Greek Isles

Hi guys!! Well I finally have something worthy to write. I’ve been away for 3 weeks now. Gosh, where to begin……

London
First port of call was London for a couple of nights, where I was picked up around 7am by the lovely Joey and Anton. They rushed me back to their apartment for a must 2 bottles of Moet. The perfect welcome to London breakfast drink. From there I was told to get my act together as we needed to head around to Ricks (Jo’s brother) for the world cup cricket final, which we won!! Was there any doubt?? Of course there was a Caribbean theme with pina coladas and funky music. This lasted till about 7am the next morning. A tip for you all……don’t play stacks on with 5 guys on a marble floor. It hurts the next day.
All good though. I caught up on some much needed sleep on Sunday then headed down to the local pub for dinner. Had my first currency shock when I paid $10 Australian for a bottle of water! Didn’t do much else before I headed to Greece. Oh went for a walk around London and had to pay to sit in the park, that was nice.

Tuesday morning I headed to Greece!!!

Athens
Athens is a weird place. I was told not to expect much and I wasn’t disappointed. The city is run down and dirty. They’re still flogging Olympic memorabilia and most of the guys wear tight jeans up to their armpits with tight D&G t-shirts. Very cliché. However, I must say that Plaka is the place to be and the food is excellent and the taxi drivers are particularly nice, even if they do drive 100kms over the speed limit in a 100 zone!!! Everything is relaxed. So relaxed in fact that they called a transport strike on the day I arrived and the day I left. The Greeks really do work the phrase “shit happens”.

The Greek Islands
Anyway, hooked up with Laurie at Athens airport and from there we headed into Athens for a night before catching the ferry to Santorini. I’m writing in hindsight now but in my opinion Santorini is the best island! It’s defiantly the most beautiful. Popular with oldies and honeymooners but I found it just as enjoyable being a single gal. People said don’t spend more than a few days there but I could live there. Here you could mix with the locals and not feel like you were back in Australia. Although I must admit our local bar did became the Tropical, owned by a Greek/Australian. For some reason you always get drawn to your own.

A few days into it there became three of us, Loz, Loz and Lis (a friend of Laurie’s) and basically our time on Santorini was spent browsing through the shops, eating, relaxing at the beach, making friends, becoming a local, drinking cocktails, dancing, eating, cruising round the island on 4 wheelers or a car, checking out the talent, eating, doing a boat tour around the island, visiting the hot springs that weren’t hot, drinking cocktails, checking out the talent, going out and did I mention eating??

I should also mention here that the islanders love to hand out ozo shots and go crazy for Shikira.

After about 8 nights in Santorini, we headed to the island of Ios. As we were traveling at the beginning of the season it was dead except for baby Australians and Americans. No one spoke Greek. Not that we could but we did get the basics down pat. Still it was a nice island but we decided to head back to Santorini after 2 nights.

After that, our last island was Mykonos. This was much like Ios but with a few more people. Paradise beach is gorgeous and an absolute hoot and after 15 cocktails you get over the weird Japanese guy in the swimming cap and goggles burying himself in the sand and the sleazy guy with saggy dickdaks. It happened to be mother’s day this day on the beach and I must apologies again for my phone calls mum but that’s just how we were rolling.

I really shouldn’t have left it this long to write all this. It’s all over the shop but this is the first time I’ve had to use the internet for more than 10 minutes. I’ll try and write shorter ones more regularly.

I can’t fit everything in. So in short….I’ve had a ball, weather was perfect, loved the Greek islands and plan to go back for a week in August for my birthday.

If you plan to go, make sure you check if there is a transport strike. All day in the Athens airport when it’s nice weather outside sucks. Even if you do spend the day with the husband of Skye (AKA morcheeba) Watch episode 13 of season three of Grey’s anatomy and you’ll find out.

Lastly, check out the photos. I’ve put some on here but all of them can be found at my Flickr site and if you want the uncensored version, email me.



Take care.

I’m in Berlin now and will write soon.

Lauren.xx