Greece: Mykonos

Sorry I'm not telling this story as fast as I planned-- I am studying for the RD exam and it is taking over my life! Until I take it I'm going to have a hard time getting a job (it actually probably isn't going to be that easy even after I take it) so I've made it a high priority.

Anyway, Mykonos. This ended up being the nicest hotel in some ways, of our entire trip. It was right on the beach, had free internet (important for keeping my mom and Marc updated that we made it and were still alive) and it had breakfast included in the price of the room-- this turned out to be very helpful, especially since the breakfast was amazing! They had pretty much anything you could ever want-- fantastic thick greek yogurt, fruit, eggs, sausages, bacon, many kinds of bread and pastries, coffee tea etc. Food was pretty expensive on Mykonos so we usually tried to eat a big breakfast to make it as long as we could on that-- I had yogurt and fruit, sometimes an egg, a couple bites of something bread, and a lot of coffee both mornings.

As I mentioned our hotel was a ways out of town. Fortunately there was a bus that stopped right outside the hotel to take us into town. Mykonos is famous for it's narrow, white-washed streets, fancy stores and pretty harbor. It wasn't very busy-- between the volcano drama and the national strikes due to the Greek economy crashing a lot of people stayed away, plus it was still the off season-- it gets really busy in July and August apparently.

We spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for a pharmacy to get more contact solution (since the Athens airport confiscated it) and sunscreen, because there was no way we could bring enough given the airline liquid restrictions. When we finally did find one it was closed because of strikes-- apparently they all take turns being open for a couple hours at a time so we had to wander to find the one that was open, and kept getting lost because all those narrow alleys look the same. We got kind of sunburned while we were looking for a place to buy sunscreen (which was ASTRONOMICALLY expensive-- a regular sized bottle cost about 14 Euros which works out to almost $20!)

We wandered in and out of shops, mostly just looking (I didn't want to spend a bunch of money on the very first day!) but Megs bought a pair of sandals and we bought a little jar of honey at an amazing honey store where they had probably 8 or 9 different types of honey which we got to taste and the man in told us all about the different healing qualities of each one.

In the evening, back at the hotel we read at the beach, had a good dinner with wine and we sat there so long the waiter brought us free ouzo (we came to find that most restaurants will eventually bring you a free something at the end of the meal). I don't usually like hard liquor but I actually quite liked ouzo-- Megs liked it too even though she hates licorice and to me it tastes exactly like licorice.