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Buzzkill

DAY 24: To leave Oktoberfest is quite possibly the ultimate buzzkill, although it was probably best to leave after only two days to leave on a high note. Like my experience at my brother's bachelor party in Las Vegas, anything longer than three days and you cross the threshold; a fourth day is not nearly as fun as the first day, just like the fourth breadstick is never as good as the first in the unlimited breadstick deal at the Olive Garden.

What I didn't realize when I woke up that last day of my trip -- the 24th day of "Tomatoes, Grease & Beer" -- was that the act of leaving Oktoberfest wasn't the only buzzkill.


"TEAM CROSSBOW sticks together!" Terence proclaimed at the stupid o'clock hour of 4 a.m., just two short hours after I'd settled back into the hotel room after a night out of beer, singing, dancing, beer, chicken, Chick of the Day, beer, roller coasters, Spongebob Squarepants, and beer. The reason for such a rude awakening was that we were to send Paul off to the train station so he could get to his early morning flight back to Miami via Madrid.

"Yeah, I could do that," I said all groggy-eyed and with a slight headache.

Terence and I were just tagging along in the name of Team Crossbow; originally it was just Jack who was going to see his brother off in the wee hours -- it was the least he could do since Paul would be lugging a big suitcase for him, one of several bags of stuff in his move back to the USA. The four of us walked passed the neon lights of strip clubs to the Hauptbahnhof, where Paul made it on the train to the Munchen Flughafen just in time. It was the first opportunity to really use one of the inside puns of the trip: "Later, hosen."


*DING* *DING*, *DIING* *DIIING*... went the Jetsons' doorbell ringtone of my Motorola RAZR around six in the morning. It woke me up -- but not in time for me to grab the phone and answer. The Received Calls log said that Jack had called, and I assumed it was an error since he was passed out in his bed. I went back to sleep and didn't really think about it. I mean, I was hungover.

One last fill of Hotel Italia's breakfast buffet later, Jack, Terence and I made our way to the train station to get to the airport in time for Terence's noon flight. "Uh guys, do you think we have like five minutes to stop and get some souvenirs?" Jack said, all casually in his laid-back ways. He couldn't go back to his girlfriend and friends in Barcelona empty-handed.

"We really have to go now," I urged him. We were already running late; it was way beyond the suggested check-in time for an international flight and we weren't even at the airport yet.

"But what are you gonna do at the airport? Drink beers?" Jack said, still asleep from the seriousness of our tardiness. From my experience, he was notorious for rushing after the act of thinking he had time to spare.

"I gotta get on a plane!" Terence reminded him. We left him at the shop to meet him at the airport later if we could -- a good move too because Terence and I just made it on the next train to the airport and the following would be a whole twenty minutes later.

*DING* *DING*, *DIING* *DIIING*... went the Jetsons' doorbell on my phone right as we arrived at the airport's train platform. I wasn't quick enough to answer it before it stopped ringing. Then, two minutes later it rang again -- Caller ID said that Jack was calling again. (At the time, I didn't realize that Paul was using Jack's old phone and number from Miami.)

"Hello? Jackie?"

"No, it's Paul," said Paul on the other line. "Is my brother with you?"

"[No, he's still buying souvenirs. He'll be here soon.]"

Paul had just landed in Madrid for his layover, but had an urgent message: "Tell Terence to lose the beer mug." Paul had been caught at the airport security check in Munich with beer steins from one of the festhalles at Oktoberfest. Apparently having them in possession is considered theft of private property, a crime so serious that they even stop you at the airport for it. Paul had been hassled by security like he might have even got arrested for it, and had to pay a fine of 100 euros -- all to have the steins taken away from him too. The four of us had no idea it was such an offense, and Paul learned the hard way for us. I relayed the information to Terence.

"Paul is the Grand Master Falconer!!!" he said. We thanked Paul for the heads up and devised a plan: Terence would simply leave his stein in a bathroom stall. Terence's flight was already in the midst of check-in, so he figured he'd check in first -- the security X-ray check wouldn't come until after. On line, he looked rather suspicious since he was sweating profusely -- something he does regardless of carrying stolen property. He really started sweating when the check-in counter wanted to inspect the insides of his bag since he only had a carry-on. Fortunately for him, they only glanced in the bag and the stein was at the bottom underneath a shirt or something.

Meanwhile I was trying to call Jack on his Spanish phone number, but like before I couldn't connect to it. I ended up using a credit card to call a call center in Canada to relay back to a Spanish phone in Germany to tell Jack the news. Unbeknownst to me, Jack didn't have a stein with him; Paul had been carrying his for him.

Terence met me after checking in and we went downstairs by the men's room. I stood guard by the door with my luggage trolley, while Terence did the deed. "This is so Ocean's Twelve," he said. Shortly thereafter, Jack showed up and we brought him up to speed before Terence rushed off to security, stein-free.

I had a little time to kill as my headache came in and out. I bought a souvenir liter-sized beer stein with the official Oktoberfest logo (not an unlawful one with an brewery logo, picture above), and hung out with Jack for a few final thoughts.

"You know I was thinking the train ride over here, this was the best year of my life, man," Jack raved. "[I traveled Europe for two months, then lived in Malaga for seven, eight months. Went to Tomatina, and now Oktoberfest.]" Good for him, I thought, smiling. Anyone who lives life living life rather than doing the regular job, house and kids thing right away gets crazy falcon points in my book. However, his parade would end since he was out of funds and would start a new life with a new job.

We parted ways as I went off to the security check, disbanding the last two remaining members of Team Crossbow. It wasn't a goodbye -- he'd eventually try and relocate back to the New York/New Jersey area after all -- so it was just another moment to bid a "Later, hosen."


"[WHAT DO YOU HAVE HERE?]" said the suspicious security guard after X-raying my bag. He'd seen on the monitor I was carrying the Oktoberfest beer stein I'd just got at the airport.

"That's new," I told him.

"Maybe, I will check," he said, thinking I was trying to pull a fast one on him by making it seem that way. The guy went as far as to rip the tape and unwrap the packaging padding paper the woman at the store had done for me -- only to confirm that I wasn't carrying stolen property. I marveled at the fact that he was more concerned with my empty beer mug than the half full bottle of blue Powerade I had with me -- how did he know it wasn't actually a bottle of explosive ammonia?


THE NEXT BUZZKILL of the day came during my layover in Paris -- anyone who's tried to get around on any day at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport knows what I'm talking about. The place is constantly under construction and planes don't dock into terminals. They park on tarmacs and buses pick passengers up to bring them there. That's not so bad, but the buses always take the longest, most indirect route to your gate. Plus often times you can't switch terminals to a connecting flight without riding another roundabout bus, only to board yet another bus to get to the plane. And for some reason, Air France only gives you the impossible layover time of about an hour -- barely enough time to wait for and ride three buses, let alone get through security checkpoints -- and they even warn you on your ticket that "it might take 45 minutes to get to your connecting flight, sorry for the inconvenience."

The whole transfer thing made my little hangover headache bigger, and to top the buzzkill off, none of the airport shops were allowed to sell headache medicine -- I'd have to take a bus all the way to and from Terminal 2F, home of the only pharmacy. Of course I didn't have enough time to do that, and just rushed off to my gate where half the passengers had boarded the shuttle bus to the plane already. I was already passed the random screenings and outside on my way to the bus, when a security guard actually ran towards me to stop me for a second screening -- must have been my dark, Greek sun-baked skin. He searched my bag inside and out, frisked me where the sun don't shine, and even checked inside my shoes -- even underneath my Dr. Scholl's insoles. To be fair, he was just covering his own ass as a designated preventative line of defense; any flight into New York was under extreme scrutinization since every world leader was flying in at the same time for the UN General Assembly.

Headache on the flight back to New York = buzzkill. Broken headset = another buzzkill. The screening of Nacho Libre was my saving grace, but with a broken headset, it was a buzzkill. Without being able to hear Jack Black's hilarious attempts at doing a Mexican accent, I slept for most of the ride.

The final buzzkill came in New York when I arrived, but my bags didn't. It didn't surprise me; I barely had enough time to transfer planes myself, let alone my bag -- it wouldn't fly to New York until the next day. I was instructed to go to the Air France baggage services office to file a claim.

"[When should I expect to get it?]" I asked the lady at the counter, a sarcastic New Yorker with the accent that was refreshing to hear.

"[Not until tomorrow, between nine and five,]" she said. "Unless you live on the east side."

More shit for living on the east side again, I thought. (I hadn't gotten it since Athens.) I'm home. But the woman told me that it was due to the fact that most of the east side of Manhattan was closed off to traffic since "the president's in town again, causing trouble." She got my information and gave me an Air France care package with a free Air France T-shirt inside. "Here, in case you need to stay overnight," she said sarcastically. While I thought that was funny, what I didn't find humorous was Air France. I vowed never to take them again since I'd always had a bad experience with them -- I only took them this time because I had a voucher from a bumped flight back home on my Timbuktu trip. (Air France was the only international carrier into Mali, so I had no choice in the matter back then.)


ANYWAY, despite the buzzkills of re-entry, I have to say it was a great three and a half week jaunt through Europe again: flying tomatoes, ancient ruins, octopus tentacles, gorge hikes, beaches, boats, Greek raki, Bavarian beer, old friends and new ones. It truly rejuvenated my wanderlust and my joys of travel writing, and I actually returned a refreshed, new man.

"So where's the next trip?" Jack had asked me (for himself and probably on behalf of thousands out there reading this blog).

"I dunno," I answered. "It will just come to me." And one day it will, like a tomato in the face or a beer in a stein -- just not one of the ones we tried to get away with.



Can't wait for the next entry? Explore the old blogs, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around the World" and "Trippin' to Timbuktu"

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Team Crossbow

DAY 23: "Happy Birthday, man," I greeted Terence.

"Oh yeah, I almost forgot," Jack said. "Happy Birthday."

"Thanks."

If there's anyway to really celebrate a guy's 32nd birthday, it's at Oktoberfest, although it was actually debatable for months if Terence the Birthday Boy would even come; he was wishy-washy about spending the cash to travel all the way to Germany for only three days, but ultimately figured what the hell, it was more than just regular weekend trip and more than just a birthday. With me already planning on being at Oktoberfest and Jack wanting one last big hurrah in Europe before relocating back to the USA, it just made sense to go this year -- and so he maxxed out his credit card and got on plane. In the end, I think he had no regrets and came to believe in one law that I do:

Every man must make the pilgrimmage to Oktoberfest at least once in his lifetime, the way a Muslim must make the pilgrimmage to Mecca.


"MAN, I'M WASTED," Jack said that morning as we got ready for yet another full day of beer-drinking festivities, although we would pace ourselves this time around, so as to enjoy the moments and not wonder exactly what we did afterwards. Hans-Georg picked us up at the hotel around 9:30 and by ten we were already out the door. The reason being that just around the corner from us was the roped-off parade route for the grand Bavarian parade that happens on the Sunday morning of the first weekend of Oktoberfest.

As we walked amidst the flag-waving crowds on the sidewalk, I noticed that almost everyone, perhaps one out of every three people was staring at me, or rather, glancing at me and then doing a double take.

"I think they like your style," Hans-Georg told me. "Your t-shirt."

True, I was wearing the screened-on lederhosen novelty t-shirt I bought at the festival the night before to add to my collection of kitschy t-shirts (not to be outdone by the tuxedo t-shirt I had at home). I expected to see a lot more people wearing the same thing, but it turned out I was the only one, and it caused quite a stir amongst all other guys wearing authentic lederhosen.

The parade finally made its way towards our area, and once it did it was pretty much non-stop for hours. Decorated horses pulled dozens of floats of people dressed in Bavarian garb, all waving to the masses. Numerous marching bands went by, playing their drums, xylophones, horns, and wind instruments with extreme musical precision. Wheeled vehicles zipped by: proudly-Bavarian shiny BMWs, old-fashioned big wheeled bicycles, small cars, even smaller buses, and Mini Cooper cop cars. Paraders were decked out in different kinds of traditional garb -- even the little kids and the babies in the wagons -- in bright shades of blue, green, red, and yellow, still pointing and giggling at my outfit. "Nice shirt!" one called out to me. Ladies in dirndls smiled and waved at me.

"Man, this is the best twenty-four euros I've spent," I told Hans-Georg.

Amidst all the marching and waving, some paraders were sure to take a break for a quick swig of beer from one of their parading first aid rescue beermaids.

"I can't believe they have all this, dedicated to beer," I said. "It's everybody's birthday!"

The parade wasn't all hand-wavers and brass bands; there were also troupes of colorful flag twirlers and acrobats flamboyantly prancing down the street. "Schwul," Terence said, practicing a new word in his German vocabulary. An old German woman next to us started chuckling; Hans-Georg had regrettably taught Terence that word the day before: schwul = gay.



Soon groups representing different activities of traditional Bavarian life marched through like guys mounted on horses cracking whips and guys yodeling like the way Goofy yells -- but the most impressive was the troop of hunters, some carrying spear-tipped bowstaffs and crossbows (picture above). They were led in by the younger generation, carrying their latest kills on a stick. "Oh man, they got falcons!" Terence exclaimed. A team of falcon men strolled by, each with a real falcon perched upon his gauntlet.

"Hey guys, we gotta get spears and crossbows so we can get chicks," Terence joked as we strayed away from the never-ending parade. "Chicks dig medieval weapons."

From that point on for the rest of our trip, an inside joke evolved where everything was put on a point system and thought of in two ways: leaning towards being schwul (not that there's anything wrong with it), or being "crossbow," or very manly. Manlier than "crossbow" was "falcon."

"Okay, ten crossbow points equals one falcon point," I said, making up stupid rules as we went along.


OUR INSIDE MAN Hans-Georg took us not to the Theresewiesen right away, but on a sightseeing tour away from the city center. Jack was fine with it because: A) he, nor his brother Paul had seen anything outside the regularly visited places; and B) he was still pretty hungover. Terence and I had already seen most of Munich and its environs on a trip we did when we were at the naive ages of sixteen, when a younger Hans-Georg led us around in 1991 (ironically during another time the American Army was fighting in the Middle East). Anyway, it was refreshing not to be in the regular Disney World of beer for a change and besides, Hans-Georg was taking us to places with biergartens where beer was served outside of Oktoberfest.

"It's not so nice," Hans-Georg said, comparing regular city life to the beerfest. "But that's life."

Taking advantage of the German honor system of having a bus/train ticket (when they hardly check), we took a bus ride through the city to the university section of town -- where guys in flashy cars supposedly cruised around on the nights of regular weekends -- near one of Munich's more modern, but impressive landmarks, the larger-than-life Walking Man outside the Munich Re office building. We walked from there to the Englisch Garten, Europe's largest public park according to one source. In 1991 Terence and I were there and found a nudist colony in one area near a small flowing river -- a much slimmer Terence bared all that time while I went swimming -- but this time, we didn't see any nudists, only the same flowing river.

"Maybe this is where you were when you at the beach," Jack told me.

Our raison d'être this time around was not for German nude "beaches," but for something a little more Chinese: the Chinesischer Turm, a towering "Chinese Tower" in the middle of the English Garden in German Bavaria. Inside one of its tiers was a German brass band playing traditional beer drinking music to the big outdoor biergarten below, a place that Hans-Georg said was popular and packed in the summer months. This time of year, most people were drinking down at Oktoberfest, so it was pretty a chilled out place aside from the on-lookers staring and pointing at me and my shirt, whispering to each other in German, uttering the word "lederhosen" and smiling.

We had noon-time beers under the Chinese Tower to accompany the small steering wheel-sized pretzel and weisswurst ("white sausage" made of veal and pork) that Hans-Georg got for us, served with sweet mustard -- collectively the traditional Bavarian breakfast (including the beer). "You couldn't eat this everyday," Hans-Georg said, which led to a discussion about the conspiracy theory that Dr. Atkins of eponymous diet fame actually died from a heart attack. Jack, still hungover, sat out on beers for this round and did the "schwul" thing of just drinking a Coke despite our stern advice that the only real cure for a hangover is to just drink more beer. However, that didn't outdo the schwul thing that I did: try and eat the traditional Bavarian breakfast in the traditional Bavarian way -- by sucking out the meat of the sausage from its casing.

"That's schwul," the others said.

"That's it. We need to go to crossbow training camp now," I said. I ate my second link with a knife and fork.


A FREE TROLLEY RIDE to the other side of town later, we arrived at another one of Munich's famous landmarks, the 17th century Baroque Nymphenburg Palace, where I ignored its initial beauty to rush off to the bathroom for having "broke my seal" from the beer at breakfast. (It was still broken from the day before and additional beers weren't helping.) Relieved, Hans led the four of us around the palace grounds (no pooping allowed), to another exit gate and eventually to his apartment in a quaint residential neighborhood where we saw one guy cruise around in a Ferrari. We had more beers and coffees at Chez Hans-Georg, a great, simple apartment mostly furnished by Ikea. Terence made fun of me for itemizing everything: "Hey Hans, this right here -- is this from Ikea too?"

My retort: "You know they say four out of ten guys are schwul. And look, there are four guys right here." All in good humor.

From there, we walked to the Hirschgarten, what Hans-Georg told us is Munich's largest biergarten when it's not Oktoberfest, seating 18,000 people. No barmaids here; the policy was to take a stein from the cabinet, wash it yourself and bring it to the bar to get it filled. After having done so, Jack was amazed that the beer was actually helping his hangover.

We sat with our beers and chat guy talk about crossbows and falcons, while on-lookers were still staring and pointing at my outfit. We established that together, the five of us were Team Crossbow, and our manly powers were our "Falcon Force." I announced that I would attempt to earn lots of crossbow points later that night by drinking a beer, grabbing a roasted chicken and eating it like an apple with my bare hands, drinking more beer, and then riding a roller coaster all drunk. After leaving the biergarten, I did the crossbow thing of pissing in public, in the corner of a construction site.


BACK IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD of strip clubs, Paul felt inspired by my kitschy lederhosen t-shirt and bought the same one at the tourist shop in the train station. Terence got one shortly thereafter -- both for fifteen euros each. "Thanks guys. Thanks for making me feel ripped off," I joked. (I'd paid twenty-four on the festival grounds the night before.)

Jack was skeptical on buying a shirt he probably wouldn't wear again, but was inspired by the rest of us -- and our peer pressure -- to buy one. He didn't regret it when he saw a reflection of us walking in unison from a passing subway train window. "You know, it actually looks pretty cool," he said.

"Everyone is staring at us," Paul noticed. He finally knew what it felt like for me the entire day. "I think we're the only ones that bought these shirts."

And so, with the four of us in matching lederhosen t-shirts, and Hans-Georg in his real lederhosen sans suspenders, we officially formed Team Crossbow with our Falcon Force, and head back to the big leagues of Oktoberfest.

"Beerfest!" I exclaimed with my arms triumphantly in the air, as I'd been doing ever since we watched the movie on bootleg two days before.

Our playing field was the Spatenhaus tent, which was still crowded despite the crowds of people we saw leaving the Theresewiesen since it was after all Sunday, a school night. Making our way passed the beer fans and early table dancers, I managed to find us some seating a table where three girls were sitting alone -- one German blonde, her visiting friend from Vienna, and a Munchner brunette so attractive that Jack deemed her Chick Of The Day. I approached her on behalf of the rest of us. "Uh, is anybody sitting here? Can we sit here?" Chick Of The Day discussed something in German to her two friends and then scootched over the bench for us to sit. Terence turned to me and looked me in the eye.

"Major, major crossbow points."

It wasn't so major when the guys the girls were with came back from the bathroom or something -- although it was barely a buzzkill because they were a couple of fun lovin', beer drinkin' guys who immediately bonded with us over steins of beer and talks of crossbows and falcons, the most falconist thing being Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) from the international hit TV series, 24. "The next season, he's going to China," I told them.

"Yeah," Jan, the guy in blue said. "Jack Bauer versus one billion Chinese people. It's not a fair fight -- for the Chinese!" He continued, "When Jack Bauer falls into the water, Jack Bauer doesn't get wet, wet gets Jack Bauer!"

The other guy, Manuel, was a bigger riot, mostly due to the fact that he already had seven liters of Spaten Oktoberfest brew in him -- his girlfriend had cut him off. In a drunken stupor, he'd put his arm around my shoulder to give me advice and words of drunken wisdom. "Repeat after me: Oktoberfest!"

"Oktoberfest!" I shouted.

"Oktoberfest!!" he reiterated.

"Oktoberfest!!" I repeated.

"OKTOBERFEST!!!"

"OKTOBERFEST!!!!!!!!" I yelled with my arms in the air.

"YEAH!!!"

He continued his lesson by teaching me the ways of the locals, including how to yell that traditional Bavarian hunting call that sounds like Goofy's signature scream. "[Here we don't call it Oktoberfest,]" Manuel said. "'Oktoberfest' is what the foreigners call it. Here, we call it Wies'n."

"Wies'n?"

"Wies'n!"

"WIES'N!!!!!!"

He was as happy as he was shit-faced. "You are my Wies'n padawan," he told me. "I am the Wies'n..."

"You are the Wies'n Jedi... meister!"

"Yes! I was going to say 'professional,' but I am the Wies'n Jedi-meister!" he said. "And you are my Wies'n padawan."

"WIES'N JEDI-MEISTER!!!!!!" I shouted, arms in the air. The girls laughed -- and with his girlfriend distracted, Manuel ordered another stein of beer.

"I like you guys," Manuel confided in me. "And I don't mean that in a gay way."

"Don't worry, we're not schwul."

That was just the beginning of a long, incredibly fun second night of Oktoberfest. More and more people stood on their benches to dance as the night progressed -- some, not surprisingly, falling down from DUI (Dancing Under the Influence). Our barmaid served up more beers and the roasted chicken I wanted -- but I got schwul points for chickening out on my previous announcement of eating one like an apple; the chicken was way too hot for me to pick it up with my bare hands and I kept on flinching. No matter; the rest of the evening was a blast, full of table-dancing and singing along to the many favorite songs played by the German brass band (with a guest electric guitarist), tunes like: "Y.M.C.A.," "Hey Baby (Ooh, Ah)" (from Dirty Dancing), "Volare," "Smoke On The Water," "What's Goin' On" (4 Non Blondes), "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," "Yellow Submarine," "Lola" (The Kinks), and everyone's favorite, John Denver's immortal "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Also, somehow every now and then a group of Italians would start an infectious chant of the baseline of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army." There were also some German songs I didn't really know, but I did come to remember the traditional Bavarian toast song, sung every so often with beer steins swaying in the air:

Ein Pro-sit...
Ein Pro-sit...
der Gemut-lich-keit!

Ein Prosit...
Ein Pro-OH-sit...
der Gemut-lich-keit!

This was always followed by a four-count to drink: "Eins, zwei, drei... G'SUFFA!!!" Glasses would clink and then beer went down the hatch. This was only ameliorated by cheers of "Prost!" every now and then, not only between us but with our neighbors at surrounding tables:

"Prost!"

"Prost!"

"Prost!"

"Hey, nice shirt!"

On the other end of the table, Paul and Jack were having a good time while Terence the Birthday Boy was having arguably the best birthday party of his life. The band even played a rendition of "Happy Birthday" -- not necessarily for him, but we'd like to think so since Manuel had gone up to request it.

"I can't believe you have all this, for your birthday," I told Terence. "I can only hope to aspire to this when I become thirty-two." Donning a kitschy hat he bought with a big-busty Barbie-like doll torso serving beer in front (only to be groped by drunken passers-by), Terence drank to his heart's content, singing along, and dancing -- by himself, with others and even the cute bathroom attendant girl.

The birthday party didn't go on all night though; beerflow is stopped by 10:30 for closing time by 11 p.m. -- a wise decision from an event planner's point-of-view since it would start all over again at 9:30 in the morning anyway. We wandered the emptying tent with our bros and remaining brews, meeting more Germans along the way -- two of which were German army guys that drove the four hours (one way) in their single day of leave for their obligatory pilgrimmage to Oktoberfest. The two were sniper rifle pros, having scored huge Spongebob Squarepants dolls in no time at a shoot-the-target carnival game with their keen sniper skills. The Spongebob dolls undoubtedly caught the attention of girls who wanted to have them, but they wouldn't come without a price.

"Suck my dick!" one of them called out to a girl, who offered nothing.

"Spongebob for blowjob," I told him. He started laughing hysterically like it was the funniest thing he'd heard in his life.

"Hey you! Spongebob for blowjob!!! SPONGEBOB FOR BLOWJOB!!!"

The German army guys calmed down and went into quieter negotiations. One of the girls offered ten kisses instead of fellatio. "Okay, ten kisses for Spongebob," Terence butt in and offered. She gave the Birthday Boy ten kisses, scoring him many crossbow points. Terence just laughed and ran off cackling. "Sorry, it's not my Spongebob!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!" Falcon points.

To put the icing on the proverbial birthday cake, I took Terence with me to end the night on a high note: by riding the Olympia roller coaster, with five loops to represent the five rings of the Olympics. Riding drunk and not vomitting = major, major falcon points. Afterwards we wandered the festival for the rest of the evening, where everything was already in efficiency shutdown mode. The festhalles were cleared, food stands were closed, and the cleaning crew began a long, long night. After pissing in hidden corners (and in stalls in the women's room), we wandered with other random people walking around. Around us, two drunken crossbow guys started brawling while two schwuls were making out. We made our way back to our hotel, taking more and more pictures with random people along the way, including one hot dirndl-wearing girl who was not German, but Australian -- a surprise to me since, despite my early premonitions, I'd fortunately met nothing but Germans during my days at Wies'n.

"Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" Terence chanted to impress her -- but it didn't work.

"[God, I hate that. Please don't say that.]" she said. "It's so embarrasing." And there was the catharsis of my generalizations of Australian travelers since the beginning of this "Tomatoes, Grease & Beer" blog.

Back at the hotel, we parted ways with Hans-Georg, officially disbanding the five-fold Falcon Force of Team Crossbow. "Thanks for everything, Hans," we said. "Danke danke."

"Thanks," he said. "I haven't had this much fun in a long time."


ALL IN ALL, I have to say it was my best night ever at any worldly beer festival -- I'd wisely cut myself off at "happy drunkness" before crossing the downhill threshold. For Paul, it was a tremendous introduction to German culture, and for Jack it was a great send-off before making the long trek back to the American eastern seaboard. My cousin Hans-Georg would be back the following day, at a designated table his company had reserved in advance. And as for Terence, it was such a great birthday that we toyed with the idea that we'd have to do it every year for each passing age. "I can't top this [back at home,]" he said.

Whether or not we'd return the following year was not yet determined, but I must say that while "Every man must make the pilgrimmage to Oktoberfest at least once in his lifetime," it's a spectacle worthy enough to go many, many more times. And anyone who does gets major, major crossbow points in my book.


Can't wait for the next entry? Explore the old blogs, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around the World" and "Trippin' to Timbuktu"

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The (Drunken) Man Show

DAY 22: On October 12, 1810, Bavarian Prince-turned-King Ludwig the First got hitched to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen in a huge fairy tale wedding that would make any Bridezilla green with envy. The reception was such a blast that the king decreed it be celebrated again the following year -- it's good to be the king -- with another huge festival of dancing, singing, horse races, good food, and above all, good beer -- a beverage Bavaria prided itself on. Over the centuries, this October festival, this Oktoberfest was celebrated annually, minus a couple of times lost to war.

Nowadays, Oktoberfest actually takes place the three weeks before the first Sunday of October, meaning it always starts in mid-September -- for no real significant reason other than that the weather is better -- and therefore it is, for the most part, a Septemberfest. But seriously, with a festival dedicated to celebrate the Bavarian cultures of dancing, music, cuisine, beer consumption, and hot German chicks prancing around in corsets that accentuate their cleavage, why wait for October?


"EAT UP. This is what you're going to be vomitting later," I told Terence, Paul, and Jack as we served ourselves at the Hotel Italia's breakfast buffet. We loaded up on food and then walked the fifteen minutes down Schwanthalerstrasse to where everyone else was headed, the Theresienwiese (named after the Princess Therese), the huge outdoor exhibition and fair space used for Oktoberfest (and other lesser-known exhibitions during the other parts of the year). Once we got through the main entrance, we saw just what a guy's paradise it was.

"It's like Disney World," was my first impression. Previously I thought that the beer tents I'd heard of were simple circus-like tents of big tarps propped up on poles. However, each beer tent, or festhalle, was an over-the-top pavilion, sort of like one at EPCOT Center -- except instead of having a futuristic or country theme, it was an homage to Bavarian tradition, a virtual palace of beer. Lowenbrau's lion roared in intervals while Spaten's mechanical figures spit roasted a plastic oxen. Nearby there were many food stands selling everything from sausages to fish to pretzels to rotisserie chicken. There were more than enough souvenir shops to go around and, to top off the theme park comparison, there were even carnival games, haunted houses, and thrill rides, including two big roller coasters to challenge those who wanted to see their vomit fly at high velocities.

"Now this is my Xanadu!" Terence proclaimed.

"You know the Holocaust?" I said, starting a quote from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. "This is the complete opposite."

Oktoberfest also felt like a Disney theme park because most people were in traditional costume, and not just the barmaids gearing up for a long day of serving beer; a lot of people of different races and ages were dressed up to get into the spirit of Bavaria. Guys would wear the traditional lederhosen (literally "leather trousers") with or without suspenders (or curled moustaches) and high knee socks, while girls would wear the dirndl, the traditional low-cut dress worn often with a cleavage-enhancing corset, which appeased every man's intrinsic fetish.

"It's like [Comedy Central's guy-centric] The Man Show," I pointed out, surrounded by the action, the beer, and the attractive German Juggies. "I got a glockenspiel in my pants!" I pointed out another voluptuous one walking by. "Now that is two hours on a train from Rome," I told Terence, continuing the Naples joke from the night before.

"So many hours, so little time," he said.


JOINING THE FOUR of us were three more: another Erik (with a K, the correct way), a German-American friend of Jack, Paul, and their brother Nick who had worked with him in Miami; Erik's girlfriend Inga; and her uncle Wilfred. The three were living near Frankfurt, hours of kilometers away, but had made the pilgrimmage to Oktoberfest -- a first time for them. The Other Erik had done his homework though, and was versed in the festival's opening ceremonies. He led us to the parade route down the main promenade of the Theresienwiese, where each brewery would symbolically parade to their respective festhalle, complete with their own horses, marching brass, piccolos, entourage, and beer wagon. However we left before the parade really got started for The Other Erik knew that space was limited in every festhalle and you couldn't get a beer served without a seat. (The exception to this was the overcrowded Hofbrauhaus tent, where according to two Aussies I'd met on the ATM line, you could get a beer from a stand -- although he warned me that it was the rowdiest of the tents, full of Aussies and Irish guys all prepared to give anyone in the "pig pen" a wedgie to the point that their underwear is taken off them. Uh, nein.)

Anyway, the seven of us scrambled, going from festhalle to festhalle, looking for a place to sit amidst the thousands of people who'd been saving a spot for hours, or the groups that had made table reservations as far as a year in advance. We ultimately found a space at a table in the outside seating area of Pschorr-Braurosl -- but lost Jack and Paul in the scramble. Whether or not they were still in one of the tents that were now closed off to new entrants due to being fulled to capacity we weren't for sure.



We camped at the table, patiently hoping we'd run into them, until we heard the big boom cannons fire into the air at high noon, signifying what had just happened in a nearby tent full of newsmedia cameras and reporters: the Mayor of Munich had tapped the first keg, officially kicking off the 2006 Oktoberfest. Once his beer was flowing, the beer started flowing from the sixteen festhalles to serve the over 100,000 patrons in that day alone. (Over the course of the entire three weeks, six million people attend Oktoberfest -- the population of a small country.) An estimated 1,600 barmaids and waiters got into single-file formation in an assembly line style to pick up as many beer steins as they could hold in two hands (picture above) -- an incredible feat, I must say -- and bring them to their assigned tables. There is no choice of size or style of beer at the festhalles; beer is served in standard one-liter glass steins (for about seven euros), and it only comes as each brewery's specially-made Oktoberfest brew.

In no time, our barmaid made her way to us and set beers on the table for the people we had accounted for -- plus one lone guy we let scootch into the bench so he could get a beer served and move on. We held up our beer steins and toasted our neighbors down the other side of our shared table in traditional German style: "PROST!" It was the first of many toasts.

"[You think Jack and Paul would have sense to go back to the main entrance?]" The Other Erik asked me. "I mean, it was their idea." It was the emergency in-case-we-get-separated meeting place.

"[We can check,]" I said. "Hold up." I chugged the rest of my beer, a little over half a liter, in about ten seconds like I was in some sort of fraternity contest. "Okay, let's go."


THE OTHER ERIK (not to be confused with "The Other Erik" from Boracay, Philippines) was born in Munich, but had grown up in the States. He had known Jack and Paul by working with their younger brother Nick, head chef of Miami's famed Biltmore Hotel. Taking advantage of his dual citizenship, The Other Erik had decided to relocate back to the Fatherland, working at an army base while his girlfriend finished school. Walking towards the main entrance, he knew he made the right choice. "It's not a bad place to be," he said as both are eyes gawked at the attractive ladies going by. It truly was The Man Show.

"In the States, maybe one out of ten are hot," The Other Erik said. "But here, it's like ninety percent!"

"I know!" I agreed. "[And the dirndls,] they can make an average girl look ten times hotter!"

Jack and Paul were nowhere to be found, so we headed back to the table, searching some of the festhalles on the way. Inside, I saw that people were already dancing to the German brass bands playing traditional Bavarian beer-drinking music. (The brass renditions of mainstream drinking tunes could only be played after six, to preserve tradition and prevent rowdiness.) Photographers went around to document the joy (for a fee), while walking pretzel vendors went around to satisfy those with the munchies (also for a fee).

"Try to find them in here," The Other Erik said with sarcasm. "It's only ten, fifteen thousand people." I concurred; it was like trying to find two needles in a big drunken haystack. We gave up and went back to the table outside, where we were shortly joined by my cousin Hans-Georg, who was decked out in his own lederhosen sans suspenders -- he found us via cell phone calls. (Jack and Paul's international numbers weren't jiving on the Vodafone.de or E-plus networks.) But then, as if on cue, Jack and Paul magically reappeared after wandering aimlessly for us, with beers already in hand from somewhere.

"Hey guys." It was so nonchalant, like it was meant to be.

And so, there was another reunification in Germany. We were even joined by two other German guys we'd befriended, wearing matching Jagermeister shirts and crazy hats. Everything came together by early afternoon, and then the binge drinking began...


THE NEXT THING I remember, I was by the beach. If you look at a map, you'll see that Munich is actually land-locked and realize that's how hammered I was. I was seriously convinced I had waken up next to the shore -- perhaps I was having Greece flashbacks -- and not some random Munich side street. Thankfully, my camera and wallet were still with me (unlike that time I passed out on the beach in Valencia two years prior), but unfortunately, my eyeglasses were not -- everything was blurry as I stumbled aimlessly around Munich. Not since waking up from a blackout during a pub crawl in Berlin had I been so drunkenly frustrated at my condition: I was confused and alone, I couldn't see well, I didn't know where I was. Like in Berlin, I had a minor freak-out episode, mostly thinking about the cost of having to get a new pair of glasses. I continued to stumble around town, not knowing if I was anywhere near Oktoberfest or the hotel or anything recognizable for that matter, but somehow the internal cyborg in me knew the way, as it always does. I managed to find my way to the Hotel Italia where my glasses, to my surprise, were at my bedside table. In the room, Jack, Paul, and Terence were passed out in their respective beds. It was only about 5:30 in the afternoon.

"Holy shit, man," I blathered, sharing my freak-out episode with the guys. "I thought I was by the beach, man -- and we're in a landlocked area!"

We sobered up over the next two hours and slowly pieced what had happened to me and everyone else. Apparently I had gone off to find the bathroom at the festhalle, never to be seen again. I must have been turned off by the long lines to the men's room (not to be confused with "damens" room, for women), and stumbled off to find a place to pee. Incredibly I managed to walk all the way back to our hotel with my internal cyborg instincts, only to pass out on my bed and piss myself. (To be fair, I must have not been too too bad, since I knew where I was going; as a contingency, Oktoberfest employs enough police and EMTs wandering around to keep things in order -- there's even a medical tent for drunks to recuperate.)

And so the story went: Hans-Georg had gotten pretty drunk pretty fast since he hadn't eaten anything that morning, and called it quits. The Other Erik and Co. called it quits to head back towards Frankfurt. And Jack, Paul, and Terence had continued drinking beer, taking pictures with more and more dirndl-wearing girls along the way. Paul reported that Terence had gotten drunk to the point that he passed out in such a spectacle that tourists wanted to take their pictures next to him.

Wasted, the three of them had gone back to the Hotel Italia to pass out, only to finally find me there, comatose on the bed. I was still so drunk when I woke up that I didn't even notice they were in the room with me, and went off, sans glasses, to go find them back at Oktoberfest -- only to end up lost on some random street where I'm convinced I heard ocean waves in my ears.

"Man, I was already [satisfied with Oktoberfest] by three o'clock," Terence raved. "And you were even at the beach by 5:30."


IT WAS ONLY a couple of hours later that we were sobered up and ready for more. (Amazing, isn't it?) Heading back to the Theresienwiese that evening, we found a place at a table at another festhalle, where the drunken merriment of drinking and dancing was well underway. Our barmaid served us beers and it was Go Time again. Once it hits your lips, it's so good! Our barmaid, knowing it was nearing the end of her shift, shrugged her shoulders and drank a beer with us, as if to say, "Eh, what the hell, why not?"

We were fortunate to sit with some local Germans, one named Christian who was already pretty hammered, ranting to us about how his American supervisors at work drill him to work harder, when all he wants to do is just chill out and drink beer. Next to him was his friend who worked for BMW, who had just come back from spending a month at the BMW plant in Montvale, New Jersey of all places -- coincidentally in the same county Terence, Jack, Paul and I grew up. There was one truth that we all agreed upon that night -- a night of dirndl girls, toasts, beer, and sausages with sauerkraut and mustard:

"This is so much better than New Jersey," Terence said.

Continuing to be the entertainer of this German version of The Man Show, Terence later had a funny episode at the festhalle exit, when he tried to sneak out some beer steins -- a big no-no with multiple security guards stopping anyone trying to do so. Terence, conscious enough to know he was just making jokes, made obvious attempts to conceal steins under his clothes: in his pants and in his shirt (only to be fondle by security). We weren't sure if on-lookers got the joke when they looked at him curiously, but in the end, it was all in good fun. (Besides, Terence, Jack, and Paul had already managed to sneak out some steins earlier when I was busy at "the beach.")

I don't know how many beers we had that night, but somehow we managed to stumbled our way back home to our hotel room -- although at some point along the way, Jack and Paul had gotten separated from us yet again.


THE NEXT MORNING, we woke up wondering what had happened. "Man, I'm so wasted," Jack said, stating the obvious -- the beer was still flowing through all of us. Opening my zippered pocket to get my notepad out, I saw that sometime the night before I had stuffed a bunch of french fries in there, like Napoleon Dynamite did with tater tots -- although I have no memory of ever having gone to a restaurant. On the table was a hunk of feta cheese and some bitten pieces of bread. Paul said that Jack, starving for food, had somehow managed to sneak into the hotel's kitchen and raid the fridge, taking the cheese and some frozen rolls in the freezer.

In the end, it was a great first night of Oktoberfest, albeit not so memorable. Plus, there were no vomitting incidents (that we know of). As action-packed as it was (and as lengthy as this blog entry is), we'd do it all over again in a heart beat -- and we would, for we still had another full day left...


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Beer Team, Assemble!

DAY 21: On my first night in Athens, I had learned that I wasn't the only one with the same idea: to throw tomatoes at the Tomatina festival in Valencia, Spain, then travel somewhere for two weeks -- in my case, the Greek Islands -- and then head over to Munich, Germany for the ultimate beer festival, Oktoberfest. Not surprisingly, most of these like-minded planners were fun lovin' Australians -- so many that I came to believe that I'd seen nothing but Aussies in Munich. A young backpacking German couple from Hamburg that I'd met that first night in Athens concurred, telling me that Oktoberfest was a big annual festival for tourists and no Germans actually ever go there -- sort of like how hardly any New Yorkers go to Times Square on New Year's Eve.

I figured that people would travel from afar to celebrate in Oktoberfest -- I mean, who wouldn't? -- and like Tomatina, they'd come in groups of non-competitive teams with matching outfits. My suspicions were confirmed when I landed in Munich's Strauss airport and immediately saw another Team Canada at the baggage claim: a group of guys in matching red hockey jerseys, with a logo on each -- half maple leaf, half beer stein. Inspired, I picked up my bag and ventured off to gather some guys for my own team.


TERENCE (A.K.A. T, WHEAT) WAS WAITING for me at the officially-labeled "Meeting Point" at the Munchen Airport Center, having just landed half an hour before me after a two-leg journey from New York.

"Yo, dude."

Our rendezvous a little after eleven in the morning was anti-climactic and casual -- just the way we wanted, as to be a couple of wannabe jetsetters nonchalantly bumping into each other at random.

"It's so casual," he smiled. I casually opened up the bottle of Cretan raki I got at the duty-free shop and poured shots into empty Red Bull cans while we waited for another. "This is cool," Terence said. "I feel like you're still traveling the world."

Fans of The Global Trip 2004 Blog might remember Terence from my time in Rio de Janeiro. He, my brother and a guy named Paul had met me for Carnival in 2004, attending the Sambadrome festivities, the street samba parades, soccer games, and hang-gliding/paragliding. A childhood friend for over a quarter of a century, Terence was always up for a good time -- and a good beer. What inebriated adventures we'd share in the next couple of days were not yet known to us at the time, but we knew it would be added to our repetoire of great memories.

"Paul!" we called out to another familiar face. It was not Paul from Rio, but Paul from Miami, the brother of Jack, my host in Spain for the first leg of this "Tomatoes, Grease & Beer" trip.

"Wilkommen," I greeted Paul to Munich -- and his first appearance on The Global Trip blog. He did a shot of Greek raki.


IT TOOK US a good ten minutes to figure out how to get a train ticket to the city center. Eventually we got on the extremely clean, extremely efficient S-Bahn train, first riding through farmlands and small residential suburban communities where Munchners lived their lives in quiet areas. "These are all the Germans we're going to see," Terence said, knowing how much of a tourist spectacle Oktoberfest was.

Our homebase for the next three nights was the Hotel Italia, the only available place I could find on the internet when I started looking for accommodations two months prior. A three-star by European standards, the Hotel Italia had comfortable beds with comfortable linens, an unlimited breakfast buffet, and free wireless internet. It was conveniently-located within walking distance of the historic center all the Oktoberfest festivities, all in the central neighborhood of the Hauptbahnhof (central train station) filled with two things: strip clubs and computer game stores.

"We're right across the street from the table dance club and a [Playstation store,]" Terence pointed out. "This is my Xanadu!" Not that we had traveled from far away for stuff available at home -- during Oktoberfest, it's all about the beer -- although I will say that we spent much of the afternoon bumming around like we were home, while waiting for another person to arrive -- it was the quiet before the storm, if you will. We had much-needed jet-lag naps, drank Greek raki and Citron, and watched German-dubbed American TV shows like The Cosby Show and Tom and Jerry. (How do they suddenly talk in German, when they don't in English?) More appropriately, we watched a bootleg copy of Beerfest on DVD to set the mood, a movie about an underground beer Olympics of team drinking games during Oktoberfest.

Things picked up around six when the fourth member of our beer team arrived: Jack on a flight from Barcelona. If you recall, he'd decided to relocate back to the States after trying to establish a career in Spain -- but wasn't about to leave Europe without one last hurrah. His girlfriend Sylvina opted to sit this one out and visit a friend in Galicia instead, leaving Jack to be a guy's guy with us for three days.

"Man, there are so many Aussies out there," he noticed, this being his second time to the Bavarian city. "They live for this stuff."

The fifth and final member of our beer team was not American nor Australian, but an actual German: my cousin Hans-Georg, who had an apartment in Munich for his job. I hadn't seen Hans-Georg since his appearance on the big Global Trip 2004 blog, when I stayed with his family in Luxembourg. He would serve not only as a fellow drinking teammate, but our local connection, our inside man. He hadn't wasted any time in meeting us, coming right from the office on his motor scooter.

"Very nice. Right across from the table dance bar," Hans-Georg said, looking out the window. "So what do you feel like having [for dinner]?"

"I dunno."

"I'm so hungry I could eat anything right now."

"How about the Hofbrauhaus?" Hans-Georg said, smirking as if to state the obvious answer.

"YES!"

"Yeah, I could do that."


IN LESS THAN TEN MINUTES, we were at Karlsplatz, the area near the historic center and not surprisingly the one most visited by foreigners. "The Scots are here," I said, pointing out a Scottish team walking around in kilts.

"There are maybe fifty percent Germans here," Hans-Georg said, looking around. We walked around and did a quick sightseeing tour -- City Hall, the Theatinerkirsch church, and the opera house -- noticing along the way other international "teams" wandering on the eve of Oktoberfest: Brits, Japanese, and even the hockey-wearing Team Canada I'd seen at the airport. Not surprisingly, we saw many Australians, many of them on the huge line waiting outside and trying to get inside the famed Hofbrauhaus -- some chanting their national slogan, "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" The big crowd was due to Hofbrauhaus' famous brand name, like a great tourist attraction -- suitably, it's located across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe. Hans told me the Hofbrauhaus was such a touristic thing, some of the barmaids were Japanese to serve the influx of Japanese tourists and in fact, that most of the surrounding buildings, as German-looking as they were, were actually owned by the Japanese.

The long line to get into Hofbrauhaus was barely a deterrent to getting good beer, for in Munich you're never far away from another beer hall. There are several major breweries in Bavaria, each of them setting up various locations in Munich to tap their kegs. From my understanding, Hofbrauhaus isn't the best of them anyway, just the most popular -- sort of how Budweiser in the USA is huge, although from my experience, no one actually drinks it.



Walking around downtown Munich, any beer connaisseur would be in heaven; the names of arguably the world's top beers are found atop buildings in big letters and in neon lights, like monuments of heroes, all as important (if not more) than the historical buildings: Spaten (picture above), Lowenbrau, Hacker-Pschorr, and Augustiner to name a few -- the last, Augustiner, being what many locals consider to be the best brewery Bavaria has to offer. We ended up at a restaurant of another favorite, Paulaner, sharing a big table with six Italians -- three couples of old, middle-age men and younger wives. We drank Hefe-weissen dunkels (dark wheat beers) while looking at the menu.

"So do they have wurst [sausage] here?" I asked my cousin.

"I will show you the authentic food." Fifteen minutes later, platters of roast suckling pig in dunkelbier gravy arrived with potato dumplings and sides of fresh cole slaw (all at regular non-inflated-Oktoberfest prices). Across the way, the Italians were eating roasted duck -- although Jack used pizza as a way to break the ice with them, asking them about a big giant pizza festival he'd seen on TV, somewhere in Italy. The young, Marisa-Tomei-looking one he sat next to had no idea what he was talking about.

"I don' know. I come from Napoli," she said. "Naples. It's two hours on a train from Rome, to the north."

Terence looked at me. "Hey Erik, do you remember..."

"Yeah, I know." Immediately I knew he was referring to a line we both remembered from an old Married with Children spin-off that only lasted about three shows, starring Matt LeBlanc years before his role as Joey on Friends. In a very Joey Tribbiani way -- he's totally type-cast -- he refers to a girl from Italy and says something like, "Hey, I'd like to see her Naples."

That was just one on-going joke of the weekend that was spawned by our first team dinner together. Another Italian-inspired one was a routine, done in a falsetto, frantic Italian accent: "I come to Munich, to Oktoberfest, and I want to cheat on my husband, and I meet a nice guy, an Americano, and I want to show him my Naples, and I tell him it's only two hours on a train from Roma, to the norte... but you wanna know what he wanna talk about?! He wanna talk about a grande pizza in a piazza... no capisce!" Every time we'd say it, Jack would just give us the finger -- but it was all a part of good-natured beer team drinking camaraderie.


WITH OUR FULL of Italians but not beer, we wandered looking for more. "I know a place we can go," Hans-Georg told us.

"This is great," Jack told me. "I love having a local connection." We walked off the tourist radar, while I filled Jack in on the funny meeting I had with my cousin, how Hans-Georg showed up at my door one day in the 80s out of the blue claming to be my cousin -- all while I was watching the pilot of Perfect Strangers when Balki did that to his cousin Larry. Anyway, we went to Schrannenhalle, a shopping, dining and entertainment complex recently converted from an old market place, complete with Der Pschorr, an indoor beer garden. Performing on a stage in front of us was a live jazz band, playing for the almost all local clientelle.

"So this is where the locals come to get away from the Australians," I said.

We drank until the end of the set and then dropped Hans-Georg off at his motor scooter before he got too drunk. The rest of us went out for more beer and ended up at another small beer hall in the basement of an unassuming storefront a block from our hotel, amidst all the neon lights of strip clubs. "Now this is what I want to see when I come into a basement!" Jack proclaimed. We had some more rounds of beers -- I forget the total count of the night -- but ended the night off there. It was a relatively low-key evening before the real beer drinking began the next day, when Oktoberfest officially kicked off. My beer team was assembled, warmed up, and ready to go.


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The End of the Myth

DAY 20: "Good morning! Are you leaving today?" Mamma of the Dolphins restaurant in Naxos Town greeted me. She saw that I had my big bag with me.

"Yes." For brunch she served me my last fill of grilled octopus, prepared from one of the tentacles hanging on the bannister outside. Her son Giorgo served me a free coffee and old man Gregory gave me some free wine. It was sad; I was about to leave the family I had come to learn about through daily observation.

"Where are you going? Santorini?" Gregory asked.

"No, Athens. I'm going home."

Before sending me off to the ferry port, the grandfather-type wished me luck, kissing me goodbye on both cheeks in a respectful family way, like the tough guys do on The Sopranos. "[Good journey,]" he said. "Take a card, so you can remember Gregory!"

"I'll see you soon."



MY LAST DAY in Greece involved a lot of moving around. An uneventful seven-hour ferry ride (picture above) took me back to the bustling industrial port of Piraeus, just outside of Athens. I was greeted, to my dismay, by the stench of industry and the hustle and bustle of big city life -- a huge change from the quiet tiny hamlet of Town X. A half hour Metro train ride took me back to the central Monstiraki and Plaka areas, where it was just as I had left it two weeks before. Restaurant hosts called out for customers, and the street hawkers went around trying to sell bootleg DVDs and these weird noisemakers that made these annoying, springy cricket sounds. I chilled out for a while at a restaurant with Greek meatballs and live music from the plaza, and did some blogging at a wi-fi enabled bar nearby, where locals were busy watching a soccer game.

A midnight bus ride through modern Athens brought me to the airport, and it was there that I spent my last night in Greece, sleeping on a chair with my bags. I thought I was the only one who'd think to do something like that, but the terminal was littered with many people sleeping on benches and on the floor; it was near impossible to find a good place to camp out.

The airport got a little busier around four in the morning, and I woke up to check the boards and find my check-in counter. Alitalia had me checked-in by 4:30, and on a plane by 6:30. I flew off to Munich via Rome, leaving Greece and all its people and monuments behind, at least for the time being.


GREECE'S TOURISM SLOGAN plays off the country's well-known mythology: "Live your own myth... in Greece." I'd like to think that I did live my own myth in Greece, if only for two short weeks. There are way too many islands in Greece to see in one's lifetime, let alone all the mountain regions of the Macedonian mainland, but at least I got a taste of the spectrum of Greek culture and life. I saw for myself what Greece has to offer to the world in today's age -- not just a rich history that everyone in the Western World seems forced to learn about in school.

These past thirteen entries chronicle this myth I've lived through, which with some thanks to Cliff Notes, I've been able to draw parallels to The Odyssey and other stories of Greek mythology. I've walked through temples of Athena and the Minotaur, and I've searched for Atlantis. I've met a one-i'd Cyclops, a bunch of Lotus-Eaters, and a legendary man in a tiny island town. I experienced things from the ultra-touristy to the path less taken, and above all, I've eaten a lot of really great food. (Man, am I going on a diet when I get home.)

Unlike my adventure to Timbuktu which became more of a continual story as the days progressed, my day-to-day escapades in Greece were pretty random -- but that's okay because Odysseus' adventures in The Odyssey were also a pretty random series of episodes. If I am to continue drawing parallels to Homer's epic, I should probably end my myth by going home and killing a bunch of suitors trying to claim my throne, but due to a lack of suitors or any throne, I'll just have to go and try to kill my liver instead -- next stop: Oktoberfest.


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Bag of Winds

DAY 19: To paraphrase the copy of Cliffs Notes for The Odyssey I packed along in my carry-on (deemed safe by Homeland Security, but not by your sixth grade English teacher), Odysseus was right on course to go home to Ithaca with the help of the Aeolus. Aeolus, King of the Winds (a.k.a. Joe Blow) had used his powers to take all the adverse winds and stick them in a Ziploc® freezer bag. The bag was then sealed shut ("Yellow and blue make green!") so that none of the bad winds would escape and send Odysseus off course. However, when Odysseus & Co. were right within sights of home, a couple of crewmembers with the munchies thought that there was some sort of hidden treasure in the bag -- or maybe just some leftovers -- and opened it. Their boat was sent way off course, leaving Odysseus to think that maybe he should have labeled his bags accordingly:

"ADVERSE WINDS" | "MEATLOAF"



I HAD BEEN in sights of a fishing trip in Naxos, but that too was blown off course; high winds from the north made the sea choppy, keeping the smaller fishing boats in the marinas. I figured I couldn't wait it out any longer and just embraced the winds for my last day of recreation in Greece in the best way that I could: windsurfing (picture above).

There are a couple of windsurfing outfitters on Naxos' west coast, one of them a German operation called Flisvos that had a one o'clock trial session. Rushing there on my motorbike from Town X -- "Punch the keys for God's sake!" -- I made it just in time to suit up in a worn-out grey and red shorty wetsuit for the lesson to begin. I felt like I was in kiteboarding lessons again.

There were only six of us in class led by our instructor, an olive-skinned, Greek-looking Belgian guy named Miguel who was all business, never cracking a smile or making a joke. He brought us over to this simulator on the backside of the surfshop, where we learned how to mount a board, extend its mast, and get into stance -- all without getting into the water just yet.

"Windsurfing is very technical. If you get it one or two times, you will be happy, we will be happy," he told us.

We took to the water, near the catamarans they used for catamaran lessons, and we tried our newly-learned techniques using the winds to the back of us. One thing that I did learn was that windsurfing was tough.

*SPLASH!*

That wasn't the only wipeout and it wasn't just me. But eventually, people starting getting the hang of it, more than I did. Miguel observed each of us and then gathered us around to give each of us pointers. It went something like this:

"You (points to first guy), you are doing good, just lean back more... You (points to second guy), that's good, just keep your feet behind the mast in a Bruce Lee stance... You (points to me), you have to stand on the board first before you get the mast."

"Oh."

That wasn't my only problem; it turned out my sail wasn't tied properly on one end, so I was sent back to the surfshop to get myself another one. I didn't know whether or not to be embarrassed for getting something labeled, "Kiddie 2.5" but eventually I got the hang of it, at least for a couple of seconds before wiping out again. Just when I thought I was getting good, the trial was over.

Luckily a two-hour "beginner's session" would start in half an hour, and each of us signed up for the additional 40 euros. (That's how they get ya.) Miguel was our teacher again, and this time around I was upgraded to a bigger board and a bigger sail, supposedly for more balance in the choppy surf. The lesson started out with a review of equipment and how to set it up, and then a lesson of some funny terms in windsurfing lingo: "loofing" and "bearing away." Back in the water, we tried to loof and bear away, but mostly we wiped out a lot.

"Here, I will show you," Miguel would say every ten minutes before getting on a board and showing off.

"Oh, he makes it look so easy," I said.

Over the next two hours, we learned a technique, practiced it, and then went back to Miguel for more. There were still a lot of wipeouts, and I even crashed into a German woman's board, but I guess that was expected. A lot of times the strong winds would blow me way out of the practice zone, and I'd have to wade my sail and board back to Miguel. "Stay close to here, so I can help you," he said, as if to assume I actually knew how to steer direction in the strong winds. Seriously, that unlabeled mythical Ziploc® freezer bag of adverse winds was out of control.

By the end of the course, I really got the hang of it, even turning 180° and switching direction albeit very clumsily. "[The winds are strong.] This is really the upper border for beginners," Miguel told us.

With that said, I felt good about my first windsurfing experience and called it a day. I lazily spent the rest of the afternoon finally chilling out on the beach with a book -- some people go to the Greek Islands and only do the beaches, and I'd figured I might as well get around to it. Soon I realized I was at the nude beach and wondered, What is it about nudist colonies that attract the least attractive naked people? It was a real Beaversville.


BACK IN NAXOS TOWN, I returned my motorbike and got my big bag from storage, ready to find a room for my last real night in Greece before heading off a long 24-hr. way to Munich via Athens and Rome. I went to the tourist information office to ask for a cheap, convenient place near the port and in the end, the most convenient place for me to crash the night was in a pension in a quaint alleyway managed surprisingly by a Filipino woman.

"You look Filipino," she told me.

"Yeah... [My parents are from] Malabon and Bulacan," I told her. "How long have you lived here?"

"Oh, long years. There are many Filipinos here."

She showed me my room with a view and how to turn the hot water in the shared bathroom. "Salamat po," ("Thank you,") I said in Tagalog, thinking how funny it was to say it in Greece of all places. But I guess it wasn't a total shock; Filipinos are everywhere in tourist hubs, a lot of of them in the service industry. (In Rio de Janeiro, on the top of the Sugar Loaf, a Filipino woman there thought my brother and I worked on one of the cruise ships.) More than that, Greece isn't all Greeks; there were many immigrants that I'd seen, mostly in Athens though, showing that there was some sort of multi-culturalism in the country. Kostas of the Hotel Kouros told me there were even many African businessmen making successful livings in Athens.

In Naxos there wasn't so much diversity that I'd seen -- except for my Belgian instructor at the German windsurf school -- but there still was evidence of other countries in terms of cuisine: an "Asian" restaurant and the faux Mexican place that served me tacos -- a one-time break from all the Greek and seafood I'd been eating. (If you've noticed, I've really tried to vary my meals to try a lot of different dishes of Greek cuisine, a lot of them involving seafood. That night I still had a baked mackerel back at Dolphins.)

After watching the sun go down by the marina, my last real night in Greece was a quiet one; I was exhausted from windsurfing, and going out in Naxos Town wouldn't have outdone the great time I had the night before in Town X anyway. I just quietly blogged the night away so as not to fall behind.

The next morning, it wasn't so quiet when a gust of wind swooped into my room and slammed the window shut with such a force that a pane of glass shattered into pieces. I don't know if Aeolus (a.k.a. Joe Blow) was mad at me, or if the unlabeled mythical Ziploc® freezer bag of adverse winds wasn't exactly 100% airtight -- all I do know is that if Odysseus is going to share a boat with a bunch of guys, he should really start labeling his stuff.


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The Legend of Vasillis

DAY 18: This tale should be prefaced with the following instant messenger chat between me and Tracy, my former Creative Director during my dot com bubble days (and fellow globaltripper):

ME (place annoying AIM "message sent" chime sound here): yo
ME: where should I go in greece?
TRACY (place annoying AIM "message received" chime sound here): i can recommend NAXOS
TRACY: north east tip, tiny hamlet named [Town X]
TRACY: find the hotel kouros and the owner, vasillis -- tell him you are a friend of Mississippi's.
TRACY: Vassilis calls me Mississippi
ME: ok
TRACY: its a great, small village. right on the water. he cooks for you at night and drink home made wine
ME: nice

Tracy was skeptical on letting me in on his special Shangri-la in Naxos -- so special that he doesn't want it to be overridden with too many people, like in the book/movie, The Beach. Instead of using its real name, it is to be known for all intents and purposes as "Town X," although anyone who's been to Naxos can pretty much figure it out.

And so, like a character in a video game quest like The Legend of Zelda, I went off to venture on a quest to find the old man Vassilis in Town X, that tiny hamlet of Naxos, and to see what sort of treasure I could find there.

X marks the spot.


THERE IS AN INCREDIBLE back story to this quest, one of a long time ago (well, the 1980's and 90's), one that I do not completely know but have pieced together with stories from Tracy and his friend Stuart, the older Lotus-Eater that I had met on my first night in Naxos Town. Vasillis was a man who ran the Hotel Kouros, an unattractive building at the end of the road in Town X, secluded at the edge of the bay. What the Hotel Kouros lacked in decor and style was made up for in its hospitality; Vasillis was a master entertainer and his hotel was legendary for its livelihood. Travelers stayed for entire seasons, befriending and bonding with local villagers and becoming so drawn to the laid-back, friendly vibe of Hotel Kouros and Town X, that they kept on coming back year after year -- decades of merriment and great memories. Tracy himself became a regular, going back every year for fifteen years, for it was like a second home to him, a place where everyone knew his name: "Mississippi," a nickname given to him by Vasillis because he drank so much that it was flowing like the Mississippi River. Stuart, another member of the extended family, drank as much as his nickname "Lake," and Vasillis was the greatest of them all, the "Black Sea." With them was another guy named Travis, known as "Geronimo" for a reason I forget.

"Those days are over," Stuart had regrettably told me. While he too was living in Naxos, he hadn't been to the Hotel Kouros in a while. He warned me that it wasn't the way it used to be and that Vasillis was a changed man, incoherent and dependant on medications due to his non-stop, twenty-five-year-long drinking binge, entertaining visitors and family.


"WHERE ARE YOU GOING?" asked Maria, the old woman of the house in Naxos Town I was departing from.

"I'm going to [Town X]."

"[Town X]?" she pouted. "But it's too windy!"

At the Dolphins restaurant, I got more warnings. "[Town X]? There's too much wind from the north," Giorgo told me. "You will not like it."

"[Town X?]" the old man Gregory questioned when I told him my destination. "Oh, be careful!" He put his hand on my shoulder with concern. "Listen, be careful."

Hearing that, I was curious more than ever about the mythical hamlet and its legendary man, and set off on my quest on the back of a motor scooter.


I TOOK THE LONG WAY to Town X, first checking out some of the coastal towns and beaches on the west coast. Naxos has some really good beaches with fine sands and blue waters, with many beach clubs and studio apartments available right across the way. The farther out of Naxos Town I went, the more secluded the beaches were, and I was really impressed that Naxos really had it all -- mountains, beaches, ancient sites, Venetian castles, some hiking trails, old authentic villages, nightlife, and a tourism infrastructure -- when many young Lotus-Eaters in Santorini's Perissa Beach told me not to bother because there was "nothing there." (It wasn't Perissa or Ios.) I almost wanted to call Naxos "Island X" to keep it unspoiled, although my impressions of it where only at the end of the season when not many people were around.

The journey to Town X wasn't as perilous as lofty quests are supposed to be. No goblins, no ringwraiths, no Nazi bad guys looking for lost artifacts. I just drove there on my motorscooter, through the mountains and the windier side of the island, with only really minor setbacks: almost losing balance on a hairpin turn, backtracking twenty minutes to get gas from the last available station, getting lost from direction signs pointing the wrong way, and overtaking slower vehicles. I'd rev my engine up to speed up aside them, shouting "Punch the keys for God's sake!" -- Sean Connery's immortal quote in the movie Finding Forrester (only second to the other immortal quote, "You're the man now, dog!")



I really felt the anticipation when I reached the final road to Town X, for it had been built up so much in my mind with the stories and the warnings. Driving in, I saw that as expected, Town X was a sleepy little hamlet. It wasn't easy to get lost, for there was only one main road and an old, but clearly-marked sign pointing me in the right direction. Just as the legend went, the unassuming Hotel Kouros stood alone at the end of the road at the edge of the bay (picture above). It was deserted, just as the town was -- numbers of tourists in Naxos Town were low at the end of the season, let alone a little hamlet that everyone was warned not to go to.

I looked through the front door window and saw an old Greek woman, hunched over the way that old women become in old age. I entered the lobby and she turned to me, surprised. "Uh, milas anglika?" I asked. She didn't speak much English, so she called out to the back room where a middle-aged, un-hunched German woman named Maria came to serve as a translator. "Is the hotel open?" I asked.

"Uh, yes." She too was confused. Nowadays, the only people who came to Town X were usually daytrippers that left before nightfall.

"I can stay here?"

Maria said something in Greek to the other woman. "Yes," she told me. "But the son of the hotel is sleeping. You will have to wait maybe one hour."

"That's okay," I said. And then I said the magic words: "Uh, I'm meant to ask for Vasillis."

"You know Vasillis?"

"I'm a friend of Mississippi."

Her eyes widened from the name recognition. "Vasillis!" she called out to the back room before saying something in Greek with the word "Mississippi" in it. I heard a man's voice in the back cry out, "MISSISSIPPI!"

To his dismay, I was not the legendary Mississippi, but everyone was happy to hear a name from the past anyway. I was invited back to the family's residential section of hotel, where cassettes and a cassette deck still stood in the corner. There was a blood pressure kit on the dining table and beside it in a chair was the legendary old man Vasillis himself.

"I'm a friend of Mississippi," I told him. "My name is Erik." He extended his hand for a handshake. "You are a legend amongst my friends," I told him.

Vasillis looked the part; he was the sort of old man you meet at the end of a quest, with white hair, his signature moustache, and a big beer belly. At 79, he was portly and jolly like a Santa Claus without a beard or a sleigh, distinguished yet unrefined. His face was full of experience and wisdom, each wrinkle representing a tale of a long, fulfulling life. However it was hard to talk to him since he wasn't exactly all there. Regardless of English or Greek, it was hard for him to speak any coherent sentences at all.

"I don't know the word in English," Maria informed me, "But it's when there is no blood flowing to the right side of his brain."

I was invited to sit at the table while Vasillis' wife Popi, the old hunched over woman, served me a cup of Greek coffee next to a side of cookies. Most of my conversation was with Maria, who also lived in Town X after building her getaway house there. She had been a part of the Hotel Kouros' former glory days; she told me that Tracy a.k.a. Mississippi was actually with her when she went to see the plot of land where her house now stood. Another girl that was with them at that time (I forgot the name) had already passed away. Things were a lot different, yet things were a lot the same; Town X still retained its quiet magic, a magic that convinced Maria to spend her twilight years there after living in Berlin as a teacher.

"Why do you like it here?" I asked her.

"You can't describe it," she said. "It's just a feeling." Some people hated it, but some people completely embraced it she told me.

Vasillis looked on, but could only say one word English statements in his very slurred speech. He'd almost shout them, the way a person with headphones does when his/her hearing is impaired from the music blasting in the ears. "MISSISSIPPI!"

"He's married now," I told them. "I have pictures." Tracy had e-mailed me recent pictures of him and his wife, and their new house in the suburbs, and I put my PowerBook G4 on the table to show them.

"She's very beautiful," Maria commented on Tracy's wife.

"Yeah, she's on television. She's a journalist." The digital pictures were from an assignment the couple had done in Egypt. Tracy's wife Toni posed with a fez, and in front of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

"TRACY. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC!" Vasillis said, again in a slur.

"Yeah," I said. Tracy had always been in project flirtations with the National Geographic Society.

"TRACY'S WIFE. FROM EGYPT!"

"No, she's from New York. They only went there."

"FROM EGYPT!" He wasn't all there, but I tried to have some small talk anyway.

"Stuart says hello."

"LAKE!"

"So what do you do here these days?"

"He spends his days listening. And thinking," Maria told me.

Vasillis said something in Greek I couldn't comprehend, but Maria translated that earlier that day he had gone to the dentist with his old friend Dimitri, another local from a neighboring village that was also integral in the heyday of the Hotel Kouros. Tracy had told me that if I was lucky Dimitri would take me fishing, but he was no where to be found -- there was only an old picture of him on the wall. In fact, there were many pictures on the wall, like wallpaper in two rooms, pictures of all the memories. Pictures in color, black and white, and sepia-toned, all of them fading but immortalizing the good times and great moments. The glory days were no myth; I saw pictures full of smiles and parties and dancing with family and friends. It was evident that Vasillis was the master showman I had heard about, or at least was. Those days are over, echoed Stuart's words in my head.

"TRACY!" He pointed out a faded out picture of Tracy and Stuart on the wall.

"Tracy is coming here in October. Next month," I told them, relaying the news Tracy gave me, but reminding them that Stuart and I couldn't exactly believe everything he said. Maria nodded.

"TRACY IS COMING! OCTOBER," the old man said. "HIS WIFE. FROM EGYPT!"

"No, New York."

Meanwhile, Popi was having a stomach episode, looking rather ill in a chair. Maria suggested I go off and see the town to kill some time until my room was ready for me.


TOWN X WAS SLEEPY indeed. It was like a retirement community with old people wandering the streets and fishermen patiently wasting the days looking for a catch -- most of the young people who grew up there had left to get jobs in Athens. It's only main archaeological tourist attraction was its kouros, an unfinished ancient rock sculpture of Dionysus that laid abandoned atop a hill. I walked from there, to the little harbor area and the rocky beach, and back to the Hotel Kouros where Kostas, Vasillis' middle-aged son was awake.

"I'm a friend of Tracy," I told him, the new manager of the hotel. He actually lived in Athens with his own family, but was in town to fix up some things and wrap up the season. He showed me to my room, Room No. 7, in the middle of the hotel before going off to run some errands.

I was the only guest of the hotel that night -- two prospective German women checked it out but were turned off and left -- and it was a little like being in the hotel in The Shining. Everything was deserted and a little dusty -- the reception area and the cafeteria -- plus there was a big ominous refrigerator at the end of my hallway. Looking out my terrace to the bay I noticed some locals walking along the beach, doing double-takes at me as if to think, Can it be? Someone is actually staying there tonight. My room was simple but peaceful, with no sounds but the relaxing sounds of crashing waves outside. An ocean breeze filled the room, my temporary fortress of solitude. This is the peace Maria came for, I thought. X marks the spot.


I WAS LOOKING at the hotel's photographic history in the lobby when Kostas popped his head through the door from the outside. "Uh, can you help me?"

"Sure, no problem." He was finishing up a landscaping job outside, planting trees he'd brought from the mainland since the sea had destroyed most of what was there before. I simply had to help him move a big potted plant to the backyard. Doing so broke the ice for conversation.

"[I didn't really know Tracy that well.] When he was here, I was in Athens," he told me. Of course he had heard about the legendary Mississippi -- everyone thought that he might even get married there.

"He's married now," I told Kostas.

"Child?"

"No."

"Maybe he is waiting to come here to make one," he smirked. He showed me around the back of the building -- the family had a garden for fresh vegetables and a small vineyard to make homemade wine.

"Is there food here, or should I go into town?"

He thought for a bit. "If we have food, you eat with us."

When you're here, you're family.

Like father, like son; Tracy had told me Vasillis used to cook for his visitors, mostly with whatever they had laying around the house. There wasn't much in the cupboard that night, so dinner was simple but satisfying: a bowl of stewed chick peas, bread, tomato chunks, local cheese, and their strong, homemade wine bottled in old plastic water bottles. Popi did kitchen duties while Vasillis sat in a chair and watched an episode of Lost subtitled with Greek letters.

"Tracy has not been here in many years," Kostas said. "If Tracy comes back, he will see my father is a different man... But before, he was the boss. He would be cooking, not my mother."

Vasillis listened in on the conversation -- I'm told he could listen better than speak -- and only said one word things I could understand. "TRACY!" "LAKE!" and "Ne" ("Yes.") He ate soft cheese because of his recent dental work.

"You know the kouros?" Kostas asked me.

"Yeah, I went up there before."

"It's an unfinished statue. Like this place. Hotel Kouros. Unfinished," he joked. "When I fix it, maybe I will change the name." Vasillis had already passed the hotel business to the next generation; Kostas had taken over three years ago. He was trying to restore it for when he moved there with his wife after retiring from his job as an electrical engineer in Athens -- another circle of life sort of thing.

We chat over food and the homemade wine about various topics: that global warming affected the oceans (I might have gone fishing if the seas weren't abnormally rough); that Damon Lindelof, creator of Lost, went to high school with me; that Tracy and I were together five years ago, both seeing the Twin Towers come down before us from the roof of our office on 19th Street; that yes, I'm actually 31 and not 24 like Popi had thought; and that, according to Kostas' experience, Americans were great people, despite the regime of Bush. "Americans are like the Greek people," he said. "[They know how to live.]" Like the mainstream American consciousness, he too was annoyed at the French. "They come and only order a Greek salad. And for four people!"

Kostas took his father's blood pressure, as he did everyday, to figure out how much medicine he'd need. Shortly thereafter, the old man went to bed.


WITH THE OLD COUPLE TURNED IN, Kostas took me to his friend's bar down the road, seemingly the only place open that night. We brought over a bottle of the homemade wine and shared it with two relatively younger locals, Efthimios and bartender Panos, who were both wrapping up the season before heading back to Athens. They were both impressed that I could write their names in Greek letters, even in an inebriated state.

The rest of the night is fuzzy, but I recall it being a blast, full of homemade wine and shots of raki. "Slow down with the wine," Panos told me as I sipped another glass of the strong concoction. "That's local wine." I remember us drinking and laughing and listening to music from Panos' laptop hooked up to the bar's speakers -- he was a huge Motown fan. It was, without a doubt, the best night I'd had in Greece. Maybe this is what it was like during Mississippi's days with Vasillis, I wondered.

I outlasted Kostas, who went back to the hotel at I don't know what time. Efthimios, Panos and I were the last men standing, quite possibly the only people awake in town. I don't know what time it was when I stumbled back to the Hotel Kouros, but I know I was pretty wasted. If anyone was around to see me, they would have seen a bumbling, drunken idiot empty all the items out of his pockets in the hallway looking for his room key. In the end, I couldn't find it -- or was just too drunk to -- so I just passed out on the couch in the lobby.

The morning sun woke me up around 6:30 when I heard the footsteps of the old man Vasillis walking across the room to the hallway. I don't think he noticed me. A bit sobered up but not completely, I went out to look for my room key -- it was on the pathway to the bar in plain sight. I slept the rest of the morning in my bed, waking up a couple of hours later to the peaceful sounds of crashing waves.


KOSTAS WAS OFF running errands, so it was just Popi and Vasillis who saw me off later on that morning -- but not after sitting with them one last time with Greek coffee and some more cookies. When I asked to take their picture, Popi blushed and stood on her tippy-toes to simulate her younger days when she wasn't so hunched over.

"Thank you for everything," I told them. "I like this place. Efkharisto."

"Parakalo," Vasillis replied. "MANY GREETINGS..." he started before slurring off into something Greek. Popi tried to translate with body language and I managed to figure out that they wanted me to tell my friends about them with that computer I had with me.

"Yes. I will," I said. (A few days later, this blog entry appeared.)

I rode off on my motorbike away from the tiny hamlet of Town X, after only a single day -- but I wanted to based myself in Naxos Town the night before I left for Athens so as not to rush around in the short amount of time I had left. I may have not been at the Hotel Kouros for enough time to get my picture on the wall, but at least I got a taste of that visceral feeling one can't describe that Maria had told me about. Plus I had met the man, The Legend of Vasillis, and saw that his legacy and lust for life would not be forgotten, and would continue on.


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When You're Here, You're Family

DAY 17: I noticed a big impressive schooner named Galileo docked in the port that morning when one of the ferries was coming in. I went to check it out and shoot a picture when I ran into Oula, the woman who had touted me two evenings prior when I had landed in Naxos, and gave me the room I was staying at in her house in Naxos Town.

"[I am late for the ferry arrival,]" she told me, knowing that family came before her job touting people off the ships for a place to stay. "[I had to bring my daughter to school. In Greece, today is the first day of school.]" While back in America the 11th of September would be remembered for something else, in Greece kids went back to their classrooms.


I DON'T KNOW what it is about the American chain restaurant The Olive Garden that sets itself up to be made fun of all the time; from stand-up comedians to the movie Old School, The Olive Garden always seems to be harmlessly ridiculed. Maybe it's because in one TV commercial, an Italian-American guy raves about how he always brings his visiting Italian grandmother from the old country to The Olive Garden, because "When you're here, you're family." My friends in the New York area laugh because only a fool would bring a grandmother visiting from Italy to the American franchised, Tuscan-themed Olive Garden, when there are so many other authentic Italian restaurants around. We taunt the slogan "When you're here, you're family" in a stereotypical Italian-American accent before bringing up the fact that you can get unlimited salad and breadsticks for just $5.99.

The Olive Garden's slogan doesn't just apply to Italian restaurants, but many other family-oriented cultures around the world -- especially the Greek one. From my wanderings in Greece thus far, I'd seen that when you're here, you're in a family; a majority of hotels, pensions, restaurants, and shops were family-run -- establishments are proudly handed down from generation to generation. Families are an integral part of Greek life -- anyone who's seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding knows that it can also sometimes get overbearing to the point of annoyance.

But I digress. The island of Naxos, the biggest of the Cyclades archipelago, is no exception to the Greek culture of family. Unlike the tourist-frequented islands of Mykonos and Santorini, Naxos still retains an old, authentic country charm despite the increasing number of tourists. Mass tourism is fairly new; it was only about ten years ago that people started coming to Naxos to get away from the louder scenes of the other islands, and the resulting development has transformed Naxos Town and its surrounding crystaline beaches.

Away from the coast it is a different scene; cows moo, goats baa, and tractors make whatever onomatopoeic sounds that tractors make. Naxos is also very mountainous in its central region, with Mt. Zeus standing tall in the middle at about 1000m high. Quiet villages still thrive in the mountainous area -- quiet, except for the hour that a day-tour bus stops in -- and they are places to explore and see Greek life.

The easiest way to get around Naxos is to rent your own car, ATV, or dune buggy for the day, or in my case, a motor scooter. Confident that I could handle one again -- it's like riding a bike -- I rented one for 24 hours to zip around the mountains. Cruising out of Naxos Town, I didn't regret my decision to do so; the initial expansive views blew my mind so much that I had to stop on the side of the road every so often to just take it all in. Tall, brown mountains sloped down to brown rolling hills, farmlands, and groves of olive trees -- the entire central region of Naxos is one big olive garden -- although I didn't see any unlimited salad and breadsticks.


HALKI IS ONE TOWN of significance because one family, the Vallindras family, has made a name for itself producing a drink known as Citron. Citron is a hard liquor that isn't easy to come by; it's only made and sold on the island of Naxos by only two competing families. Since 1896, the Vallindras family has taken the leaves of the locally-grown citron fruit and distilled it using an old-fashioned distiller, still in use to this day. (Literally, they had just used it that day for a new batch.) The essence of the citron leaves is blended with alcohol, and then natural colors are added to distinguish each batch's strengths and texture: green, the lighter, sweeter one with 30% alc/vol; clear, the regular one with 40%; and yellow, the full-bodied cognac-like one with 40%. Now in its fifth generation, the Vallindras family business would live on with curious future generations.

While wandering Halki, I saw that one of the other proudly-produced goods was handwoven fabrics, and I stopped in one shop to take a look. Inside was a friendly old woman named Maria who had used an old weaving machine for forty-two years to make tablecloths, placemats, bookmarks, bags, and the like. We had some small talk.

"I am from New York," I told her.

"[Ah, New York! My daughter is in New York!]" she replied with a bit of excitement.

"Where in New York?"

"In Queens."

"Ah, Astoria. Very Greek," I told her under assumption.

"No, Bayside."

She showed me around her store in hopes of a sale -- I was nice and bought two handwoven bookmarks -- and reminded me what the day was. "[So bad. Five years in New York.]" On the wall, there was a changing-image poster of the Twin Towers, one in the daytime, one at night. I had almost forgotten about Nine Eleven with the sensory overload I had from the Naxos mountain scenery. "America is good," she told me. "But Bush is bad. And Bin Laden, and Blair." Despite US foreign policy, she was proud of America because that is where her daughter and grandchildren were. I saw pictures of them on the wall, near the Statue of Liberty and at a baseball game, evidence that Greek families extended outside the home country. I'm told there are 10 million people in Greece -- and 10 million Greek people abroad.



LEAVING HALKI, I continued to cruise around central Naxos in my scooter up hills and down hills on the curvy mountain roads, passing through villages and stopping by the many churches scattered throughout the island, and the occasional windmill. I checked out the Dimitri Temple, the old marble quarry, and did a short hike up to the Cave of Zeus, where Zeus supposedly got his thunderbolts, just under the ominous Mt. Zeus, whose peak was shrouded by clouds. (I might have trekked up to the top, but the trail from the cave wasn't maintained and Chuck Taylor was no match for the King of the Greek Gods.) I took a breather in the quiet mountain village of Apiranthos, a sleepy old town of old Greek men and family-run restaurants. Taverna Platanos served me my fill of local Naxos kefalofiri cheese and of course, olives from the olive garden. While I might have not been family, I saw that they had plenty of family to go around for themselves anyway -- on the wall were pictures of its many, many members (picture above).


RIDING OUT WEST into the sunset, I arrived back in Naxos Town and had dinner at my usual place, Dolphins. "Mamma" happily served me this time (grilled octopus) while the charming old Gregory was busy making new patrons feel like family by striking up conversations, patting them on the back and their cheeks all grandfatherly-like.

"Very bad weather," he told me when he got around to me, nixing any possible fishing the following morning. "[But] come back tomorrow for coffee." I had breakfast there the following morning, and he served me a complimentary glass of wine to go with my omelette. I also got to meet one of other waiters there, not surprisingly, Gregory's nephew Giorgo.

"The coffee's from me," Giorgo said with a smile, thanking me for my continued patronage. Hey, it may have not been unlimited salad and breadsticks, but really, nothing says "you're family" like free coffee and wine in the morning.


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Wanted: Poseidon Adventure

DAY 16:Poseidon, King of the Seas in Greek mythology, is a deity so powerful that he can take Hollywood remakes baring his name and turn them into box office duds. (Seriously, that was in theaters for only about two weeks.) As King of the Seas, he is responsible for many seafaring adventures, and the one I was looking for was to be a bit tamer than The Perfect Storm.

I thought that organizing a fishing trip like I'd seen on Globe Trekker would be a straightforward affair -- for some Greeks, fishing is a way of life and seafood is on the menu of every restaurant -- but I was soon discovering it was not. I made some inquiries at other places before with no luck, and I did again in Naxos Town. I asked British ex-pat Stuart about fishing the night before, and he regretted not having any fishing contacts. He told me to just check out the official Naxos information office, but they told me there was nothing that could be arranged. I asked different tour agencies, but they too were no help. I thought about asking the family at the seafood restaurant I'd been introduced to the night before, but they were closed on Sunday.

And then I stumbled upon Dolphins, a family-run restaurant in the old port where a funny, friendly, and charming old man sat at a table on the promenade, greeting anyone walking by like a jovial grandfather. He knew several languages and tried to make friends with everyone in their respective tongues, so that he could invite them into the restaurant.

His English got me in the doorway, to the outdoor seating area, where I dined on a mixed fish platter of red mullet, squid, and other small fish. I figured that restaurants were the link between non-Greek speaking tourists like me and seafood-supplying fishermen and I asked the old man -- Gregory was his name -- about the fishing boats. He poured me a complimentary ouzo.

"I have two fishing boats," he told me, pointing to the marina. "[A small one... the red. And a bigger one. In blue.]"

"Do you catch octopus?"

"Yes! Every morning we go fishing at five o'clock in the morning, come back at eleven. Fresh fish for lunch," he told me. "Then at three, we go and come back at six. Fresh fish for dinner."

My eyes widened; it wasn't three o'clock yet.

"[But] not today. The weather is not good." Looking out to see, I saw that the waves were rough and the winds were picking up. Aeolus, King of the Winds, was play-fighting with Poseidon. "Maybe tomorrow."

"Can I go?"

"It's at five o'clock in the morning," he warned.

"Yeah, that's fine."

"Okay," Gregory told me. "Come back here tonight at ten o'clock or eleven [to see if we are going in the morning.] If not, you get one ouzo from Gregory."


I HAD A WHOLE AFTERNOON and evening to kill, and so I went out to explore old Naxos Town, another former Venetian settlement. Like Santorini's Fira, it too was a labyrinth of alleyways and archways, filled with houses, shops, boutiques, but without the designer labels. I don't know if it was because it was Sunday or if the tourist season was winding down, or if Naxos Town was simply not as touristy as other island towns I'd been to, but it was actually quite pleasant, being evidently a not-so-beaten path. Wondering around, I saw that produce markets replaced Fira's Camper stores. I saw kids playing in the streets near their houses. Some areas were almost deserted; I'd wondered where everyone was as I got lost in the maze of streets.



Outside the maze, I saw the Metropolis church and the northern shoreline of crashing waves where things were not looking good for any possible fishing (picture above). I went to the Archaelogical Museum, holding a collection of Naxos artifacts, and even spent some time sipping on a Citron drink at Agios Giorgios Beach.

The most impressive site of the day was at the Venetian Museum, a fully-restored aristocratic house built in the garrison of Naxos' castle, where the descendants of the the Della Rocca Barozzi family still lived and maintained the grounds. More than a museum of rocks collecting dust, it was an impressive collection of things acquired by the French/Italian-Venetians families, displayed in each of the rooms to retaining their 700-year-old history: the sitting room, the chapel, and the dining room (sporting corkscrews from every century since the 12th.) More than a throwback to the past, the Della Rocca Barozzi family used their lower floors for an art museum, showcasing the work of current Naxos artists. To make the whole thing classy, they pumped classical music throughout, and to make it even classier, they ended their tours with complimentary drinks.

Out classing that was the fact that the museum also held classical concerts in an adjacent yard at nights, this one with an attractive selling point underlined on the bottom of their flyer. With that read, I bought a ticket to the show, an evening showcase of traditional Naxos unlimited booze. Oh, and traditional music and dance -- not to be confused with the shows you may see in some of the restaurants. Striving to be authentic -- it was a museum after all -- they distinguished themselves to other shows that weren't really Greek. (Lotus-Eating Romanian Mitch pointed out that one music set in Perissa Beach was fake; the "Greek" music the tourists were listening to was actually standard Gypsy music, a culture not specific to any one country.)

The musicians played their guitars and fiddles and bagpipe-like instruments (I forget the name), and the dancers danced in traditional garb, even drinking in between sets for the added authencity. We watched and clapped and drank unlimited local wine and drinks, while a plastic barrier kept us away from Aeolus' increasing winds. Not surprisingly, the show ended with group participation, a dance circle, a combination of square dancing and a conga line, with dos-y-doing and skipping under each other's chain of arms. Nikolas, the emcee of the evening (looking a bit like Brian Johnson of AC/DC) was a class act as well, handing hecklers with finesse (yes, there was a rude, old British heckler that everyone hated), encouraging us to drink more of the unlimited drinks, and making us feel good about ourselves for being there. "[You are not like the other tourists. We are here, away from the noisy motos, and the ouzo places, discos and bars because you actually have an interest in our culture.]"


THIS "OTHER KIND OF TOURIST" left the museum and head back to the Dolphins restaurant to see if Poseidon had triumphed over Aeolus for a little fishing adventure.

"Very bad weather tomorrow," Gregory informed me. I had a feeling that was coming.

"It's okay, I'll eat here anyway." Gregory served me marinated octopus and an ouzo as I wondered if I would go fishing at all before I left -- but at least I gave it a shot. Poseidon and Aeolus continued on, dos-y-doing the night away, with unlimited drinks if they had any luck.


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The Lotus-Eaters

DAY 15: In Homer's epic The Odyssey, hero Odysseus travels from island to island, getting into several MacGyver-like episodes, on his way home to Ithaca. In one episode, he arrives at the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, a tribe of people addicted to the lotus plant, a food which has the power to disempower someone; once addicted to the lotus, one loses all ambitions and motivations to go anywhere or do anything (but eat more lotus). Odysseus had a hard time pulling his newly-addicted crew away from the Lotus-Eaters, so that he might get on and continue his odyssey -- before the word and poem "Odyssey" might be named after someone else. (MacGyver perhaps.)



The Lotus-Eaters exist today in the form of the backpacker, particularly the ones who arrive at Santorini's Perissa Beach (picture above) and never want to leave. At the Youth Hostel Anna, the epicenter of young Lotus-Eaters, I had met many people who had stayed in Perissa much longer than they had anticipated. Chihiro and Yuko, two Japanese girls who spoke really good English, had planned on spending three days there, and were going on six so far. An Aussie guy in my dorm room had been there for three months and counting, with no immediate plans to leave just yet.

What the lotus plant is a metaphor for in this scenario I am unsure of. It can't be the beach -- there are far better beaches in the world, including some in southern New Jersey -- for Perissa beach is merely a narrow strip of coarse, black sand, little pebbles even, that get so hot you feel like you're walking on hot coals if you don't have sandals on. Beer is definitely a part of the lotus metaphor, and I assume a couple of other substances, although I really didn't see any evidence of it other than a really good Cuban cigar. If anything, the lotus in this situation is a collective of everything: the warm Mediterranean sun, friendly people, laid-back atmosphere, good food and copious amounts of alcohol. Young people come has visitors and become temporary residents of Perissa, using Youth Hostel Anna as the perfect home; it's a very cheap place to stay (6 euros) with several clean dorm rooms and an internet cafe, so kids can surf the web and add more friends to their MySpace pages. (No kidding, I saw it myself.)

Varying my travel styles and budgets on this trip, I stayed at the Youth Hostel Anna. Although "youth hostels" let any age in, it's mostly 18-24 year olds -- but it was easy to blend in with my unnaturally young-looking facade. No one questioned why a 31-year-old was hanging out with a bunch of 19-year-olds who probably had no idea what a Flux Capacitor was.

With that said, it was easy to strike up conversations with fellow travelers, most of them still students on vacation. Management student Yuko came with me to find a Red Bull for I knew there would probably be a long night ahead.

"The Big Market is there," she pointed out, "Big" being the actual proper name of the supermarket. It was pretty big compared to the others though.

"Ha, you know because you live here."

"Yes, I live in Perissa!"

Eventually we rounded up a gang of people -- strangers-turned-friends in a matter of minutes (the great part about hostels) -- and we went out to dinner by the beach. With me were the two Japanese girls, Chihiro and Yuko, Romanian businessman Mitch, Scotsman Daniel, two Flemish girls Emmylou and Elizabeth, and a funny, quirky, eccentric Swiss guy named Greg, the kind of guy "who could sit on a rock and entertain himself for three hours" according to Emmylou.

"Say hello to Elephant Tom!" he instructed everyone, introducing each of us to the little drawing of an elephant on his Swatch watch.

"Uh, hello."

Elephant Tom led us to a restaurant on the north end of the beach. We ate Greek foods (souvlaki, fried tomato balls, lamb kleftico) while chatting about this, that, travel, and politics -- somehow most of these first conversations almost always touch upon the regime of US President Bush. Greg entertained us with his offbeat, ambiguously gay humor with stories about how he had so many "I [HEART] NY shirts" and how he talked his way out of compulsory service in the Swiss Army. Mitch the Romanian made some harmless comment, but Greg cut him off, "Hey, you came from a Third World country. You're not entitled to an opinion." I laughed.

"He was talking about you," Daniel told me.

"That's why I'm laughing."

Believe it or not, the dinner group went back to the hostel to call it an early night (12:30) because most of them were headed off in the morning to the other Greek island of Lotus-Eaters, Ios. A backpacker's party island just an hour and a half away, Ios was the poor man's version of the glitzier Mykonos, Greece's hedonistic mecca of very flashy -- and very gay -- nightclubs.

"Don't go to Mykonos," said Australian Ryan, who I tagged along with on the way to another bar. Although he hadn't gone to Mykonos himself, he was convinced it was nothing but a "pretentious" scene where "you have to wait on lines and pay 30 euros to get in", plus it was "full of homos." He, like the rest of the Lotus-Eaters, had gone to Ios, but left after the exhaustion of non-stop partying for two straight days. Plus, he ran up a 200 euro tab for shots of Jagermeister at a bar called Rehab.

"[I went to Ios for two days, just so I could tell my friends at home I saw more than one of the Greek islands,]" he said, before telling us about the fight he almost started there. In the end, he came back to the more laid-back scene of Perissa -- only to continue drinking at bars without really seeing any authentically Greek for the rest of his holiday.

We went to The Beach Bar, another Perissa establishment with a really obvious proper name, where they had planned on meeting up with other Lotus-Eaters, most of them Australian. With us was another Ryan, from California, a tall engineering student with curly hair that reminded me of Sebastian (Morocco, British Columbia). He suggested we got to the "other" bar amidst dozens of them. "The Youth Hostel only goes to two bars! Beach Bar and the Full Moon Bar!"

With the moon still looking pretty full (there was a big Full Moon party on the beach the night before), we walked down the road to Full Moon Bar, hosting "The Real Full Moon Party," complete with free glow sticks. There I had my first of many Metaxa on the rocks that night, meeting more and more Lotus-Eaters. A group of Albanian kids danced on the floor with this spunky Canadian girl I met. She was in a bigger group of Canadians chatting it up with more Californians, Brits, and Aussies. More drinks were poured. More lotus was consumed.

We eventually moved onto the "other" bar, The Beach Bar, where we ended up sitting around their beach campfire, contining the party. The fire slowly died, but that didn't stop the drunk Canadian girls from going out to collect branches and other flammable materials, including the straw reeds right off the beach umbrellas. But when one girl dragged over this huge log that looked like a parking barrier, the manager of the bar had to shut us down.

"Party's over," he said, killing the fire with a water hose, spoiling the mood. However, there were enough embers left to start up another fire with torn-off umbrella reeds.

"Woooo!"

And so the party continued. A hipster from Oregon drove in on his ATV to liven it up, plugging his iPod nano into portable speakers to crank Sublime until the wee hours of the morning. Merriment continued. More lotus was consumed. I started feeling like I didn't want to leave.


THE NEXT MORNING I almost paid for the all-nighter, almost missing the checkout time from oversleeping. I could have easily stayed another day, or another week or even month -- but like Odysseus, I knew I wanted to move on. With some fava in me (a Greek humus made with fava beans), I said goodbye to the Lotus-Eaters and took the transport to my ferry to Naxos.

* * * * *

I ARRIVED IN NAXOS TOWN, the port city of the island of Naxos, just in time for the sunset by the Temple of Apollo. I actually had a contact in town, a friend of my former creative director back in my dot com days. His name was Stuart and he was another Lotus-Eater, albeit older at 57, who had come to Greece and didn't want to leave. A Brit who had once come on holiday, he definitely found his own "lotus" with Greece and had been traveling to Naxos for the past 25 years. He loved it so much he eventually started a photography course tour of Naxos to support himself.

"I'm all sorted," I told him on the phone, arranging a meet-up that night after having found a room in a two bedroom apartment in a Greek family's home. I wasn't sure what he looked like, but he described himself as "carrying a black bag... tall, intelligent, [and with a] moustache."

Upon meeting, he definitely had a bag, was tall, and sported a moustache. The intelligent part I'd soon discover later, but in the meantime, we had an instant bond in the fact that our mutual friend Tracy was "full of shit."

"Oh, so it's not just us in New York who think that?" I joked.

We ended up at another family-run restaurant (they all are) that he recommended. We dined on seafoods and 4-5 carafes of white wine. (I lost count after a while.) Regardless, "intelligent" shined through in our dinner conversation. The older Lotus-Eater was an interesting man, sharing his stories of the old days traveling Greece with Tracy, spreading wisdom down to me, a fellow traveler. "Eventually wanderlust runs out," he told me after doing it for so long. "You can't force it."

At 57, he finally started to simmer down from his Lotus-Eating ways. "[I realized I should probably spend my time doing something with my life,]" he said. This "something" was getting married to an attractive German woman 12-years younger than him (just this past April) and raising a young boy with her. He laughed at the fact that while he was trying to be responsible, he was actually still in warmer weather of Naxos (to do end-of-season tours, unfortuately fully-booked), while his wife and kid were back in Germany.

"Greece definitely has an energy that keeps you here," he said.

Whether it's an energy force or just alcohol that is the metaphorical lotus in this scenario, the fact is that Lotus-Eaters still do exist in Greece. And who knows if they'll ever leave?


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Searching for Atlantis

DAY 14: Santorini's central volcano Nea Kameni erupted around 1625 B.C. and destroyed what the Minoans had settled there, causing a massive tsunami across the sea that washed away many Greek settlements -- the most well-known being the lost city of Atlantis. Some believe the Atlantis that Plato spoke of (was it Plato?) might have been near the Temple of Knossos in Crete or somewhere near Gibraltar, but many believe it is in fact near Santorini itself. One way to find out is to go underwater and see what's there, so I set up two scuba dives with the Santorini Dive Center. I had hopes of seeing something cool, like the remains of the mythical city, or if anything, an octopus.


"NICE SHIRT," I told the guy sitting across the table from me as we signed our lives away on indemnity forms. His shirt said "FRANK THE TANK" and had a picture of a tank on it.

"Thanks," said the fellow Will Ferrell fan. His name was actually Todd, and he was a Torontonian now living and working in Chicago. He was in Greece to do The Santorini Thing and add a couple of dives to his count of over seventy.

"How many dives have you done?" he asked me.

"Just a little over thirty."

"[Eh, you'll be fine.] The difference between seventy and thirty is just forty."



We suited up (picture above) with the rest of the certified divers -- although cerfification was never an issue; the Santorini Dive Center didn't even ask, probably since it didnt' matter because we signed our lives away anyway. That was the only realy risk involved in what was otherwise an easy, well-supported day of scuba diving.

"I should have gotten this T-shirt I saw in Thailand that said, 'Remember when sex was safe and diving was dangerous,'" Todd the Tank told me.

Olga our divemaster briefed us on the shore dive from Caldera Beach before us, complete with a review of the local underwater hand signals.

"What's the sign for danger?" my dive buddy Todd the Tank asked.

"There's nothing dangerous down there," Olga said.

The "perilous" search for Atlantis was just that: pretty lame and not dangerous. Diving an underwater wall, we saw some sea sponges, a few sea peacock fish, and a non-aggressive barracuda, but mostly it was just a bunch of rocks. Olga had to open up a bag of bread to attract fish for us to see, but nothing brought on the remains of Atlantis or an octopus for that matter. Despite it being pretty boring, Todd the Tank got a nose bleed from the pressure of his mask squeeze.

The decompression rest period was spent at the nearby restaurant where I chat over a dish of takos (not to be confused with tacos) with my fellow divers: Kate from Canada, Susan from Orlando, former BBC correspondent Peter from the U.K., and American honeymooners Brian and Georgia from South Carolina. We all agreed that the dive was okay except for the fact that we were swimming way too close to each other, bumping into each other flippers all the time.


THE SECOND DIVE promised to be a little more exciting: a volcanic wall dive off the coast of Nea Kameni itself, in the center of the Santorini micro-archipelago. "Is there anything dangerous?" Todd the Tank asked again.

"Just each other," I said.

The dive along the wall was sort of mediocre, although I've become more of a dive snob after every dive (like every diver does), especially after seeing incredible marine life in the Galapagos and more colorful coral off the coast of Zanzibar. I dive wasn't a complete bore though since I saw a few things: a spirograph worm that fanned out for food but retracted into its tube upon my arrival, bright purple sea anenomes, and a little grouper. Still no Atlantis, or an octopus for that matter. In fact, the only thing cool I did find on the second dive were more Will Ferrell fans: the three young British girls who had come along to snorkel and altered quotes from Anchorman:

"I love snorkeling. Snorkel, snorkel, snorkel. Down, down, down. Down into the water..."

Meanwhile, Todd the Tank came up from the dive, his entire mask red from another nose bleed. He told us not to worry. "This always happens."


TAKING ADVANTAGE of the dive center's transport shuttles from Akrotiri, I ended up not back in Fira but in Perissa, Santorini's laid-back backpacker beach haven, where I found more fish on my plate (fried gavros) than I had seen on my dives. I found something else there, someone more specifically: Lilit, the fellow New Yorker, friend of a friend, and Williamsburg hipster who also had a blog of her travels in Greece.

"Hey!" she called out to me. She was holding her roller-luggage since she was just about to leave for Crete. "I got your little note," she told me. "You should have woken me up."

"Yeah, but I didn't want to be that guy."

She was literally on her way out -- the shuttle to the port was waiting for her -- so our second encounter in Greece was also brief. No big loss, we'd meet up back in New York anyway. It was nice to run into her again though; at least I could say I found something I was looking for that day, even if it wasn't a legendary, mythical lost city like Atlantis. Those are pretty hard to come by I guess.


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The Santorini Thing

DAY 13: Santorini, according to basic geography, is a micro-archipelago of the greater Cyclades island group in Greece. The remains of a collapsed volcano, it once held a settlement of Minoan prosperity -- until a volcanic eruption wiped it out. None of that barely matters today for Santorini is now a popular honeymooners destination with its unique, brightly painted architecture contrasting gray metamorphic cliffs that swoop down to black sand beaches. Its overall appeal is so romantically mainstream that it is a port-of-call on the list of every luxury cruise ship in Greece.

"The Wanderings of Trinideus" continued to this tourist destination not by cruise line but by a high-speed catamaran named "Super Jet" from Iraklion. As I approached the volcanic lair, I saw that the peaks were snowcapped -- until I realized the white tips were actually buildings. More specificially, they were the restaurants and designer shops of Fira, Santorini's main town, a condensed maze of alleyways for cruise tourists to wander for the day before getting back onboard their respective Love Boats.

As uber-touristy as it was (there's even paintball and a water park on the island) I really didn't mind it that much; Fira's unique architecture of Ottoman curves, bright whites and blues set it apart from the generic island tourist scene of the other places I'd been so far. Sure there were other places in the world with similar aesthetics -- Arequipa, Peru, Cinque Terre, Italy for example -- but I was in Greece and I was landing there anyway. Without a chip on my shoulder, I figured I should do "The Santorini Thing": to experience Fira as a package tourist, at least for 24 hours, before making moves to a more laid-back part of the island.

My home base in Fira was not in a luxury hotel, but a family-run pension where the family Petros lived above a series of studio units. Mr. Petros met me at the dock, his cousin drove me to the house in a minivan, and I was greeted by the mother of the household -- "Mamma" she wanted to be called -- and the teenage daughters. The younger one showed me my room in the back, with its view of the east, where I set up shop. My brief encounter with their family life in their part of the house was not unlike most families -- the older sister was busy cooking in the kitchen while the other pouted that their father wasn't yet living in the modern world -- he refused to get a cell phone, even for his business.

But I digress.



I wandered around Fira's alleyways of shops, restaurants and churches, with its stunning views of buildings perched (picture above), it seemed, atop each other, all on the edge of the caldera wall as if to flirt with the powers of gravity and geology. Their backdrop was a view of the sea, the stuff that postcard dreams are made of, and I shot the same trite view-through-the-portico photos that everyone else did. (If I had a video camera with me, I might have stood in one place to do 360 panoramas to show all my friends at home, too.) Many languages filled my ears from the international scene of tourists: British English, American English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, and even Tagalog. Because of the worldly clientelle, there were some non-Greek restaurants around from an Irish pub, a Chinese restaurant, and a Mexican place oxymoronically called "Señor Zorbas."

Walking around the outskirts of Fira's tourist zone, it was obvious what another one of The Santorini Things to do was: stop walking and rent a moped or ATV from one of dozens of shops, to explore the rest of the island at your leisure.

"Can I rent a motorbike?" I asked Cris, the guy running the shop by Pension Petros.

"You know how to ride?"

"Yeah, I rode one in Vietnam."

"Ha, in 1962?" He chuckled, even though I didn't get it at the time. He was a little wary to loan me a moped since a lot of the switchbacks on the island were hard to maneuver. "Are you sure you know [how to ride one]?"

"Uh, yes," I said, remembering that while I was a whiz of driving one in Vietnam, I almost crashed into a vendor stall in Boracay, Philippines.

"[I think it's better for you to take the ATV.] Better for you, better for me."

"That's fine."

And so, for the first time since Namibia, I was on the back of an ATV to cruise around like a four-wheeled, Easy Ridin' poser.


ZIPPING AROUND Santorini was great, driving through the dry landscape -- so dry that Santorini must import all its water. I checked out the monastery at Pyrgos and made occasional stops on the side of the road to take pictures of stunning views of the caldera. I eventually rode down to laid-back Perissa Beach on the other side of the island to set up a scuba dive for the following day and look up a familiar face from Athens (from New York).

"Is there an American girl named Lilit staying here?" I asked the table of Aussies on the front patio of the Youth Hostel Anna. "From New York, about this tall, kind of pretty, looks like Scarlett Johannsen..."

"Oh yeah," one of the Aussies said. "Kind of pale?"

"Yeah."

"She's in my room," he told me. "[Dorm] Number One."

However, Lilit was passed out sleeping when I opened the unlocked door, and simply left a note for her before riding off on the ATV again.


SUNSET WAS APPROACHING and The Santorini Thing to do was watch it from one of the many restaurant terraces perched on the caldera cliffs, or take the cable car down to the old port and catch it there. Choosing the latter, I found myself in line amidst a big group of old French cruise tourists and a middle-aged American woman. "Are you traveling alone?" she asked me.

"Yeah."

"Down to this Hell?" she said with cynicism that made me believe she was from New York. No joke though; we were literally being led to the cablecar loading zone like sheep into a corral.

"Yeah, I know," I told her. "I'm here tonight, but I'll probably go to Perissa tomorrow. It's nothing like this."

"Thing is, they need this [hell] to exist."

"It is what it is," I said. All a part of doing The Santorini Thing. I saw the touristic views from the cable car, and the changing sky colors from the old port, and all the boats bringing the port-of-call tourists back on their Love Boats. The only Santorini Thing I didn't do was take a donkey ride back up to town, after a donkey tout rubbed me the wrong way in trying to get me on one. (I needed the exercise anyway.)


DAY TURNED TO NIGHT and the lights of Fira sparkled with the twilights of a romantic honeymoon. I had fava bean soup, mussels saganaki and a mediocre grilled octopus at one of the touristic terrace restaurants since Nikolas, the highly-recommended, authentically local Greek restaurant had a huge line out the door. I ended the night by checking out a couple of bars and clubs, drinking Alfa beers and glasses of Metaxa on the rocks. (Greece's cognac, better than ouzo or raki in my opinion.) I stumbled home drunk that night -- all a part of The Santorini Thing after all.

The next morning as I left my quarters, I saw the same minivan that had driven me in just 24 hours prior, bringing in another lone tourist. The Santorini Thing would begin all over again.


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The Old Man and the Sea

DAY 12: When you're in a tourist hub like Hania, you can either bitch about its commercialization non-stop, or shut up and go with the flow. That's what I did that day, the shutting up I mean, after leisurely spending my last morning in the Neli studio, packing up, and enjoying the view from the terrace one last time. Down from my street, the town was just waking up as well: old men sat in alleys and discussed the news, while out on the tourist strip, the usual waiters and hosts of restaurants called out to potential customers.

"Hello! Oh, I see you are wondering about a good restaurant! Please, come have a seat..."

Some would try to presume the language you spoke and vie for your business accordingly -- one guy pinned me for Spanish. It was competitive out there, especially with guidebooks leading foreigners to the same restaurants. Molly and E.J. had gone to one Lonely Planet recommended two days prior and said that the surrounding restaurants were sadly empty all because everyone has the same book.

Anyway, I embraced the touristic scene and wandered from the church in the Plaza Athinagora to the Ottoman domes of the Kloutsouk Hasan Mosque. Browsing the souvenir shops, I thought it was funny how Greek tourism capitalizes on the fact that they are stray cats everywhere -- by putting them on calendars. While I didn't buy into those, I did buy into a big beach towel with the Greek flag on it since I hadn't brought one with me.


AFTER PEOPLE-WATCHING at Cafe Remezzo over a mousakas and frappe (a popular coffee drink amongst everyone), I "went with the flow" and hopped aboard the M/S Irini, a "real vessel" for a four-hour boat cruise and snorkel tour around some of the small island offshore in the Sea of Crete. What would have started as a relaxing boat ride actually started with a fight between our captain and the captain of another boat after a near collision right in the harbor. Meanwhile, on the main deck, I noticed the old man of the crew hitting the sauce with some shot of hard liquor.

Like during the Samaria Gorge trip, I was the only party-of-one on board; the rest were mostly old Danish couples. One of them actually mistook me for a Greek crew member -- with the captain's short dark hair and Mediterranean-baked skin, I could see how he might have made the mistake.

The M/S Irini took us out to sea and around the small island of Thodorou, site of a big cave-like rock formation on its western tip. We anchored offshore for a snorkel break because there was the remnants of a German WWII plane beneath us, leftover from the Battle of Crete in 1941.

"Is that supposed to be the plane?" I questioned the captain after a look. No cabin, no wings; it could have been any anti-climactic piece of scrap metal.

"[It's only part of the plane,]" he answered. "[It exploded in the air and fell in many pieces. The rest is buried under sand.]" Afterwards, he went back to arguing on his cell phone, probably to that other captain.



WE CONTINUED ON and anchored off the island of Lazaretta (picture above), with more rocks by the shore to provide for more fish to see, but like the previous site, it wasn't very snorkel-worthy. All in all, it was a pretty mediocre boat trip -- until the old man started serving complimentary fruit and, more importantly, shots of raki, this sort of Greek grape vodka similar to Peru's pisco. The old man -- Yureg was his name I believe -- poured me a shot. "Yia mas!" he said.

"What do I say?"

"Skol," he said lifting his own shot glass. "Yia mas."

"Yia mas," I said, toasting him and shooting it down.

"In Greek philosophy, if you have two or three raki, all the day, happy!" he said in his thick Greek accent.

"Two or three, huh?" He poured me another.

"Yia mas!"

"Yia mas!"

He went and poured me another before going over to serve the other passengers. One old Danish woman refused. "No likey."

So as not to go to waste, Yureg took the shotglass for himself. "Yia mas." He shot it down, smacked his lips and pumped his arms as if he claimed a small victory. "The best!"

The captain took us back to shore while I struck a conversation with the Old Man of the Sea. (Coincidentally, an old Danish man with white hair and beard, sporting a beret, looked a lot like Ernest Hemingway.) "Can I take your picture?" I asked Yureg. There was lots of character in his face -- and tobacco stains on his teeth.

"Sure, why not?" he replied. "Where do you come from?"

"America."

"I am from Duluth, Minnesota."

"Really?"

"No, but I worked there. In cargo." He went on about how he worked in the shipping business all over the States 30-35 years ago in Minnesota, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York. "Americans. They are the best people!" he exclaimed, with a small triumphant hand gesture. He told me how he was once down on his luck with no money for a taxi and some friendly Americans just gave him a lift. "Americans. The best people!" He went off to attend to ship duties, but really I think he went off to drink some more raki.


ONE LANDING, two efkharistos, and three hours on a bus later, I was back in Iraklion in eastern Crete, my overnight layover before I hopped on a boat for my next destination the following morning. I crashed in the backpacker dorm for the night, but not without some raki in me from a trendy cafe across the street. Yureg may have said that three shots of raki would make the day happy, but three shots of raki later make the night happy too.

Raki. The best!


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The Beaten Path

DAY 11:Hania, which in Greek letters is spelled "XANIA," is Crete's second largest city and its biggest center of tourism. Hania's old Venetian harbor is a hub of cafes, boutiques, souvenir shops, restaurants, clubs, internet shops, photo developing shops, glass bottom boat tour desks, accordian players, horse carriage rides, a few begging old gypsy women, and mimes. (Well, the one mime that I saw.) In the Plaza Venizelou, vendors sell balloons by day while promotors hand out club flyers by night -- some to self-proclaimed "Scandinavian clubs." Collectively, the uber-touristy scene is what many call, "The Beaten Path."

However, there is an escape to this Touristville, particularly one for those appreciative of nature: the Samaria Gorge in White Mountains National Park -- the longest and deepest gorge in all of Europe at 16 km. -- a must see in my Let's Go Greece guidebook. Only an hour away by bus from Hania, it too is an attraction for the masses -- or at least the fraction that can handle its day-long trek -- providing for another sort of beaten path.


"KALIMERA," said the woman's voice with an accent on the bus' speaker system in the pre-sunrise hour of 6:30. "'Kalimera' is an important word in Greek because 'kali' means 'good' and 'mera' means 'morning' and together you say, 'good morning,'" she said. "Kalimera." Guiding the day trip was Valerie, a pretty Greek blonde who was unusually chipper for doing the same routine so early every morning. The rest of the bus was still trying to adjust from the pre-dawn awakening, only to have to deal with the nauseating mountain roads on the way to the trailhead. But once we arrived and saw the sun come over the peaks of the White Mountains, we knew that somehow it was going to be worth it.

The downhill-turned-undulating trek took about 5-6 hours, depending on one's pace. With about two busloads of people hiking the trail, there was more than enough pathway for groups to thin out and give space for the individual hiker, or the few donkeys on the trail for that matter. Aside from the zone of stacked rocks and the occasional agrimi mountain goat, along the way was the mountain stream, which sometimes formed small waterfalls -- all remnants of the water path that sculpted the gorge over the past 14 million years. The water was so pristine there that it was also used as our drinking water source at the occasional stone tap fountain along the way.

Amidst the mostly German tourists, I managed to find two Americans, one who had lived in New York CIty: Moringside Heights, Sunnyside Queens, and Williamsburg Brooklyn. "What part [of New York] are you from?" she asked me.

"Uh, the Upper East Side." I waited for a snide reaction, but all I got was a casual "Oh, cool."

Her name was Molly and she had left New York for her hometown of San Francisco before the Williamsburg Ego got the best of her. Traveling with her was E.J., her friend, fellow San Franciscan and fellow recent law school graduate. Both of them had just traveled through Turkey, but left earlier than planned after the recent wave of terrorist bombings. (They were five blocks from one of the blasts.) They had been to some of the eastern Greek Island before coming to Crete -- but already had thoughts of leaving Greece entirely.

"It's all the same," Molly told me.

"What, it's like Turkey?"

"[No, it's all the same tourist scene,]" she told me. Everywhere that they had been in Greece so far was just as it was in Hania: tourist cafe after souvenir shop after restaurant, etc., mostly catering to package tourists or honeymooners. The Beaten Path.

"Yeah, it's like the Caribbean," I said. From what I gathered, the Greeks Isles were to northern Europeans what the Carribbean islands were to North Americans: vacation destinations were tourists flock in droves for warm weather and to live it up without being culturally aware. "I thought it wouldn't be so bad because it's the shoulder season," I said, cursing travel guru Rick Stevesfor recommending everyone to travel in the "shoulder season" between high and low periods.

"I know!" E.J. said. "We should have gone in October."



We made the best of it and continued on with our trek on the beaten path through the Samaria Gorge (picture above).


THE LAST SIX KILOMETERS of the trek was without a doubt, the most awe-inspiring. Dramatic silhouettes and funky rock formations surrounded us, dwarfing us into insignficance. Some sections of the gorge narrowed, at one point to just three meters wide -- a place aptly dubbed "Iron Gates." As wonderful as it was, E.J. was focused on something else: the old, unappealingly orange-skinned old German women who had no shame in wearing nothing but a bra to hold up their sagging breasts.

"It's like the older they are, [the less shame they have,"] I said.

"[I'm taking pictures] so we can show all our friends at home, 'These are the people we hung out with in Greece!'" E.J. said.

The exhilarating trek ended at the beach of Agia Roumeli, on the southern shores of Crete along the Libyan Sea. The three of us took a dip in the deep blue waters to escape the too-hot-to-touch rock pebble beach. While sitting and swimming, I was happy to know I was in the company of like-minded people, whose opinions of "good travel" lie in a delicate balance between package tourism and culturally irresponsible backpacking. (Molly said that they were turned off and bored of the groups of Australians in Turkey they had met who did nothing but drink in the hostel for three weeks.)

After snacking on Mythos beers, stuffed zucchini flowers and tzatsiki, we hopped on a ferry to take us to the bus on the road back up to Hania and the north coast. Valerie the guide, whom we weren't sure if she actually hiked with us, pointed out the olive and orange trees along the way.


EXHAUSTED FROM A LONG DAY of hiking, we parted ways back in the other "beaten path" of Hania. Taking advantage of the fact that I had rented a studio apartment with a terrace and kitchenette, I simply stayed in with a platter of Greek snacks and a bottle of local Cretan wine from the local In.Ka supermarket. I sat out on the terrace attending to blog duties, listening to the locals of my alley chat in Greek, noticing the family watching TV across the way, and simply, taking in the moment. On the beaten path of tourism, sometimes doing nothing can be really refreshing -- particularly when your leg muscles are sore.


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Speculations and Interpretations

DAY 10: Archaeology is not an exactly science; it does not deal in time schedules. However, there is a fine line between science and speculation, and when you're dealing with the ruins of something wiped out hundreds of years ago, it could go either way. This is such the case with the Temple of Knossos, the greatest archaeological find of the Minoan civilazation -- and home of the Minotaur in the labryrinth legend -- a half hour bus ride from Iraklion.

During the hey day of archaeology in the early 20th century, the British "discovered" the ruins of Knossos on the island of Crete, and for 43 years excavated and restored it under their lead archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans. However, Evans sort of guessed his way around Knossos, so blatantly to the point that every guidebook and informational sign prefaces all facts with "according to Evans..." For example, in this one famous fresco found on the site, Evans had only fragments of the entire piece (lower right of photo) but simply drew in the rest from his imagination. This is like getting 20 pieces of a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle and drawing in the rest without ever having seen the box with the final picture on it.

RICH THE ONE-i'D CYCLOPS met me at the Iraklion bus terminal so we could take the shuttle bus to Knossos together. He was playing hooky from his medical device conference since the topic of the day -- tension-free vaginal tape of all things -- had nothing to do with the product he had worked on. Besides, it was a beautiful day and back home it was a day off anyway, Labor Day. We waited a good forty minutes at the cafe by the entrance of Knossos for the official English-speaking tour guide to amass a big enough cost-effective tour group, but there were very few native English-speaking tourists around -- Greece is rampant with mostly Italian, French, and Germans.

Rich The One-i'd Cyclops and I just went on our own, powered by two guidebooks. "[It's a shame about the tour,]" Rich said. "[But whatever they say,] it's all just speculation anyway."



Speculation is right. Picture the jigsaw metaphor I used for the fresco, and make it much bigger and three-dimensional. Evans took a look at the ruins that remained and drew an illustration of what Knossos was before its fall. The museum in town even recreated a scale model of Evan's vision, which looks like a pretty bad ass Lincoln Log cabin if you ask me. To give Evans credit, there were definite fragments of the temple remains that did suggest a continuity in the palace as a whole. The red pillars (picture above) for example were everywhere -- whether they were all red is speculation.

Rich The One-i'd Cyclops and I wandered around Knossos amongst the other tourists, all mindful that the restoration of the ruins before us was merely an interpretation. "I don't know if they're restoring or painting on rocks," Rich said when we saw a couple of archaeologists working on the site.

There wasn't much to Knossos -- particularly after seeing how awesome it might have been in its glory days -- and going around took only about an hour, from its outsides to the few areas of interior that were closed off to be "imaginably restored." You could see that the former passageways were probably very narrow, with right angles and low ceilings, which is why it was dubbed the "labryrinth" in Greek mythology.

"A guy probably saw all this and just said, 'It's like a labryrinth,'" Rich said, citing the legend of the Minotaur. "I heard that the Minotaur was just some family member that was [hideous], which kind of makes the slaying of the Minotaur kind of sad." Concurrently, Knossos' maze of mud, stones, and bricks reminded him of the video game God Of War. "I feel like smashing one of the vases."

The throne room was the big crowd-pleaser of the Knossos, a room fully-restored and painted to Evan's vision, complete with the placement of fake furniture and fake frescoes painted on the walls. It was with that that we concluded our trip to the former Minoan palace. "It's all a big fraud," I said. "It's all just pieces brought over from the U.K."

"It's really just an Irish castle," Rich joked. Despite the controversy on the authenticity of the Knossos site, Rich was happy to see it instead of being at his conference. "It's better than listening to a lecture on tension-free vaginal tape."


AFTER A GREEK BANANA SODA (I chose it for the monkey), and a lunch of Feta in the Oven, cuttlefish, and delicious grilled octopus tentacles, Rich The One-i'd Cyclops and I parted ways rather abruptly since we both had buses going to two different destinations. I was headed for the western part of Crete, to the city of Hania, where I'd spend the night and arrange a trek to the famous Samaria Gorge the following day.

Hania was another Venetian port city with a protective fortifaction protecting the harbor, although its allure to tourism was far greater than Iraklion. Like Venice, Italy, it seemed to be a place that was once great but had now only existed for the sake of honeymoon vacations, a place that Las Vegas might want to recreate with their own speculations and interpretations. I arrived just in time for sunset, when fishermen were trying to catch fish with bread from the Venetian walls. Boats came in from sea using the Venetian lighthouse as their beacon as the sun sank and the moon rose.

I was sort of turned off by Hania's ultra-touristy scene of tourist cafe after tourist cafe and vendors everywhere along the marina, and rented a studio apartment with a kitchenette and a terrace overlooking a small, quiet alleyway a block away from all the action. It was in this alley that I dined on a Cretan stifado stew of lamb, beef, and rabbit home-cooked by Anna of the Taverna Apovrado. Afterwards I found a local dive bar, the Kafe Kriti, where two Greek guys played traditional music when they weren't busy serving ouzo and snacks in between songs. Definitely the coolest place I'd been in Greece so far, this kitschy bar of random chotschkies that collectively reminded me of a VFW hall was a local's favorite -- as well as of the few tourists that showed up to get away from the glitzier clubs by the marina. At one point, a dance circle sprouted with cheers of "OHPAA!" as I sat and watched while drinking my glasses of ouzo.

This is awesome, I thought. Much better than listening to a lecture on tension-free vaginal tape anyway.


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Wandering Without The Cyclops

DAY 9: In Homer's Greek epic The Odyssey, Odysseus wanders the Greek Isles for ten years, trying to get home to Ithaca from the Trojan War, getting into sticky, episodic situations along the way, like MacGyver. (My Cliffs Notes dub this part of the book as "The Wanderings Of Odysseus.") In one of his earlier episodes, Odysseus encounters the one-eyed Cyclops, son of Poseidon, and defeats him in true MacGyver-style -- by simply blinding his eye with a paperclip, a teabag, and some ammonia. (That's a joke in case you hadn't read the Cliffs Notes.)

I had left mainland Greece and ventured off on a cruise ferry across the Aegean Sea to start my own aimless odyssey around the Greek Isles -- "The Wanderings of Trinideus," perhaps? -- starting with the southernmost island, Crete. To parallel Homer's epic, I had made arrangements to start off with my own Cyclops, sort of.

My "Cyclops" would be a guy named Rich, who is only a Cyclops in the sense that he has one eye -- one "i" -- in his name. It's a huge literary stretch I know, but mind you, that accounts for his full name. (By that rationale, I'm a creature with three "i"s. Creepy.) Rich was a friend of a friend I'd supposedly met once at a party but didn't really remember, but that didn't matter because I felt I could use the company. He was in Crete for a business conference with Johnson & Johnson, and our times synched up; he had two days of leisure to spare on the island.

Rich The One-i'd Cyclops had been put up in a fancy five-star resort 45 minutes from where I was, in Crete's capital city of Iraklion, and called my cell phone to arrange a meeting. Long story short, he was advised by his concierge not to come into town because the cab ride was 50 euros, which wasn't worth it because mostly everything in Iraklion was closed on Sunday.

And so, alone, I started my wanderings without the Cyclops.



CRETAN CIVILIZATION, known in ancient times as Minoan, actually pre-dates the greater Hellenic civilization, and has a long history which has made it today a blend of Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician, Turkish, and Venetian influences. The most visually evident influence is of the Venetians since the Venetian Empire had used Crete as a commercial hub for trade in the 16th century. To keep Turkish invaders at bay, the Venetians had built the arsenal and the Koules Fortress (picture above) to protect the harbor. The latter was open that Sunday, for visitors to wander its insides and out. Up the road in the main plaza was another remnant of the Venetian past, the Morosini fountain.

Rich The One-i'd Cyclops' concierge was right; Iraklion was in fact, pretty dead on that Sunday. The main drag that linked the water with the center of town was practically deserted, and the few places that were open were only open to attend to tourists like me wandering around. However, at a seaside restaurant (where I had the local gilthead fish for lunch), most of the staff was fixated on the FIBA basketball game on TV: Greece vs. Spain. Spain clobbered Greece, so much that some guys in the restaurant started jokingly cheering for the other team ("Espania! Espania!") in the fourth quarter. However, that didn't stop the faithful from draping themselves up in Greek flags and parading around the Plaza Eleftherias with their honking motorscooters after the game.

Deciphering the street signs in Greek letters (much like I did with the Cyrillic alphabet in Russia), I wandered around that afternoon, from the Ventian walls, to the maze of tiny residental alleyways, to the numerous churches. While the Tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis, famed author of Zorba The Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, was closed, the Archaeological Museum was open for tourists, and I checked its collection of Minoan figurines, vases, and sculptures, plus the famous Phaistos disc, bull-leaping fresco and Ring of Minos, found not too long ago.

With not that much going on that evening I just had a stuffed tomato (with rice) and a serving of ouzo (Greece's licorice-y version of Jagermeister or Absinthe) before I retired back in my rented room.

The next morning, Rich The One-i'd Cyclops finally came into town to meet me, sporting two eyes. For all intents and purposes of this blog entry I could have gotten rid of one, but I didn't exactly have a paperclip, teabag, or ammonia handy.


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Ruined

DAY 8: Athens, center of the Greek universe for millenia, is as legendary as the Goddess of Wisdom it was named after, Athena. The present-day capital of a civilization credited with democracy, philosophy, art, mythology, and the Olympic games, it is truly a "must-see" on any traveler's list. But perhaps Athens' attractions are on too many tourists' lists because groups come by the busloads, almost hourly in the summer days, completely breaking the mystique that is supposed to come with a Wonder of the World. The ruins of ancient Greece have been ruined.



The centerpiece of Athenian tourist attractions couldn't be more prominent; towering high above the city is the iconic (and ionic) Acropolis, the epicenter of ancient Greece. I tried to beat the crowds by starting my visit early from the south entrance by the Temple of Dionysis and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, but it didn't seem to work. By the time I got up the hill and through the Temple of Athena Nike, the crowds were already there (picture above). (I blame Rick Steves for recommending everyone to go in the "shoulder season.") Each one was led like a herd from the front of the Parthenon -- centerpiece of the Acropolis ruins -- to the museum and the Erechtheion (huhuh, I said "erect"), listening to their guides answer their own questions like, "And why is this one doric instead of ionic?" I circumvented this all with the ripped out pages of my guidebook to explain everything for me and my short attention span. However, I immediately regret not being in a tour when those pages accidently flew away with the wind and landed down the hill in a restricted area.

With that said, I apologize for not having my usual historial tidbits in this blog entry -- but it's a travel blog, not a history blog anyway, remember? Like the sights of Egypt, there were so many ruins to keep track of anyway and they all started to jumble up in my mind and form one big indistinguishable brain mass, especially for my oversaturated jaded mind. I pose a question: Are these works of ancient Greece genuinely a wonder in most minds, or is it only because the Western World has conditioned us to think so?

Anyway, down the hill from the Acropolis was the old ancient marketplace (and present-day area for many sleeping stray dogs), the Agora (and Agora museum), also double-y ruined from wars and tourism. Nearby were all the other sights included in the price of the Acropolis ticket, Hadrian's Gate and the Temple of Olympian Zeus (also a haven for sleeping dogs). After just one day, I had been "ruined out" with all the ancient sights -- the most exciting thing was when I saw a turtle walk right into The Danger Zone of the ancient Keramikos cemetary.

Fortunately I got a break from it all when I walked passed Socrates' prison and up the much less-crowded Hill of Muses with a spectcular view of the city. With only a handful of people wandering near the Philopappos monument on top, I managed to just sit out undistrubed -- in fact, I took a short nap.


INSPIRED BY THE MUSES and a yummy Greek salad, I head back to the Inn to gear up for my overnight ferry to Crete. "You're Erik," called out a voice in an American accent. "I recognized the shirt. [I wasn't going to say anything until I saw it otherwise I'd be a racist.]"

"Wow, that's the fourth time someone's recognized me," I said, amazed that I'd met two New Yorkers two days in a row.

Her name was Lilit, a self-proclaimed hipster from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC -- who also gave me shit for living on the Upper East Side -- and her recognition of me wasn't too impressive; she had been tipped by someone that I would be in Greece at the same time as her -- in fact, we had mutual friends. Lilit had been talking to another girl in the courtyard from Queens she'd just met until I bumped in.

"[I go away to get away from all this, and everyone here is from New York,]" Lilit said (to the best of my memory).

"Well, with that said, I have to go. Seriously, I have a ferry to catch." (All this way to get shit for living on the Upper East Side, two days in a row?)

We swapped emails before I took the Metro to the ferry port at Pireaus. Minoan Lines' Festos Palace, a vessel that was more of a big gaudy luxury cruise ship than an ordinary "ferry", took me across the Aegean, away from a place tainted by wars, mass tourism, and a couple of New Yorkers.


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It's All English To Me

DAY 7: One of my pet peeves is when a traveler goes to a foreign country and doesn't attempt to learn the local language. It's one thing to not grasp it, but it's another to not even have the intent to learn and assume everyone will speak English. There's something about that that just puts you in the "asshole" category in my book.

In Greece, it's a little different because many people do speak some English, after Greek of course. Like Tagalog in the Philippines, the Greek language is slowly dying; it has become less-popular with future generations to embrace since it isn't really practical outside the country. However, I was told that a local Greek would still be impressed if you tried to keep the language alive, which is why I invested in a phrasebook and language CD this past summer. In addition, I was lucky to meet Lia, a Greek-American friend who had transferred to my work office for the summer, who had schooled me on some basic phrases:

ne = yes
ohi = no
yia su = hello
tekanis = hi, how are you?
efkhariso = thank you
parakalo = you're welcome / please
signo me = excuse me / sorry

and most importantly:

milas anglika? = do you speak English?


FLYING TO GREECE from Valencia via Milan was an 8-hour affair, but by afternoon I had landed in Athens, ready to try out some of my Greek. Like I had been told, all the Greek signage was subtitled in English, so much that I managed to get to the train without looking lost at all. However, I was a bit confused on which train to take.

"Yia su," I greeted the woman at the information desk. "Milas anglika?"

"Yes," she answered, with a hint of sarcasm as to say, "Of course I do." She gave me directions to the Syntagma stop with the 3:00 train -- an easy affair. More and more locals got on the train the closer we got to the city, and I used my "Signo me"s to get by with my big bag.

"Hello," said the woman at the HI hostel in an Australian accent that caught me off guard. No Greek was necessary, and I got my room in English. After an internet session, the woman at the desk had been replaced by Dimitri, a man looking a little more Greek.

"Yia su," I greeted, trying to get a reaction. Nothing. "So are you the only Greek that works here?"

"I am half-Greek, half Chinese," he told me with a questionable smile. He showed me a picture of some random Asian kid on his cell-phone. "You don't believe me?"

"Sure," I said, not believing him at all. We went into a bit of small talk -- in English -- and he gloated about the big news of the day that every proud Greek knew about: the national Greek basketball team had just beaten the USA national team in the FIBA World Cup of Basketball.

"Maybe I should call you Mr. Loser," Dimitri joked. I wasn't amused.



PLAKA AND MONASTIRAKI are two trendy albeit touristy neighborhoods in the shadows of the Acropolis, where sidewalk cafes and tourist boutiques adorned the narrow streets in proxmity to many ancient ruins and Greek Orthodox churches. Friends of mine who had been to Athens before told me the city was dirty, but from the looks of things, it had all been cleaned up for the 2004 Olympic Games and was actually quite pleasant. Wandering around to get my bearing, I saw the Changing of the Guard at Parliament, and stopped in at Savva's, the most recommended souvalki (picture above) restaurant by many locals (so my guidebook says). Lost, I stumbled upon an adventure tour company called Scoutway, which boasted having done the bungee jump seen on The Amazing Race.

"Yia su. Milas anglika?" I asked the Greek Scoutway guy.

"Ne, mila," he replied. "Where are you from?"

"New York. I'm American. Uh, americanos."

"Then how do you know Greek?"

I flashed my Lonely Planet Greek phrasebook.

"Ah, very good!"

That was about the extent of my Greek -- it was a good attempt -- so he continued the conversation in English. "You know Greece beat the USA in basketball..." he started.


DESPITE ITS GENERIC hostel backpacker vibe, the Student & Traveller's Inn was a good place to go since a) it was cheap; and b) it was a good place to meet other solo travelers. Originally I was going to stay at a Greek family-run hotel with a rooftop terrace overlooking the Acropolis, but they were booked solid. So I reverted to my backpacker roots, and within two minutes of lounging out in the central courtyard, an Aussie gave me some of his vodka. (Score!) Other travelers came in an out of the common area, sharing tips and travel stories -- I wasn't the only one who had come from Tomatina. There were Aussies, Hungarians, Germans, Mexicans, Spanish, and Japanese, but the one I really hit it off with was Tracy, a fellow American traveling solo on her way to Italy. "Where are you from?" she asked.

"Eighty-first street," I replied.

"No way, I just got an apartment on 81st!"

A new neighbor perhaps, found in Athens of all places, although she gave me shit for being on the east side. (Even 5,000 miles away I get it.) We chat through the night with other inside New York-centric jokes. "You know [my home town] Teaneck [New Jersey]?" I asked.

"Uh, I'm Jewish." (That means "yes.") "How do you feel about going out for some ice cream?"

With a chestnut, walnut and honey ice cream cone in hand, we wandered the dimly-lit streets of Plaka, talking about this, that, and "I didn't even know there was a World Cup of Basketball." I questioned if one of the darker alleys was safe, and she assured me it was; there were still lots of people out and about, including this big group of what looked like old German tourists walking in front of us.

"[I guess] they'll rob these guys first," I joked. "Actually, I thinking about robbing them myself right now." An old woman flinched and walked a little faster. Tracy laughed.

"You know it just occured to me that these guys speak English."


AND SO, my first day in Greece and I didn't use much Greek -- at least it was the thought that counts. However, the next morning when I bought a ticket for the Acropolis, I caught the ticket lady off guard with an "efkharisto."

"Ah, parakalo!"

It was about friggin' time.


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Stuff In Me

DAY 6: There's an underrated but funny quotable line from M. Night Shamalan's movie Unbreakable where a comic book store owner tells Samuel L. Jackson that he has to leave his store because he's closing up and he's hungry. It goes something to the effect of, "You don't undertand. I gotta go. I gotta get some chicken in me!"

How this popped in my head I don't know, but it spawned an on-going joke throughout the day.

"I need to get some paella in me!"


MY WEEK IN SPAIN was coming to a close but it didn't matter to me; it wasn't my intention this time to "see" Spain like a tourist, but to just visit Jack and Sylvina and attend La Tomatina. With both crossed off the list, my last day was to be a leisurely one to bum around Valencia and get food and beverages in me.

"This is my last day in Spain," I said, raising my glass of Rioja. "Probably for a while." We had taken our rental Citroen to the beach to eat Valencia's contribution to world cuisine, paella. The medley of rice and seafood was good as it was before. This time around we were serenaded by an accordian and sax player doing a rendition of George Michael's "Careless Whisper."

Walking the promenade and down the shoreline was a casual affair amidst all the Aussies around leftover from Tomatina. Jack reflected on his time in Spain, and how it's different to see it all as a foreigner; everyone in Spain is so zealous about their own region, its unlikely they'll see the rest of the country. He was happy I got to see him and his life before it came to a finale in the next couple of weeks. As deep as the conversation got, both of us were distracted everytime we'd walk by a topless chick sunbathing.



A NEIGHBORHOOD OF VALENCIA that I hadn't seen before was the Ciudad De Las Artes Y Las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences). Like a city of the future right in the middle of what is usually a cosmopolitan yet historic Spanish town, the complex included ultra post-modern buildings as striking as ones I'd seen in Berlin, surrounded by shallow turquoise pools. If we had the time or motivation, we might have gone inside the Palacio de las Artes Reina Sofia (performing arts center) or the Museo De Las Ciencias Principle Felipe (science museum) or L'Hemisferic (IMAX theater) (picture above), but instead we just hung at the cafe under the science museum, where others were chilling on beds by the pool across from the L'Umbracle listening to the electronic downtempo lounge music echoing from the walls.

"I need to get some coffee in me," Jack said, sipping his cafe solo.

"Si claro," I said in the worst American accent. It was another on-going joke of the day.


FOR MY LAST NIGHT in Spain -- probably for a while -- we were supposed to go out for dinner with Juan and Elisa, but Juan got called into an emergency dog surgery. It was just Jack, Sylvina and I that headed off to the city center with its sidewalk cafes by the Cathedral, where many of the leftover Aussies were carrying on inside their Australian traveling bubble at Finnegan's, the Irish pub we'd gone to before.

"I need to get some tapas in me," I proclaimed. We settled at a restaurant with a quieter scene.

Patatas bravas (fries in garlic sauce), gamba de ajillo (garlic prawns), pulpo de gallega (Galician octopus), and a platter of manchengo cheese came to our table while we took in the moment over a local red wine blend. "It's funny. It's my second time here, but it's different. It's like I'm taking the long way home," Jack said, getting all existential. "Funny thing is, I wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for the first time." True, he met me in Spain on my big Global Trip on a whim, ended up meeting Sylvina that time on his last night, starting dating her for two years, traveled two months around Europe with her, lived with her in Malaga for seven months -- all before he'd move back to the States and, most likely get married to her.

"You've come full circle," I said, raising a glass.

He'd go home in the coming weeks to start a new life again -- but he'd definitely, without a doubt, have some Spain in him.


FOUR-THIRTY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Jack and Sylvina took me to the airport. "Buen viaje," ("Bon voyage,") Sylvina wished me. She had given me a keychain from the futuristic science museum as a keepsake of the last day in Spain together.

"Buena suerte," ("Good luck,") I wished her. I'd eventually meet up with her back in the States, but for Jack it would be much sooner.

"So I guess the next time I see you, we'll be on Oktoberfest time," I said.

"Yeah, Oktoberfest time!"

I left for Athens leaving Spain behind yet again, knowing that I had a little bit of it in me too.


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Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

DAY 5: "Two tickets to Tomatina, with a return ticket," said the young traveler in his British accent.

The Spaniard behind the ticket counter rolled his eyes, unimpressed at the Brit's complete disregard of the local language. However, he knew what the guy wanted since almost everyone in the Valencia train station was headed towards the same place: La Tomatina, the world-renowned tomato food fight in the small town of Buñol, about 45 minutes from the city center of Valencia. At 7:45 that morning, the station was crowded with Brits, Germans, Aussies, Japanese, Americans, Canadians, and some Spaniards -- some wearing Tomatina t-shirts, some toting waterproof disposable cameras -- all gearing up for the sloppy tomato-filled G8 summit.

"Dos para Buñol," I requested at the counter.


NO ONE REMEMBERS exactly how it started, but La Tomatina has been a tradition in Buñol since the 1940s, an annual event attracting 40,000 people to the otherwise sleepy town on the last Wednesday of August. Like Pamplona's San Fermin Festival (The Running of the Bulls), it has become a huge tourist draw, and it was evident with all the foreigners packing into the train like clowns into a small car. "Oi!" yelled an Australian. "[Could you move the line down!]"

Some people were annoyed. "You should probably say that in different languages," someone called out.

Forty-five minutes later, we all arrived in Buñol, where the festivities were slowly getting on their way. Some backpackers had camped out in tents, while some slept on benches in the train station, and they were all getting ready for the food fight to begin around eleven that morning -- most of the preparation involved drinking beer and sangria. Groups had come in "teams" representing their countries and social cliques, from Team Canada, to the guys in tuxedoes, to guys dressed up as Mexican banditos, to the numerous groups of Australians in homemade team shirts. Like most backpacker enclaves, the "guiris" -- a Spanish term similar to Mexico's "gringos" -- had come with an ignorant imperialism, causing a ruckus and blasting their own canned music; I don't know how many times I heard Madonna's "Hung Up" blasting from a speaker system. We barely saw a Spaniard in sight -- but then again, it was a regular work day for most people.

With only a couple of hours sleep the night before, Jack and I wandered around town looking for a place to grab a bite and get some coffee. Most stores had boarded up already for the madness to ensue, the way Times Square in New York does on New Year's Eve, but we did find one place raking in the dough, providing bocadillos, coffee, and above all, beers to the masses. We sat at a table outside and people-watched, gaining energy for the day ahead. Not surprisingly, our guy talk conversation evolved into one in which we used the term "tomatoes" to refer to a certain part of the female anatomy.

"Hey, I'd like to see her tomatoes." (Works best in a Brooklyn accent.)

With coffee, ham, cheese and bread in us, we started the morning off right, with breakfast beers around 9:30 a.m. It was then we befriended an actual local, a guy from Valencia who was in attendance for his first Tomatina. He explained that it was something he'd always heard about, but never went, and he was as excited as the rest of the guiris to participate. With that said, we actually started noticing other Spaniards around, mostly teens cruising around in cars blaring their horns and chanting "Toma-tina! Toma-tina!"

"I definitely hear some Spanish now," Jack told me when we walked by another group of Spanish youth.

And wouldn't you know, he heard more Spanish as we walked with the thousands of others down to the main plaza at the base of the valley. "Gaston!" Jack called out. He recognized a face, and then another, and so did I: it was his friend Nicos and company from Barcelona who I met on my big Global Trip, the one that actually introduced Jack to Sylvina two summers prior. Unfortunately we lost them in the crowd as the streets got more narrow and more crowded with the clock quickly approaching eleven.


"TOMA-TINA! TOMATINA!!" went the chants of the crowd, followed by a couple of rounds of "Buñol! Buñol!!" Rowdier and rowdier the mass of people got, bouncing beach balls off the walls. Local on-lookers from the terraces and roofs of buildings joined in on the fun by spilling buckets of water from above.

More chants ensued. More madness. But no tomatoes just yet.

A cannon fired, signifying the beginning of the festival, spawning the entrance of five dump trucks filled with 110 tons of overripe tomatoes. Around the corner from my vantage point in the main plaza stood a ham placed atop a pole. A contest began in which people had to race up the pole to bring it down. I'm not quite sure what this signified, but as soon as the ham was let go, it was the signal for the food fight to begin.

Revelers from the trucks armed the masses with the tomatoes, throwing them out to the streets with an unfair advantage. The unofficial rule was to crush the tomatoes before throwing them to soften the blow, although from the looks of things, a lot of them exploded on impact with their target.

The more tomatoes were distributed out to the streets, the more ammunition was available for the all-out tomato war, which was confined to just about five small blocks. Jack and I made our way into the battlezone, armed mostly with tomatoes pieces albeit a couple of whole ones, throwing them any way that we could; it was so crowded there wasn't much room for arms swinging. In fact, there was barely enough room to move and we had to fight the pushes and shoves simply to stay upright and prevent ourselves from being stampeded and crushed by the mob -- or worse, drowned in a pool of tomato sauce.

For a good hour this continued. As more tomatoes turned into pulp, revelers turned to other items to throw: lost flip-flops, soaked t-shirts, and, at one point, a sloppy tomato hairpiece that landed right in front of me. I heard that some people went as far as to rip the shirt off of other people to use them for ammunition. (When we found Nicos later on, he had been one of these victims.) As far as I could tell, nothing really got out of hand, despite the food fight being a total boys club -- Sylvina wisely opted not to come -- although there were a few hardcore Aussie chicks getting in on the action. (Hey, how do you like them tomatoes?)



Another cannon fired, signifying the end of the fight, with most of the whole tomatoes already turned into sauce. Rivers of tomato juice started to flow down the hilly streets, where guys slid down like it was a big Slip 'n Slide. The crowds started to thin out in the center (picture above), allowing people to play in the tomato-y slop like kids playing in snow. Some alleys were so thick with salsa that you could almost swim in it. Jack and I surveyed the damage, wading our feet through it all and participating in the merriment as locals started the arduous task of cleaning up. The official cleaning crew hit the streets shortly after, pushing all the tomato remnants down the drains. Hoses sprayed down all the red-stained walls -- plus a couple of tomato fighters -- and the whole town center was clean in a couple of hours, as if nothing ever happened.

The celebration continued back on the streets closer to the train station, where impromptu block parties overtook the streets and blocked out exiting traffic. The chants of "Tomatina!" and "Buñol!" continued, with "Camiseta!" thrown in the mix whenever the crowd wanted a girl to take her shirt off. (Earlier I had heard an American voice cut to the chase and simply called out "Show me your titties!") Beers soon replaced tomatoes since everyone had one in their hand -- but instead of throwing them, they were consumed en masse. Spaniards and guiris came together all in celebration of La Tomatina.

Jack and I somehow managed to bump into Nicos and his crew again, and we all befriended some girls from Australia, Oregon, and California, plus some guy from Colorado named Jeremy. We partied with them and the girls until we had had enough -- unlike the non-stop seven-day San Fermin Festival I'd experienced in Pamplona, the Tomatina party started to die down by sundown. Unless you were passed out in an alley completely wasted or vomitting in a cup somewhere (we saw both), most people who had come in from the city just got back on the Valencia-bound train to clean up. I for one definitely needed a shower.


THAT NIGHT Juan and Elisa came over for dinner (ironically on the terrace of their own apartment), where we regrouped over homemade tapas and a salad with tomatoes in it. Eating them, I knew more than ever that tomatoes might be best digested than smeared all over my body -- although it's just not as fun.


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Homes

DAY 4: "Erik, we are homeless," Sylvina told me at El Mercader, after they had packed all their belongings in suitcases and bags to move their lives out of Malaga.

"I'm homeless too," I smirked.

"No, you have your home in New York."

"Mi casa es tu casa."

It pretty much took most of the morning for Jack and Sylvina to pack their apartment up, from their clothes to Jack's beer bottle collection and Batman toys. To get out of their hair, I finally went sightseeing to see other homes that had been vacated for centuries, the first being the Castillo de Gibralfaro, an ancient Phoenician castle at Malaga's highest point. Built by the Phonenicians and repurposed by the Moors and the Spanish for its optimal position for a watchtower and lighthouse, the Castillo de Gibralfaro fortification is now home to a museum and numerous miradors for perfect views of the city -- its harbor, its bullring -- and rumor has it that on a very clear day, you can see Africa off in the distance. To the north, the Andalucian mountains surrounded us, and I could see just what former watchmen saw -- although most of that view is obstructed from luxury condos now.



Adjacent to the Castillo de Gibralfaro was La Alcazaba (picture above), "Malaga's most imposing sight" according to my guidebook, and with good reason. Once the palace of Moorish kings who ruled the land, this well-preserved 11th-century fortress still instilled a sense of Arabian mystique. Walking around its gardens, waterducts, amphitheatre, and pools, and passing through its Arabian archways and rooms, I felt transported to another time and place -- although while most people may have imagined themselves in a tale of Arabian nights, I felt swept in like I was in the video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.


JACK AND I took the bus crosstown to get to the Atesa rental car office where we jointly rented the car we'd drive up that evening to Valencia. We scored a sweet diesel-powered Citroen C4 from a funny Spaniard who, after hearing that Jack was American, had all these questions about his upcoming vacation to Mexico.

"The Spanish are so ignorant here," Jack told me. "[He thought that since Mexico and Florida are next to each other, they had the same government. He was asking me if the government of Mexico and the government of Florida were the same since they're so close to each other.]" The reason he asked was because he wanted to bring his wife, parents, and kids to Mexico -- in addition to a bag of weed -- and was wondering if that'd be cool. Jack advised him not to risk it.

By four in the afternoon, we had everything shoved in every available space in the C4. More people came to say final goodbyes. The landlord lady came to check out the apartment. We were ready by 4:45, then 5:00, then 5:15. Sylvina was having a long, hard time saying goodbye, especially with the friendship earrings she and Ellie had traded. With tears and sobs in the air, I couldn't help but feel responsible for it all, and so I gave the girls their moments while I just chilled out by the beach with Jack.

"I feel kind of bad," Jack told me. "We're really leaving here because of me."

"No, I feel bad," I said. "It's like you're leaving here because of me."

No matter; the decision had been made -- and logically it was the right one -- and there was no turning back with the car packed up and the "[FOR RENT]" sign on the apartment balcony already. Nothing could have reminded Sylvina that she was "homeless" more than that.

By 5:30 we were on the road to Valencia through the majestic and awe-inspiring Andalucian landscape. Six hours later we arrived in the city center of Valencia, where we met up with our host Juan, Jack's old Spanish friend from Miami whom I met during my last time in town. More than a host, he and his girlfriend Elisa surprised us by not only letting us crash their apartment for a couple of days, but by simply letting us have it; the couple would stay at his in-laws during my stay so as not to crowd the place with five people -- not that it mattered because there was so much space, with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, a study, and two terraces on each side of the unit.

"See, you're not homeless anymore," I told Sylvina as we moved all their belongings in.

She smiled. It wouldn't be forever, but it definitely would do the job in the meantime.


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Breaking Up With Spain

DAY 3: "It's a shame," Jack said. "It feels like when I'm breaking up with a chick."

"You're breaking up with Spain," I said.

"Yeah, I'm breaking up with Spain."

It never really hit me that there would be such an emotional backlash for meeting up with Jack and Sylvina in their adopted home of Malaga and bringing them with me to Valencia. For me, going from Spanish city to Spanish city was just another leg in a trip, but for Sylvina and Jack, it was the end of an era, the manifestation of a failed attempt of establishing a professional career in Spain -- even with Jack's claim to fame doing a vet house call for Lenny Kravitz and his dog in Miami.

And so, sooner than they thought it would hit them, the end was upon them. I could relate to the emotion in the air; it was like my last night in Singapore before my big Global Trip came to a close.


MOST OF THE DAY, Sylvina ran some last day errands in Malaga while Jack gave me a look into the everyday life he'd had since they moved there. Living off of savings while looking for a job as a vet, he led a pretty leisurely life, like one of Hemingway's Lost Generation. For example, we didn't wake up until noon and didn't have breakfast on the balcony until three in the afternoon.



Sylvina usually went to work to pay for her half of the rent while Jack just sat around and drank coffee, surfed the web for work, and watched this Argentine soap opera involving hot girls in school girl uniforms. Eventually he'd get up and go to Malagueta Beach across the street (picture above) for a quick dip -- if he felt like it of course -- and then perhaps wander around the streets of the city center to take in the sights -- he never tired of the big Cathedral. Then he'd sit a cafe, like the one overlooking la Plaza de la Constitucion, check his PDA for emails, drink more coffee and just people watch.

"It's a daily dose of breastification," I told him as we watched voluptuous Spanish women walk by.

I had thought that our wanderings in downtown Malaga, a city of old and new, would have led to some touristic sightseeing, but most places of historical value were closed on Monday (minus the bridge built by the Germans as a gift in 1984). Inside the cathedral, closed. The Alcazaba fortress overlooking the city, closed. The numerous houses and museums honoring Malaga as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso, closed. And so, we just continued doing what Jack did best: a lot of nothing but sit around in cafes in bars.

His favorite bar of course, was El Mercader, a place "where everybody knew his name" since his girlfriend worked there. I thought it was cool because they had a thong dispensing machine.

"This is my bar," Sylvina told me, working the back even though she had quit the week before. She did it mostly because she had made many girlfriends at the bar, her fellow waitresses, who all had a special bond together -- except for Turkish barely-legal blonde Gogtche (sp?) because she was the pretty one and got away with stuff. (Girls will be girls in any country.)

"[This is my friend Erik,]" Jack introduced me to Ellie, the Spanish-speaking Bulgarian waitress, and what seemed like Sylvina's best friend.

"Hola," I said.

"[He's come to pick us up.]"

"[Then he is my enemy,]" she joked, knowing she'd miss them. My travels thus far was breaking hearts.

There were a lot of preliminary goodbyes amongst the girls while Jack took his usual spot at the end of the bar, like Norm Peterson on Cheers, and drank more coffee and beer. He told me the crazy stories of being there, from hanging out with the crazy old German ex-pat who reminded me of Stan Lee without a moustache, to the times he had to bail Sylvina out of situations with pompous rich English customers.

Speaking of the English, that night when we went to the Plaza Obispo under the Cathedral in the town center to meet up with two more of their friends to say goodbye, the bar next door (ironically named "Cheers" and sported the same logo as the TV show), which catered to English tourists, had two flautists outside playing nothing Spanish -- but renditions of Beatles songs.

I sat and listened while the friends said their goodbyes. Again I felt them leaving a life behind.

"We are alone," Sylvina told me. "What you see, it's a show." She tried to convince me that they really didn't know many people; it was just a coincidence all the people they knew were suddenly popping out of the woodwork on their final day. Still, it looked like a good life, and I wondered why they would leave it behind.

"If we stayed, we probably would have started hating it," Jack told me. "[I'd just do nothing again for three months.]" He hated to admit it, but doing nothing for a while got pretty boring.

"Well, you're leaving on a high note," I told him. "It's a good break up."

"Yeah, she'll always be there for me."


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United Nations of Malaga

DAY 2: "So most people don't go out until midnight around here?" I asked my buddy Jack as we walked from Malaga's airport to the train that would take us to his apartment by the beach.

"People don't go out until one," he told me. "This is actually pretty early." My watch read about 11 p.m. local time.

"I got here just in time then."

MOST OF MY DAY before this conversation transpired was a crazy continuation of my long, yet cost effective journey to get from New York to Malaga in the Andalucia province of southern Spain. It was fairly exhausting going a roundabout way, traveling from terminal to terminal, waiting on line after line -- and I mean all of this within Paris' ass-backwards Charles de Gaulle airport.

Eventually I went from Paris to Munich where I wandered around for six hours like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, until I got on the check-in line for my Air Berlin flight to Spain, a cheap domestic flight in the fashion of America's Jet Blue.

"Dutch or German?" an old Bavarian man asked to figure out how to address me.

"American."

"Oh. You go ahead. There are twenty of us here." He pointed out that he was one of a big group of old senior types, and that I might as well cut the line before their group. Each of them would have taken longer to check-in as each and every one of them had a traveling set of golf clubs.

Malaga is known these days as a beach vacation resort type of city for many European foreigners, mostly Germans and British. In the past decade, they've "discovered" its warm, summer weather, its balmy but breezy nights, its good food and drink, and its laid back atmosphere. The Spanish, of course, resent it to an extent; it is a sort of modern colonization with British ex-pat neighborhoods popping up all over southern Spain, the way New Yorkers colonized Florida and Costa Rica.

But there isn't much tension; the Spanish of the region are so laid back, that it barely phases them anymore, at least in the eyes of Jack, who said the phrase, "Everyone's so laid back here" about a hundred times on the train ride to his apartment when he wasn't being interrupted by his mobile phone ring of the Spider-man cartoon theme song.

Fans of this blog might remember Jack from my travels on my big RTW trip, when he met up with me in Spain in July 2004. A Uruguayan-American childhood friend from New Jersey, he had moved with his parents back to Uruguay when we were in the fifth grade, and eventually moved back to the USA (Miami) with them after college. We'd kept in touch, and made our visits to each other through the years, and in 2004 he traveled with me in Spain for a while -- a time when, on our last night in Barcelona, he met Sylvina, who eventually became his Uruguayan girlfriend that he moved to Malaga with.

"Hello! How are you?" Sylvina greeted me with a hug when I entered their small, but very nice apartment -- emphasis on the "very" as it was across the street from the beach, within walking distance of historical Malaga, near an internet cafe and right above El Mercader, the bar where Sylvina had been working since they arrived seven months prior. She was sort of the breadwinner of the household, waitressing and eventually running the bar with her E.U. passport status, while American passport-holding Jack looked for work -- and working papers -- as a local veterinarian. To make a really long story short, it was more complicated to get work legally than he thought, and after numerous attempts of figuring out a decent work situation and/or a possible marriage with Sylvina amongst other things, the two decided that their time in Spain was over -- conveniently right at the end of summer. My visit to them actually sparked their exodus after trying to work it out in Spain for seven months; they would travel with me for a bit before relocating back in the States.

"This is it," Jack said, not referring to their last days in Spain, but something far more important to him: a green bottle of Alhambra Reserve 1925, a Spanish beer so fancy it had no paper label -- just an embossed logo. "This is the best Spanish beer," he told me. In his time in Spain, he had become a pseudo-beer afficionado, trying as many diverse international beers coming from the different foreigners in town. He started collecting beer bottles as trophies and put them on his shelf, and I completely busted his bubble when I told him that most of his "trophy beers" were sold right at my corner grocery in New York. Not that stopped us from drinking welcome beers that night, or what was left of the beer in the fridge since he was already in packing mode, trying to get rid of stuff before moving out. We sat out on the balcony overlooking the beach and a small courtyard below, catching up on old times while Sylvina served us tapas-sized portions of snacks they were trying to get rid of in the fridge.

"It's hard when you live with someone," Sylvina told me in English, for moving in with Jack was a test in their relationship -- one that was passing with flying colors despite the occasional arguments of any couple. The other "test" involved was Sylvina and her English, a language she had wanted to perfect since their visit to me in New York before they moved to Spain. That was also passing with flying colors -- plus she had picked up some German and French from serving all the ex-pats and tourists in port from one the of the cruise ships. On top of that, she became good friends with a Bulgarian co-worker.

Despite the opportunity to work in a bar in such a laid back international scene, she was getting tired of it, and definitely didn't mind leaving it behind. "I work there, then get the money, and I go." Jack on the other hand, just went there, got some beers and coffees, and lazily hung out while waiting for calls for interviews. He'd tutor her in English whenever she'd get stuck, trying to explain something to a British customer.

It was at this bar that Sylvina and Jack befriended another nationality present in the Malagan melting pot, a group of Turkish exchange students, living and working in Malaga for the summer. "I told these Turkish kids we'd hang out with them tonight," he told me. However, when we tried to meet up with them around 1:30 -- half an hour later than we said we'd meet them because we lost track of time -- they were no where to be found. In fact, there was no one to be found anywhere near the town center; Jack had to revise his previous statement about going out in Malaga: People usually go don't go out until one -- unless it's a Sunday when it's pretty dead.



We walked around anyway trying to bump into the Turkish kids (with no luck), checking out the sights on the way from the usually crowded Calle Larios, to the larger-than-life, usually lit cathedral (picture above), the old Roman amphitheatre, and City Hall. There were a handful of people wandering around the medieval, Moorish-influenced alleys and plazas like us, and I overheard conversations in English, German, French, and of course, Spanish.

"I guess I'm not really out on a Sunday," Jack apologized for the lack of activity. I didn't mind; I was still pretty tired and jet-lagged from my plane journey. We ended the night back on the balcony with more beers until we called it a night around 3:30.

"Good night," Sylvina said.

"Buenos noches," I replied.

"Guten nacht," Jack added.

Malaga wasn't just the city were Jack and I were reunited, but it was the place where different countries came together for summer relaxation and the occasional beer -- even if you could just get them at home.


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Liquids On A Plane

DAY 1: "So how does it work?" I asked, holding a bottle of Diet Coke. "Do I get rid of this now?"

It was my first flight since the LE scare (Liquid Explosive) of August 2006, an airline terror threat not to be confused with the other one of the month, SoaP (Snakes on a Plane). No liquids were allowed to be carried on-board any commercial flight. No snakes too, for that matter.

"You might as well drink it now and throw it out over there," said Security Check Officer Rivera of JFK's Terminal 3, pointing to a nearby trash bin. "They'll squeeze your bladder on the other side," he joked in a stereotypical New York accent.

I put all my carry-on items in the bin and chugged the Diet Coke down like my mouth was a kitchen drain, mindful that I hadn't recently ingested any Mentos. "Hey, take your time," Officer Rivera said. "You don't want that coming out your nose."

I took my shoes off and put them in the bin for the X-ray machine while Officer Rivera continued to make small talk. "So where you goin'?" he asked.

Rather than explain my long, yet cost-effective 20-hour three-leg journey of New York -> Paris -> Munich -> Malaga, I simply answered, "Ultimately Spain."

"What do you have planned for Spain?"

"Well, you know that festival where they throw tomatoes at each other?"

"Oh yeah. Where is that, Pamplona?"

"Valencia."

"Oh. I think they got the bulls in Pamplona. You doin' that?"

"I did that two years ago."

I threw out my empty soda bottle and Officer Rivera wished me well to send me on my way through the metal detector. Once in the secured area, I went right to the bathroom to relieve myself of the Diet Coke.



THE DELTA AIRLINES RED EYE FLIGHT (picture above) to Paris doubled as my Air France flight, as well as one run by AeroMexico. The cabin was full of many "sí"s and "oui"s and on top of that, there were many Indians on board as the plane would continue from Paris to Chennai, India.

Sitting next to me in coach was Sid (short for Siddhartha) a VP of some outsourced financial consulting firm in Bangalore -- "a boring job" as he told me in a stereotypical Indian accent. With only six hours flight time to Paris, it was barely enough time to get a good night's rest upon arrival in the morning. Sid told me that he had purposely not gotten a good night's sleep for the past couple of days so that he could just pass out on the flight. "Red wine also helps," he told me.

"Red, but not white," I said.

"Yes, only red."

I'm sure the red wine he consumed at dinner ultimately made him take a piss in the lavatory that night. And I'm pretty confident he didn't take a photo of it like I did -- although who knows what he does for kicks from his mundane job?


Can't wait for the next entry? Explore the old blogs, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around the World" and "Trippin' to Timbuktu"

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After Timbuktu

It's been roughly four months since my "Escape from Mali" -- the ending of an emotionally draining, albeit memorable journey through the western African nation of Mali to the legendary-turned-anti-climactic city of Timbuktu (all of which have been immortalized in The Global Trip blog "Trippin' to Timbuktu"). Since then, life has returned to a state of normalcy -- if you considering working in a youthful NYC interactive advertising agency being "normal," sending funny YouTube and ytmnd.com links to friends and coworkers all day.

Well, that's not all that has transpired since; there were some definite stateside aftermath events left over from the Mali trip. For one, Joanna, the British blonde I met in Mopti, rang my doorbell unexpectedly one Saturday morning when she was in town and decided to look me up. She admitted she thought it was weird that I, a virtual stranger, had willingly given her my home address, but she figured it'd be my own damn fault if she turned out to be a psycho. She wasn't after all -- at least the weekend she was in town -- and in fact, if anything she was well-connected; within two hours of her ringing my doorbell, I had been invited to brunch with her friend, coincidentally the Deputy Consulate General of the U.K. That night I was invited to a house party at his fancy luxury Upper East Side apartment to hobnob with British, Mexican, and Singaporean aristocrats over fine wines.

As for my relations with Van, my excellent-turned-somewhat-shady guide in Mali, we've kept in touch -- sort of. I had given him my work number and one day he called me out of the blue to catch up -- but I was in a meeting at the time, and had to call him back. After a four-day game of phone tag, we finally spoke, and it was just a friendly courtesy call to see how I was doing since I left Mali so abruptly. On top of Van wondering how I was, he was wondering when I would get around to making a website for him and his business. Giving him the benefit of the doubt one last time, I made him a simple two-page site in English and French, which he was happy to have:

http://www.geocities.com/van_modibo_ballo

After sending him that, I thought the hassles would be over, but he has since bugged me for a Jay-Z DVD, despite me trying to explain to him that DVD region codes are different depending on country and anything I send him from here wouldn't work over there. Also, in one "urgent message," Van asked me if I could please send him some money so that he could buy a new computer for his new business. I politely declined.


WITH ALL THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS of Mali, it's no wonder I compared traveling through it (during the low season) to one of the harder levels of a video game. For my next trip, this time around I'm resetting the console and doing something a bit easier: Europe again (my fifth time now). For six days, I'll be visiting my friend Jack (from the Spain episodes of TGT2) who currently lives in Spain the Sylvina, one of the Uruguayan girls he met on my trip. We'll all go to Buñol, Valencia for La Tomatina, the world-renowned tomato throwing festival. From there, my travels will take me to Greece for two weeks, where I've never been, to see the sights, check out the island life -- both day and night -- and hopefully do some fishing and octopus diving. I'll end my trip off in Munich, Germany for the first weekend of the ultimate celebration of inebriation, Oktoberfest.



In true Global Trip style, I haven't packed or prepared anything yet, although I did invest in a guidebook (picture above) and some Greek language CDs so that I might be able to strike a conversation with a local out in the isles. So far I am retaining none of the information; the only Greek I know right now is "Gyro with white sauce, please."

Anyway, sit back, and get ready for another three-week-long The Global Trip travel blog fix. The Trip begins August 26th.



Special shout-out to my "Livin' On A Prayer" karaoke partner Lia Vakoutis for her photo of Santorini, Greece used in the background! (The tomatoes and beer stein photos are courtesy of a Google image search.)

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