it repaired much of the damage caused by earlier restorations.

Most of the state chambers were decorated according to mythological themes, but Napoleon left his mark as well. One of the very famous paintings by David is hanging here, showing Napoleon crowning his wife Josephine as Empress under the peeved expression of the Pope.

I had read that the estimated cost of the construction of the chateau and grounds at Versailles (over the years it took) eventually added up to half the annual GDP of France at that time. This is mind-boggling.

The gardens were created to bring to mind the absolute rule the king had over his country, his subjects, the other nobles and nature. Lines were cut into the countryside -- long, broad, straight and green -- so your eye could see exactly how much land he had available for his gardens.

The canals are also long and wide. Tourists (and in a sense, anybody that isn't French royalty is a tourist here) can rent rowboats by the hour to travel on the canal. We sat down with some sandwiches to watch two giggling Japanese girls try to figure out how to get back to the shore -- they obviously weren't salted mariners.

My favourite part of the day were the fountains. They take an incredible amount of resources to run, and originally they would typically only be turned on when the king was in sight. Today, there are certain hours during the weekend when most (but not all) of the fountains are run, accompanied by classical music and guards blowing whistles. The complete list of the fountains and their times are available at the chateau. We were only in the gardens for the late afternoon session, but that was sufficient to see nearly all the fountains.

The Bassin de Latone shows the moment where Latone (the mother of Apollo) has the villagers taunting her turned into frogs. Very imaginatively and disturbingly done, their bug-eyed pleas for mercy go unheeded as their very flesh turns to slime and ribbits. Needless to say, it was my personal favourite of the fountains (a close second goes to the golden titan being drowned alive under black rock).

There are several things to see in the gardens other than the fountains. We walked along the Grand Canal to the Grand Trianon (used as the offices of the president for some time) and the Petit Trianon. There is also the renowned Queen's Hamlet, where Marie-Antoinette could go to play at being a milkmaid or shepherdess in order to escape the strain of being Queen -- needless to say, the sheep were perfumed and the servants did the actual work.

I actually didn't do the second tour at the chateau, which shows the private chambers of the king. I separated from the Goldstroms to visit the few fountains that we hadn't yet seen that day.

One of the non-Versailles highlight of the week was meeting Aaron and Maria, Christopher and some other French people at a restaurant close to Place de Vosges. I had the escargot (for the first time in France), the noix de Saint Jacques and the tarte tatin for dessert. Just so you know.

And if you happen to see Aaron, could you ask him whether a one dimensional hypertorus would be a line segment, two points or a single point? With all the gesticulating over coffee about the four dimensional hypercube that makes up the Grande Arche in La Defense, I completely forgot to bring it up.