Mykonos Part II: Bad Dreams, Good Beaches

Love at first sight is the only way to describe the instantaneous relationship between me and the Mykonos coastal town of Hora. There are no cars in the center, so you can finally relax since there’s no longer a chance that you’ll
a) die in a fatal car accident or
b) be walking down the narrow, sidewalk-less streets and be killed by a passing vehicle.
In the town center, you can finally let your guard down and meander in chic European style. The roads are cobblestone, winding and so narrow that only two to four bodies can pass through at a given time. The buildings are pure white against the deep blue Mediterranean and the town is a kind of boisterous labyrinth: bars, trendy restaurants and blasting music can fade away in one turn to reveal art galleries, quiet rooftop restaurants, houses with potted plants, clothing stores, souvenir shops or churches. If you follow the maze down to the waterfront you see magnificent yachts and cruise ships sparkling in the distance. Seafood restaurants line the sea’s main piazza. If you head toward Mykonos’ signature windmills, there’s an area called Little Venice where the sidewalk dangerously narrows and you feel as if you’re walking along canals, the ocean lapping right below your feet.

Golden and I had our first meal at a trendy restaurant called Coo in the center of Hora. We inappropriately hadn’t made a reservation but were seated almost immediately when Golden recognized an old friend from Athens who had now retired from mainland life and was apparently Coo’s owner.

“He used to own a really popular bar in Athens and I was dating the other owner’s ex-girlfriend,” Golden explained over drinks at Coo’s long, white bar.

“So if you were banging his business partners ex doesn’t he hate you?” I asked confused.

“That’s why we’re having drinks at the bar before we’re seated.” Golden said sipping his Heineken with a smile.

At Coo we had the best lobster risotto I’ve ever had in my life. None of this stingy American invisible lobster morsels in your food crap. We had an entire, Mediterranean crustation in our risotto, pulled right out of the nearby sea. Delicious.

After sleeping in, our days were spent taking the car and checking out various beaches, the roads to which, merit a novel themselves. Steep and treacherous aren’t words that do these back roads justice. Imagine navigating a stick shift Smart car through blind turns on dusty un-paven cliffs. My nails would be digging into the dashboard until making that one turn which would reveal the sparkling ocean and the beach below, forcing me to exhale and relax.

Day one we chilled on nearby Paradise beach, lovely except for the screaming spoiled Greek children nearby. After we relocated, I still wasn’t able to fully concentrate on my book since I was now in direct view of Mykonos’ Paradise beach lifeguard, appropriately the hottest man I’ve ever seen. As if it couldn’t get any better, day two we trekked to Super Paradise beach (this is actually it’s legitimate name, I have photos of the road signs to prove it.)

Super Paradise had no children, a lot of topless women and the occasional naked old man, hoards of young people, and music from three different sources, forcing you to choose your own beat. The ocean was salty to the extreme and the entire beach Caribbean-like in the water’s purity. No seaweed or fish/animals anywhere – just the sun’s jigsaw puzzle designs. I once or twice freaked out that there was something splashing in the water with me, but quickly realized it was my own bikini’s bow-tied strings. Yeah, in seawater I’m the biggest scardy-cat loser ever. I blame my father who let me watch all three Jaws movies consecutively in one sitting at age nine. I still haven’t recovered.

Since my spastic, fast-paced, Manhattan wired body isn’t used to this kind of intense relaxation, it’s compensating by giving me horrific, stress-inducing dreams. Isn’t it fascinating how our body chemistry attempts to retain a sense of normality? The bad news for me is that my ‘normal’ equals a rushed, panicked physical experience similar to that of an ulcer. Thanks to my dreams, which have ranged from me getting swallowed by a giant tsunami-like tidal wave, being betrayed by my closest friends, abandoned in the woods, and left to violent grizzly bears, I’ve developed a canker sore the size of a small crater on the right side of my mouth. This is the only physically malady I have to report at this point. The large cigarette burn on my knee bestowed on me by Bartok’s Marlboro light the evening we went to Per Lei has healed well thanks to my excessive salt water bathing, and it doesn’t look like it will permanently scar.

In other local news, I’ve morphed into a kind of blonde Bob Marley as the seawater has transformed my long hair into white-girl dreadlocks. If there’s a real victim in this vacation so far it’s my hair, which follows a routine a salt-water – pool chlorine – salt-water – shitty shampoo – salt water everyday. Greek hotels (even the nice ones) don’t seem think conditioner’s a life-necessity (insanity, right?!) and refuse to provide it. Those of you who’ve followed this blog since it’s early stages know that my hair’s an especially sensitive topic, and I intend on entering my locks into deep-conditioning rehab the moment I return to civilization. Soon however, my bladder will be in need of rehab as well. Those of you who’ve enjoyed by good-hearted mocking of aSmallWorld.net will be intrigued to know that there is aSW part right here on Mykonos, and I’m a confirmed attendant. Does aSmallWorld offer real life fun? Something besides a sense of internet-networking superiority? While slightly concerned about the effect alcohol consumption will have on my already LSD, psychotic level nightmares, I intent to find out. All this and more, stay tuned.

Alive (barely) and Reporting From Mykonos

So allow me to state what’s become obvious, island life isn’t really conducive to blogging, hence my absence from the web the majority of last week. While the Greek isles do make people want to indulge in extreme bouts of laziness, mass amounts of liquor, and scandalous levels of sex, it’s not really an appropriate environment for productive work of any kind. Or unproductive work of any kind. It’s just impossible to work at all. Period. It’s both creepy and phenomenal.

After a three-hour ferry ride from Piraeus to Mykonos, I disembarked at the Mykonos port just in time to witness the most magnificent pink sunset I’ve ever seen. Mykonos as an island is utterly barren. You could water sunflower seeds here for hours and be lucky if the dirt remained moist. There’s no shade, no trees, and nothing green. Yet paradoxically the island’s utterly beautiful, wild and picturesque in its own unique way. And entirely dysfunctional. Especially in August. The first example of this dysfunctionality occurred immediately after exiting the large, crimson, Vodafone ferry/advertisement that had transported me to the island: There were no cabs. You’d think a major port, and the only mass means of access to the island (aside from a tiny, infrequently used airport) where groups of tourists and Greeks alike are dropped off by the hundreds every few hours would be a magnet for Greek taxi drivers eager to rip off the next dazed and clueless arrival. Wrong. There were no cabs in sight, and let me clarify that the port’s in the middle of nowhere. I saw two taxis somewhere in the dusty distance which were snagged before I could even throw my extremely heavy purse over my shoulder. That’s it? TWO cabs for our five hundred-person arrival in a ferry that was larger than six city blocks? The math was very fuzzy.

Most people rushed toward uber-tanned tour guides holding Contiki or other tour group signs. Many boarded shuttle buses with various hotel resort names sprawled across the side. Since I’d be staying at a cheapo hotel booked last minute, there was no hope of receiving a hotel provided shuttle. In the madness, the best move seemed to be to rush out of the port area as quickly as possible. Golden conversed with some obscenely tan, wrinkled old men who drove what looked like toy size pick-up trucks (luggage transporters) that only fit one person, the driver, in front. These vehicles seemed like what olive pickers pre-World War I might have transported produce in, and they certainly didn’t seem solid, safe, or sturdy enough to be on 21st century roads. Yet I’d soon discover that any contraption with wheels was fair game in the streets of Mykonos.

After walking the winding road out of the port (note there are no sidewalks in Mykonos so car tires are constantly skidding dangerously near your sandals), Golden spotted a rental car agency. Moments later we were the proud owners of our own tiny, red Smart car that looked more like a child’s toy than something adults would actually drive. We zoomed off when the sun had just disappeared below the horizon and nighttime had officially commenced. What I then witnessed can only be described as a jungle. Imagine the drunken partiers inside Pink Elephant New York, multiply them by three hundred, give them all scooters, and scatter them throughout an island, and you’ll be envisioning only the mere beginnings of what I saw. Hundreds of frighteningly attractive people in bathing suits on mopeds, singing, shrieking, and honking with joy. No helmets anywhere, skin exposed to the max. Dozens of attractive couples on AVM motor bikes (it looks like a roofless toy jeep and rides low to the ground at slow speed) pareas clinging to their bodies, sunglasses on their heads. Jeeps with shirtless drivers, three guys up front, six girls standing in swimsuits in the back as the car worked its way down dark switchback cliffs. A bandana-wearing scooter driver hollering in Italian, his passenger’s arms spread out to his sides with joy as if flying. Junky, blue city buses past capacity filled with partiers clutching beach blankets. These buses teetered on the cliffs, the engines stuttering as they transported herds of happy people from the beaches into town for the nighttime fun. Since people on scooters tended to be groups of friends traveling in packs, everyone’s always calling out to each other and slowing down to chit chat or confer on directions, making the roads that much more dangerous. And everyone’s always honking. It’s Mykonos’ signature sound. I’m not sure if this is an act of exuberance or a more practical warning signal for cars on the other side of the many blind turns. My guess is both.

Every which way I looked there were enthralled, tan, young people, all of whom had clearly never heard of the words ‘car accident’ or ‘drunk driving.’ Note also that there are no traffic lights on Mykonos. The island’s many rotaries are so confused and congested that it’s an utter free for all, drivers calling out to each other in jumbled Italian and Greek (the only two nationalities brave enough to drive) and in almost all cases aggression is the only traffic code of law. These tiny island intersections make the huge traffic circle in Paris seem harmless. The roads to the beaches are literally mountainous steep switchback turns and narrower than your average one-way street. Yet here, they are two-way streets – treacherous roads for the most incapacitated drivers. “There are deaths every summer,” Golden says to me as he maneuvers our stick shift into performing a nearly 360 degree uphill turn, six motorinos blindly passing us on the left. “They just don’t report it because it’s bad for tourism.” My jaw hadn’t closed since we left the rental agency.

Our hotel was near the famous Mykonos beach called Paradise, home also to the island’s most well known club, the outdoor megaplex Cavo Paradiso which is open until 12 noon everyday. Everyone arrives at 4 or 5 a.m. and parties through sunrise and breakfast the next day. It was only 9 p.m. when we drove past and there were already excellent house tunes pumping out of speakers bigger than cars and hundreds of tan bodies in bathing suits dancing on the main floor and sand. After only two minutes of this ambience: the gleefully honking scooters, the laid back beach aura, and the irresistible music, I was in the island vibe and ready to leap out of the car and be handed a vodka lemon.

We checked into our hotel, which was actually lovely for having three stars, and had an infinity pool overlooking Paradise beach. We then hopped back into our little red Smart car, which I was already absurdly attached to, and battled the drunken party traffic into Mykonos’ main town Hora. As we descended the deep slope toward the town I saw motorbikes and scooters parked along the already absurdly narrow two way street by the hundreds. People had parked along every road, cliff, rock, and surface space available. Kids in bathing suits roamed the nighttime streets in hoards. Music was everywhere. Driving was nearly impossible. I never have, and don’t think I ever will, be in a place with this extent of palpable energy. After inventing a spot on the side of what looked like a modern day crater and surviving the stench of our burning tires, Golden and I descended the dusty, rocky, unpaved parking lot (there are no such thing as paved or organized parking lots in Mykonos) and followed the hoards of people into the illusive town center of which I had heard so much but never seen.

To Be Continued…

Getaway to Greece: Part II

I, Model Behavior, have gone from a compulsive to-do list making Manhattan maniac to an essentially worthless Mediterranean housewife in a matter of days. And I’m loving it. I quote myself as ‘worthless’ because I do absolutely nothing domestic. I haven’t cleaned one dinner dish or put together any semblance of a meal. Instead, I lounge, swim, read, contemplate exercising, and eat the plentiful leftovers from my arrival feast. Golden and I drink profusely at night, emerge from bed around noon, then sip frappes and consume Greek breakfast at outdoor lounges in Kithisia before swimming at home or heading to the beach. I’m a huge fan of the Greek yogurt with honey and nuts, the sweet brioches, and cheese pie. For the first time in months, I actually have time to eat. In New York, I’m one of those pseudo-anorexic anally busy chicks, who only gets a real meal if someone manages to get me into a restaurant and buckled into a chair. My diet tends to consist of yogurt, cereal, Milano cookies, and spoonfuls of peanut butter. Since Golden’s never seen me substantially consume food in the USA, he’s blown away by my new found appetite, and suspects my body’s been taken over by a squad of tzatziki loving aliens. He’s absurdly full at the end of our five-course Greek meals, while I’m ready for ice cream.

Our latest and most strenuous activity to date was a return to the lovely beach thirty minutes away. After swimming and sunning, Golden took me to a fish taverna in a tiny coastal town near where his grandmother has a summer home. We claimed an outdoor table in the empty seating area and proceeded into the kitchen where he and the waiter together picked our fish selection out of metal drawers filled with the catch of the day packed in ice. Golden held and examined our fish carefully before handing them to a worn woman in an apron to grill and fry. We eat feta cheese with our French fries. We snarf down large salads of juicy tomatoes, cucumbers and onion. My breath has never been more disgusting and I couldn’t be happier.

The majority of my time here I’ve felt like an infant. I can’t properly communicate with anyone, and Golden facilitates all our transactions with the outside world speaking Greek at a mile a minute. I paid for one of our bottled waters the other day all on my own performing sign language with the cashier. I felt like a big girl for the first time since I left Milan. It’s helplessly pathetic and I love it.

It’s only in a state of utter relaxation such as this when one can begin to acknowledge at what an absurdly fast pace we zoom through life in New York. I was such a gerbil on a spinning wheel that I had no idea how superhumanly fast I was going. Here, after waking up from my mid-afternoon nap, approaching my laptop to check my email just seems too stressful. I opt for some quiet reading by the open window where I enjoy the greenery and slew of country kittens that like to roam the yard and sneak into the house when Golden and I leave the terrace’s sliding doors open. I, the girl who used to check my four different email accounts every ten minutes during the working day, now cannot be bothered to connect to the internet. I fear receiving an email that might upset my daily schedule of nothingness by reminding me of something productive I should be doing. I, the text message queen, have had my cell phone off for over four days. I, the girl who’s averaged four and half hours of sleep a night this summer, now takes approximately three naps a day.

Safari came to visit and stay with us Saturday night. We went out to a local Athenian bar where the distinctly Greek music with mandolins is occasionally mixed with U2 and Nelly Furtado. I’ve met a lot of ship-owners children (who are all very down to earth for being worth $130 million each) as well as friends of Golden’s I apparently know from Pink in New York (I have zero recollection.) My new beverage of choice is peach daiquiris – and they put in a lotta rum over here. It’s kind of amazing when buzzed, sitting at an outdoor table, music swelling the background, you look to your left and see the Acropolis glowing on a mountainous rock complex above you.

Now readers don’t worry. This absurdly boring domestic bliss won’t last forever. Tomorrow we leave for Mykonos, where Golden and I both fear we’ll get so drunk that we’ll break up and lose each other in the swarms of absurdly attractive people. At least we realize this is a possibility. If we survive the party island, it’s off to Santorini for some good fish and romantic relaxation. After three more days in Athens we go our separate ways for a bit. Golden joins a guy friend of his in Riga (or someplace equally absurd) and I head to Italy. The million dollar question is: Where in Italy … ? I don’t really feel like ending up on some ex-boyfriend’s doorstep, which eliminates a lot of my vacation options. I’m thinking of publishing a humorous pro and con list of my Italian options sometime this week.

Stay tuned for an official Mykonos report. Some people say it’s classy, others deem it trashy. Some people have told me there’s tons of gay men making out in the street and Italian guidos grabbing at anything with breasts. Others say it’s twenty times classier than Ibiza with chic, high quality (whatever that means) people. Paris Hilton apparently hated it; my friend Safari was a big fan. No matter what, the sunsets are guaranteed to be amazing. I can’t wait to check it out for myself. Tomorrow!

Getaway to Greece

Having heard enough horror stories about unbearable traffic delays and missed flights, I forwent a taxi and instead hopped the subway to JFK. I was at AlItalia’s terminal in less than an hour, standing in line, making all the necessary ‘I’m leaving for a month’ goodbye phone calls to parents and close friends. I predicted we’d leave an hour late (Has anyone ever left on time from JFK?) and sure enough we sat at the gate for 45 minutes, then on the runway for another 40.

“Good evening everyone this is Captain undecipherable undecipherable and it is my pleasure to be flying you today to … (long pause as he looks through a clip board to see where we’re going) … Milan.”

That’s the last we heard from our dear captain as we proceeded to waste nearly two hours on the ground. See, other airlines constantly update you on what’s going on: “We should be heading out here in about twenty minutes, sorry for the delay,” or blame someone else: “We’re about fifth priority right now to air traffic control, thanks for your patience.” But no. At AlItalia you get nothing. No explanation. No blame pinning. Why? Because they’re all having too much fun playing cards and smoking Marlboro’s in the cockpit to inform the plane-full of passengers that we’ll be leaving with an hour and thirty minute delay. Note also that our AlItalia flight was operated in conjunction with Delta and AreoMexico. AreoMexico helped get me to Milan? I guess bankruptcy forces absurd collaborations to occur.

Thanks to the very large Ambien I consumed right before my plane meal of steak which looked exactly like canned dog-food, the rest of the flight passed very quickly. I woke about an hour before we landed and then wandered Milan’s Malpensa airport, memories buzzing around me like a swarm of wasps. I sought refuge in the Bulgari store and fell in love with what I thought was a simple pendant on a gold chain, only to be informed that the necklace would cause me around $1,500. Bummer. Only Milan’s Malpensa airport has the power to make even the most fashion conscious travelers feel un-chic. Every designer in the world has a store spanning the airports long hallway hub. Why bother driving forty minutes into the city to stroll Via Spiga when you can go bankrupt tax-free right in the air-conditioned comfort of Malpensa? Thankfully, I boarded my flight to Greece without any financially damaging purchases and began to get really excited to my best friend and Greek lover, Golden.

Now, I’m sure some of my more consistent readers are shaking their heads and muttering, “Greek lover? How have we not heard about this before?” Well, the answer is that Golden is my best-kept secret, and has been for a year and a half. Why? Because I actually have serious feelings for this guy. Feelings so deep rooted that even a reckless partier like me doesn’t want to write about him on the internet for entertainment purposes, and I want to write about everyone and everything (including myself!) for entrainment purposes. So we know this guy has to be pretty special. Let’s not go as far to call him Model Behavior’s boyfriend or anything like that, but let’s say that there’s a mutual long-term interest. Golden and I recently had a semi-serious conversation in which I addressed the fact that I felt it necessary to introduce him as character in the life of my blog, since I wanted to properly and truthfully convey my experiences during these weeks in Greece. Golden grinned and replied: “Make me however you want! Whatever to help make your writing the best it can be. You can even make me bad!” I don’t feel the need to make Golden a fictional bad boy because God knows we have enough real ones of those. The point here is that I was extremely psyched to see him. Golden lives in the US but not in New York. He left for Greece about two weeks before I would join him, but it felt like I hadn’t seen him in much longer.

Since I’d stupidly grin to myself every time I imagined finally seeing Golden, I was totally shocked when I came out of the airport doors, saw him rushing toward me, and realized I had tears streaming down my face. This is just another example of how lovely it is to be a woman: You have absolutely no idea how the rollercoaster that is your emotional state of being is going to swerve at any given point in time. Golden and I had traveled to Europe twice together last summer, but this was the first time we’d be together in his native Greece. For some reason, I was overcome with feeling. I’m sure the twenty hours of traveling, bad food, pills, dehydration and lack of sleep had nothing to do with it.

His parents are currently on vacation in the South of Greece so we have his family home in Ekali all to ourselves before heading to the islands in a week. Their family maid had kindly prepared several homemade traditional Greek specialities for me, which I dug into moments after my arrival. The meal included more deliciously roasted vegetables than I’ve probably consumed in the past two months. Next I was given a tour of the house, the outdoor gardens, and the neighboring houses including the Latsis residence, home of the notorious douchebag Paris Latsis who proposed to slutbag Hilton after dating her for something like three weeks. Their property had guards and walls with frightening looking spikes. It took us almost eight minutes to drive the huge country block around their whole private compound in a car going 30 kilometers per hour. Their mountain top pad is pretty damn big.

Next, we descended southward into the city of Athens. Golden showed me the enormous gated property where he went to high school (which literally looked like a wing of the Louvre) and then took me to see a building his family owned in Athens, an office six-story which they were planning to convert into luxury condos. After giving my opinion about where I thought the kitchenette should be installed in each and every different unit (which I’m sure he and the workman really appreciated) we did a quick driving tour of the city and ate more mouth-watering Greek food at a local taverna.

Today, I thought Golden had got word of my notorious Manhattan misbehavior when claiming to take me to the beach, he drove us further and further up into the dusty mountains. I became almost convinced that he was planning to throw me over a cliff, when suddenly we curved through a turn and the entire city and aquamarine ocean stretched out before us. After nearly impaling myself on a telephone pole trying to take pictures of this magnificent drop out the car window, we arrived at a secluded beach proceeded to read and frolic in the sand. The water was just how I like it: clear, with no waves, no fish, and as warm as a bathtub.

Other interesting phenomena of note:
a) The language is impossible to pick up (I’m still working on how to properly say thank you)
b) There are almost as many Starbucks as there are in Manhattan and
c) People here like to drive their mopeds with their helmet hanging from their elbow.

I fee this last observation is somehow telling about the Greek mentality, although my psychoanalytical abilities have yet to decipher what precisely it means. I can understand riding a moped wearing a helmet (certainly safe). I can also understand going sans-helmet, sexy Italian style. But to ride your vespa with your helmet around your arm? This just makes no sense. At that point wouldn’t it be easier to leave it at home or stick it on your head? I’ll try to get Golden to give me more info.

So the R&R ends right now, and partying begins tonight. This evening we’re having dinner in the center of Athens with Golden’s cousins (plural) and checking out some nightclubs after. Tomorrow my New York girlfriend Safari arrives from Mykonos to party with us as well, so I’ll have a friend from home to partner up with, if only for a night. Stayed tuned for reports of the Athens nightlife (we hear the Greeks like to drink) and for an eventual journey to the islands!

Andio keh simera tha ginee tis putanas! (I think that means ‘bye and tonight we’re going to party like bitches!') Cheers!