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April 2000

Mykonos

David Aaronson
2005-09-24 21:36:40

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NOT TOUCH THE PELICAN. If you do, it may turn its entire head inside-out and make a noise vaguely akin to the death-throes of a tuba. You may be wondering what happened to Petros I. That's the tragic part. He became the mascot after he was blown ashore during a storm. His reign ended when he was run over by a car. This isn't as unlikely as it sounds because we were nearly run-over on a regular basis. Cars cannot fit into Mykonos' streets so they cluster around the edges of towns. Within, people use motor scooters, often at considerable speeds through series of blind twists and turns that are definately not wide enough for two motor scooters to pass. Sometimes it is difficult enough for two pedestrians to pass.

After dinner that evening we did some shopping, managed to find our room again, and went back out to experience the famous nightlife. After a bit of searching, we found three places from which music was emanating. The first was playing Rembetika music (a sort of Greek blues style), the third was playing Madonna. We chose the second by default. It turned out to be a cozy little bar where we sampled a variety of Metaxas (Greek brandy) and watched some Arabic women undergo their first experience with alcoholic beverages. For the record, they didn't like Bailey's Irish Cream but they did like tequila. Go figure. We returned to our room which was perfectly quiet even with the windows open at night. On the other hand, we were awakened at first light by the incessant use of a power saw somewhere nearby. We arrived at the boats to Delos early, where the captains were trying to determine if the wind was too strong to make the crossing. After an hour of indecision they finally decided to go. We met a couple other Americans (Randy & Bev) and were just overjoyed to find ourselves on a small boat with that darn French tour group again. Our Delos experience has its own webpage.

When we returned to Mykonos we went in search of food where we had our first and only gyros of the trip. They were excellent, but for the most part we simply didn't see them as a menu item very often. Souvlaki was far more common. We retrieved our luggage and caught a taxi for the aiport with Randy and Bev who had decided to accompany us as far as Santorini. In this case, the airport really was a 5 minute drive. It was also in some disrepair as they were building a new one next door. Next, we had our first Olympic Airlines experience. It was a very casual sort of flying. They gathered all 20 of us in the terminal at the gate (that would be gate 1, amazingly enough). They marched us out to the plane and off we went. It was about a 20 minute flight to Santorini and we got good (if shaky) views of Naxos, Paros, and Ios on our way. The mystique of Santorini was also preserved as we flew in low from the outside of the island so we were unable to see over the cliff wall into the caldera from the air.

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