A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Greekness
September 17 - October 4, 2017
The summer of 2017 wasn’t particularly warm in Berlin. The days were mostly gray and mild, and it seemed the majority of July was 70 degrees with a misting rain. The opportunity then to go to a warm place for the end of September for a third straight year was especially enticing. Once again there was an international conference in a country we had not yet visited, so we planned an extended trip to Greece following Mazz's weeklong science gathering in Thessaloniki.
One of the best trips we’ve taken was to New Zealand in 2013. Aside from the jaw-dropping beauty around every turn, what made that trip so excellent was the freedom we gave ourselves not to be tied down to a specific schedule. We went in August, which is winter in the southern hemisphere, so there was no trouble deciding on the fly when to move on and when to linger in towns we particularly liked. When we travel through Europe, we somewhat rigidly structure our time, booking our accommodation in advance to ensure we can stay where we want. Since late September is the “shoulder season” in Greece, and there are nearly 200 islands you can visit, we were once again afforded the ability to leave our schedule up to our whims and come and go as we pleased.
We bought a Lonely Planet guide on the Greek Islands and were happy to see that they encouraged this kind of open itinerary while traveling through the country. We bought our flights into Thessaloniki, with Mazz arriving 5 days earlier than Kirb for her conference, and flights out of Athens a few weeks later. We'd figure out how to spend the time in between once we arrived and could talk to locals and other travelers about their recommendations.
We booked a tiny one bedroom Airbnb close to the White Tower of Thessaloniki for the conference, giving us a central place to explore the city. Mazz was immediately wowed by the excellent food, and was sending Kirb text messages of all the dishes she was finding each night with her Italian coworkers Bruno and Simone.
Thessaloniki is like a dingier version of Barcelona, on the verge of being “run-down” but without losing charm from it. It sits right on the water, though there are no beaches near the center of the city. There's no metro system, but the busses can get you just about anywhere, if you can figure out how they work. There are no signs that explain where any of the busses go, and Google doesn’t know the routes, so getting from place to place generally requires asking locals what to do.
Kirb had a large assignment that kept him cooped up in the apartment during the daytime for his stay in Thessaloniki, but it wasn’t too much of a problem as Mazz also needed to spend that time attending the conference. In the evenings, we were able to do some light sightseeing and then find a new and exciting place to eat, of which there seemed countless options. Boats left regularly from the downtown area, offering free 30 minute cruises of the harbor if you bought a drink. They were clearly overpriced, but in all it was still a great deal to enjoy a boat ride with a glass of wine at sunset.
We dined every night with the Italians, who appreciated following the Greek drinking customs of Ouzo before the meal, traditional white wine called Retsina with the food, and then slowly unwinding afterwards with a strong digestif liquor called Raki. To sample as much of the food as possible, we ordered each meal family style, getting eight or so dishes to share between the four of us.
In every restaurant we visited in Thessaloniki the food was exceptionally good, far surpassing any preconceived notions we had about the quality of Greek cuisine. Mazz and the Italians had already eaten once at Ouzeri Lola and were so impressed that they returned so Kirb could try it as well. The standout dishes were whole squids stuffed with feta and grilled to perfection, and something they called "Seafood Pastrami" with thin slices of fish cured in a salty brine with fresh dill and green onions.
After a great meal at Lola we wandered to find a bar, and stumbled upon an Irish Pub, which is generally a safe bet for a fun place to spend the evening regardless of what country you're in. We pulled up to the bar and asked the bartender for some Ouzo, and he curtly informed us that they don’t sell that in this bar. We ordered some whiskeys instead and started talking to the guy next to us, asking him questions about the city. Kostas told us his favorite restaurant, and asked if we had drank tsipouro yet in Greece, a strong spirit similar to Raki. We told him we just had some with dinner, but we had ordered the plain kind, which is astringent, and not the type he preferred, which is flavored with anise. He told us to hold on and rushed out of the bar, returning a few minutes later with a water bottle mostly filled with an opaque white liquid. He informed us it was anise tsipouro to take home with us, and that it probably wasn’t a great idea to drink it in the bar. He also mentioned it was 70% alcohol, so we should probably drink it on the rocks.
We were pretty blown away by his hospitality, and ordered him a fresh beer as we continued our conversations about Greece and classic rock. Kostas was a particularly big fan of the Beatles, and we talked at length about our favorite music. As we chatted, the bartender came by regularly to fill shot glasses he had placed in front of us with vodka, which is not particularly pleasant to drink straight, but we will never say no free drinks when they’re being doled out so liberally. Kostas asked us if we knew who Richie Blackmore was, and we told him we were big fans of Deep Purple and Rainbow. He reached inside his fanny pack, pulled out a Ziploc bag of photographs, and presented us of a picture of himself and the famous guitarist, “With Richie Blackmore, Sept ’98, Kostas” written on the back. It is perhaps the greatest gift anyone has ever given us in a bar, closely followed by a water bottle full of highly alcoholic tsipouro, also given to us by Kostas that same evening.
The next morning came hard. The bartender had continued to pour us free vodka for the entire evening, and we clearly were bad at saying no. After a rough start, Kirb finished his massive assignment writing about tents and life jackets and Mazz went to her last presentation for the week, and it finally felt like the vacation could properly begin. We had posted our experience with Kostas on social media, and our friend Javi from Berlin had seen it and was also coincidentally in Thessaloniki. We decided to meet up for dinner at the restaurant Kostas had recommended, called Koumparakia. Javi brought two Israeli guys he had met traveling, and we brought our Italians, and together we had a big international feast of unsurprisingly excellent food.
Thessaloniki had the most busted-ass train station we’ve ever seen. We packed and got to the station more efficiently than expected, arriving 45 minutes before our train was due to depart, so it gave us ample time to soak it all in. The trains were fully tagged from end to end; the electronic departure signs were completely bashed in. The escalator seemed like it had been stairs longer than it ever functioned in the way it was intended. At one point, a random car appeared out of nowhere and drove down the train platform as though it were just another street.
From Thessaloniki it’s about a 3-hour trip with a changeover to get to Kalambaka, a quaint town situated at the base of colossal sandstone rock formations in central Greece. At the top of these steep rocks are a handful of precarious monasteries known as Meteora, one of the great sights and tourist attractions in the country. Monks have lived in the caves of these rock structures for thousands of years, but once the Turks began invading the area about a thousand years ago the monks decided to start building their own holy castles on the tops of the cliffs so that no one could enter, or siege them, without ropes and ladders dropped down from above. The monasteries are a marvelous sight, and another testament to mankind’s dedication to build things in areas where they have no logical business doing so.
After arriving in the town, finding our Airbnb host not there to let us in, feeding ourselves, finally being let in, walking back into town, and figuring out what our options were for the day, it was already 4pm in the afternoon, much later than we had hoped to start exploring. We had missed our window to take the guided sunset tour of the monasteries, so we booked a tour for the following morning and found a hiking trail to explore what we could of the area for the evening. The trail led through the old town of Kalambaka and straight up through the rocky hillside, climbing and climbing until you reach the road that runs along the crest. Though the two monasteries in this area had already closed for the evening, we were able to explore the cliffs around them, followed as we did by an adorable abandoned doggo that we definitely would have taken home with us if the situation would have allowed it.
Neither of us especially wanted to walk back down the trail, and the busses from the area had already stopped running, so we hitched a ride from a local in the parking lot outside of one of the monasteries. His name was also Kostas, and he worked as a bus driver in the area. We apologized for making him work on his day off. He was a real nice guy and said he was happy to have an excuse to practice his English, and we were grateful for his help as he dropped us back off downtown in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to get there on foot.
We explored the shops and found a particularly excellent long-sleeved “Ouzo Power” shirt for Mazz, as she had forgotten to pack anything remotely warm. Bruno, who had planned his trip out to Meteora poorly, arrived into town on a bus just as the sun was setting. We took his bags so he could catch a cab up to the monasteries and see what he could with the remaining daylight. We met up later in the evening at the Airbnb and went into town for dinner for a tasty spread of fried eggplant and garlic sauce, grilled peppers stuffed with feta, and two kinds of pork cooked over coals.
Bruno slept on the couch of our Airbnb and was out before 8 the next morning for his train back to Thessaloniki so he could catch a flight back to Berlin. We made our way to the offices of Travel Meteora to meet up with our tour group, and found that our friendly local Kostas from the night before was going to be our bus driver. The three-hour guided tour took us to all six of the monasteries, with stops to go inside three of them. The Monastery of Great Meteoron, the biggest of the lot, was full of relics from centuries past, showing how the monks cooked, prayed, and lived their daily lives above the cliffs. One room was dedicated entirely to storing the bones of dead monks. The Varlaam Monastery still had the winch system intact that they used to use to pull people up the cliff side in nets before the walkway was built.
Though the tour was more expensive than we liked and didn’t give us the freedom we generally demand, it was worth not having to worry about the hassle of missing the infrequent public buses between the monasteries and the town. If we messed that up, we'd miss our much more expensive bus that afternoon to Athens, which at €33 a person cost more than double the price of our train tickets to Kalambaka. We had about an hour after the tour to grab some lunch before our bus came, and second Kostas had recommended a place in the square fittingly called Meteora. Surprisingly, it was the first subpar meal we ate in Greece, with our meat and vegetables seemingly coming from giant, pre-cooked pots and sorely lacking in flavor and consistency. Still, it was at least a large portion of food, as the bus from Kalambaka to Athens takes over six hours with no stops.
During this trip we were about two months deep into the “slow carb” diet, in which you are not allowed to eat any flour, sugar, grains, rice, or other carbs, and are supposed to limit dairy and eat beans with one or two meals a day. This diet can be tough to follow when you’re not cooking for yourself, but the Greek diet lent itself to our restrictions quite easily. As long as we abstained from the free bread put on the table with every meal, as well as the inevitable free desert, it wasn’t hard to order a variety of delicious vegetables, bean dishes, seafood, and meats. We made slight exceptions to the rules of the diet for imbibing on white wine, and the ever present feta cheese that was a bit tough to avoid. Once a week on the slow carb diet you are allowed a cheat day, so we decided to schedule ours so we could properly eat our way across Athens with no remorse.
The first stop was a heavenly piece of spanikopida we bought from a street vendor near the central market. The filo dough was flaky and buttery and the spinach and onion filling was rich and decadent with no bitterness whatsoever. We followed that up with an impulse buy of a Middle Eastern variation on a gyro called lachmatzoun, made with flatbread, minced meat, yogurt sauce, and veggies.
Did you know that if you show up at the Acropolis at 1pm on a Monday you’ll probably be the only person there? JK. The picture of us in front of the Parthenon may be deceiving, as roughly every person in Athens was at the Acropolis when we went. Still, it's an amazing sight, with ridiculous 360-degree views of Athens sprawling out all around you. It's also historically relevant or something.
With the big item checked off the bucket list, we set Google maps to guide us towards what was supposed to be the best bakery in the city for more cheat snacks. Fortuitously, the route took us through a great shopping area where we loaded up on gifts for ourselves and friends and family. Kirb found a bootleg Giannis “Greek Freak” Antetokounmpo jersey that he never wanted to take off for the rest of the trip.
With a variety of delicious baked goods in tow from Takis Bakery, we made our way to a park to start slowly getting fatter again. We finished off our food tour in Athens by bar hopping in our cool but dilapidated neighborhood, going to two different excellent gyro places and eating some pizza that wasn’t great but was still pizza so whatever.
We’d received a lot of advice as to which islands to visit, but with so many options there wasn’t a whole lot of overlap. We’d heard glowing endorsements for the western islands in the Ionian sea, several nods for Crete, the Sporades islands, and a handful of different islands in the Cyclades. Our Lonely Planet book had island hopping through the Cyclades as their #1 choice, and after a number of different islands in that region came up in conversations with people we met, we decided it was probably as safe of a bet as any. Crete has enough to offer that we decided it warranted its own separate trip entirely. It is roughly the same price to fly from Athens to the largest island in the Cyclades, Naxos, as it was to take a ferry, but the flight takes 45 minutes and the boat between 4 and 6 hours. We woke up extra early to take the hour-plus train ride outside of Athens to the airport and got on a propeller plane to begin the island hopping chapter of our Greek adventure.
Much like our flights between Greece and Germany, we booked beginning and end flights in and out of the islands and let everything in the middle unfold by chance. Not every island has an airport, and the prices and times of the flights helped dictate where we would start and stop. We had wanted to get out to the Cyclades as quickly as possible from Meteora, but as the flights were significantly cheaper if we waited a day, we moved our time in Athens up and got a return flight from Paros island that put us in the Athens airport only a few hours before our flight back to Berlin.
Naxos airport is, without hyperbole, probably as small as any airport in the world. There is one tiny room, in one tiny building, and that's pretty much it. The runway pulls into a concrete space no bigger than a grocery store parking lot. The “baggage claim” is a rusted series of non-mechanized metal rollers that appear to be original installs from whenever the airport was first built. We found there was no public transport from the airport into town, but there were a crowd of taxis waiting to gouge us €15 for a 7-minute ride to our hotel.
The main town on the island Naxos is also called Naxos, and like the majority of the islands in the Cyclades it is populated with bright white buildings perched above a picturesque coastline. The old town is cute and quaint, with winding streets lined with vibrant flowering trees taking you past shops and tavernas. Apollo's Temple, a door-shaped support from a temple that began construction in 530 BC and was never completed, sits on an outcropping just off the harbor, acting as a timeless frame for the sea behind it.
Not far from town is a long, white sand beach called Agios Prokopios, with plenty of bars right on the sand so you can easily get drinks as you swim and sunbathe. We opted for the always-classy plastic grocery store bag full of cheap wine and ice, which we sipped leisurely as we read books and napped until the sun set.
Lonely Planet said, "To visit Naxos and not visit Halki would be a crime," so we figured out the public bus schedule and made a day trip of it. When we tried to get on the wrong bus, the driver informed us that the one we wanted was on the other side of the road. We asked him if that bus would pull around to where we were and he said, "I don't know. That driver is a little bit off." This statement began to take fuller meaning as our driver sped frantically around winding mountain turns, honking at everything, and passing slower vehicles. From a stop, he would generally drive a good distance before deciding to close the doors. The bus was full of little old ladies, and it seemed each one got their own private stop in a small town on the way. There was a lot of yelling to and at the back of the bus. When we reached the small town of Halki, with tiny, curving streets, the bus got stuck at a turn with several cars and another bus coming the opposite way. To resolve this, everyone involved had to get out of their vehicles, pointing and directing until order was restored. Some random guy on the bus got up and started fidgeting with the bus driver's seat while he was outside, like he was in a NASCAR pit crew, making sure everything was set up just right.
Halki was as picturesque as the book made it sound, though we unfortunately arrived at the exact same time as a tour bus full of senior citizens who were aimlessly wandering everywhere we tried to go. We wanted to eat at the restaurant in town, which was supposed to be quite good, but it was completely packed with the tour group, so we made our way to the distillery instead to try the local Citron liqueur. We were inside for about 5 undisturbed minutes before 30 seniors descended on the place like vultures, jockeying us out of position for free samples. After exploring the little village and its cute shops for an hour or so, we decided it made the most sense to take an earlier bus back to Naxos instead of spending the entire afternoon there. Simply wanting some peace and quiet, we moved as far away as we could from the incessant horde of olds and drank some local rosé at a bar in an empty alley until our bus came.
Though we didn't get to eat in Halki, the food we got back in Naxos town was a proper consolation, as the meal we enjoyed at Nostimon Hellas was one of the best we ate on the entire trip. This restaurant offered forward-thinking interpretations of Greek classics we'd now come to recognize, and everything on the menu sounded so amazing it was hard to make choices. By this point in the trip, we had been completely won over by every eggplant dish we had ordered, so we stuck with that and got an amazing baked eggplant dish with myzithra cheese, fresh pesto, and tomato. We also got mussels cooked in a white wine sauce with fresh fennel and star anise, giving the dish a new and robust flavor that was different and more aromatic than other versions we've had.
Too full now to make our way to explore a new beach, we walked the few blocks back to Agios Prokopios, splurged on some lounge chairs, and drank wine in the sunset there for a second night. Don't fix it if it ain't broke.
We didn't originally plan on visiting the island of Santorini, but we were talked into it by one of our Italians, Simone, who assured us that it was simply too beautiful to miss. And since it was shoulder season, we should avoid the brunt of the summer crowds. Looking to book accommodation, we found that staying on Santorini was at least twice as much as Naxos, but we were intrigued. The town of Oia in Santorini is the iconic image people picture when they think of the Greek Islands, with supposedly legendary postcard-worthy sunsets. We both agreed that before you can properly find your way to the lesser-known gems, you have to know what the big draws look like first, so we booked a room overlooking the water in the central town of Fira, two nights in the beach town of Kamari, and got on a ferry to our next island.
When we arrived at our hotel, they had booked us into a small studio facing the road - not the ocean view we had been led to believe we were buying. There was some arguing, and a phone call to Hotels.com to try and understand why every photo of the room we booked had picturesque views of the water, but the site and the hotel both accused the other of the false advertising and we were stuck with an expensive room on a loud street and a $25 credit for our next booking. There was no reason to dwell or brood on it, so we hopped on a bus to Oia to try and catch one of the epic sunsets we'd heard so much about.
Oia is every bit as stunning as its reputation suggested, built on a cliff side with beautiful white buildings and blue domed roofs. It is also, even in shoulder season, absolutely crammed with tourists. By this point in the trip the expenses were starting to pile up faster than we had expected, so we were becoming much more cognizant of eating out and spending money on meals. Eating in Oia with a view was not cheap, so we settled on some salads at a gyro place, which still set us back €15 for the worst food we ate on the entire trip. The gyros looked good though, and they were cheap. Kirb really wanted to eat a gyro. He loudly cursed the slow carb diet and his flabby, corpulent mass.
As we made our way through the town, we found that there were already hundreds, if not thousands, of people staking out spots facing the sunset throughout the entire edge of town facing the water. Everyone was buying booze from the markets and drinking it on the streets as they waited, so we joined in and got a bottle of sparkling wine and found a spot to post up. We made friends with some jovial South Africans and found camaraderie in the fact that both of our currencies were rapidly losing value thanks to the clowns running our countries. As the sun went down it began to turn the sky a pretty hue of pinkish yellow, but then it went behind some clouds and that was the end of that. The massive crowds lining the streets slowly dissipated, turning their backs on the thoroughly average, unexceptional sunset. As the light faded, it bathed the white buildings in an ethereal blue glow, and it was easy to see the magic of the place, though the legend seemed much larger than the reality.
When we first arrived in Fira and took off on foot to the edge of town to our misleading hotel, the stretch of town we walked through was mostly full of shirtless bros on quads and fast food restaurants. We were able to explore the town a bit more the next morning on our way out of it, and found the place more charming than we had initially thought, though still not a place we necessarily wanted to spend any significant amount of time in. We drank sludgy traditional Greek coffees overlooking the cliffs, and were treated to a parade of donkeys being led through the narrow streets.
Only about 20 minutes away from Fira by bus, we were pleased to find that Kamari was a much more laid-back beach town, and that the hotel room we had booked there had a great balcony overlooking the sea. Like all of the other rooms we had chosen so far, we made sure this room also had a full kitchen, making it easy to stock up on groceries so we could cook two meals a day to help limit expenses and ensure we were getting plenty of beans in our diet.
Only eating one meal out meant we had to research wisely to make sure we chose a good restaurant. The reviews for the Captain's Corner Taverna were particularly good, so we made our way to the bustling restaurant situated a couple blocks off the main drag of waterfront tourist traps. Our orders had become pretty autonomous by this point as there were a few items that seemed to always stand out when we ordered them: eggplant, beans, and grilled octopus or squid. The stuffed eggplant dish we got here was particularly excellent, filled with a myriad of raw and cooked vegetables, feta, and drizzled with balsamic. Strangely, it almost tasted like a Mexican dish. Pureed fava beans with caramelized onion was a simple, standard starter dish that virtually every restaurant offered, and we always wanted more of it. At the end of the meal, a very old man with a tray full of shots of Raki came by and gave us a pair on the house.
The weather had already cooled down from the first week we were in Greece, but when the sun did come out is was just warm enough to justify lying around by the pool. The hotel had a number of adorable kittens roaming the premises, and one in particular made its way from person to person around the pool, making friends and demanding snugs.
Santorini is renowned for its excellent wine, and we love drinking wine, so it seemed like we should probably go drink some. The guided tours to multiple wineries were unsurprisingly cost prohibitive, so we figured out how to make our own way using public transportation and our feet. Our first stop, Gavalas Winery, only had one other couple doing a tasting when we arrived, so we were able to extensively chat and make jokes with our candid and informative server while we did our tasting. Greeks aren't particularly fond of Germany (understandably), but whenever we told people we lived in Berlin they never showed any animosity. However, as soon as we started talking shit about German stuff, the shit talking would be heartily reciprocated, and good times were had by all.
The wines at Gavalas were surprisingly exceptional. All 8 of the varieties we tried were distinct and delicious. Kirb's favorite was the Katsano, a smooth and fruity white wine that goes down effortlessly but packs a 12.5% punch. Mazz's favorite was the Nykteri, named after the several-hundred year old act of pressing it at night to preserve energy during hot harvest days and to ensure the yeast doesn't die from the scorching daytime temperatures. Our host explained that this wine is a red wine disguised as a white, and at 14% it had earned the nickname "lady killer" in Greek bars. It was one of the most complex and satisfying wines we'd come across, and we happily plunked down €18 for a bottle of it. We lamented once again traveling only with carry-on bags, as there were several wines we would have loved to take back home with us.
A little up the road, situated right in the middle of Santorini's crescent with panoramic views of the water and cliffs, Ventesanos Winery had an ambiance few other wineries can rival. The wines here were also excellent, though the island-specific varieties of Santorini and Nykteri weren't quite as good as its predecessor. Their rosé however was exceptional; smelling likes roses and honey with a taste of fresh berries. We'd mostly been drinking cheap Retsina during the trip, as we were surprised to find that there were few if any cheap Greek wines in the supermarkets. In Berlin you can get a pretty decent bottle of wine for a mere €2.50. Sampling a few Santorini wineries showed us that though the price point may be high with Greek wine, the quality is commensurate.
The Google reviews did us wrong that night, leading us to a disappointing and expensive meal at To Pinakio, where everything we ordered was criminally under-salted and slathered in feta cheese. This greatly upset Mazz and she would continue to bring up her disappointment about this meal for the rest of the trip. She has mostly stopped complaining about it now that we are back in Berlin. The unanimous 5-star reviews of the open-air movie theater we went to after were right on the money, though. Constructed in a converted courtyard, covered in succulents and old clay pots with a full-service bar and a warm ambiance, the Kamari open-air theater was a particularly great place to see a movie. "Logan Lucky" was a pretty good movie, too.
We didn't necessarily regret having come to Santorini, but we definitely left the place with as many complaints as compliments. If the crowds were that intense in Oia and Fira in the shoulder season, we couldn't imagine how insufferable it must be in the summer. Happy to have seen it but just as happy to leave it behind, we got on a giant ferry boat for a 4-hour trip to the island of Paros, where we would quickly get on a bus to another port, board another commuter ferry, and briskly cross a channel to the tiny island of Antiparos. Here, were hoped to find some of the slow-moving, small island life that Santorini was devoid of.
We found a cute, fully-stocked, and comfortable apartment with a great outdoor patio area for half of what we had spent per night in Santorini, and our host cheerfully advised us on how best to spend our time on the tiny island. We were a five-minute walk from the eastern-facing harbor, five minutes from the town, and five minutes from the western-facing "sunset beach." Feeling like we had finally found the vibe we'd been looking for, we made our way to the beach for a spectacular sunset, then to a restaurant our host had recommended for some real Greek home cooking. Our waiter told us that his mother woke up at 4 a.m. every morning to make all of the food from scratch. We ordered slow-cooked chicken with peppers and onions in a wine sauce, grilled peppers stuffed with cheese, and moussaka, a sort of Greek lasagna made with eggplant, ground meat, and a baked béchamel top.
As we did in Athens, we saved our cheat day for a day when we didn't have to travel. After looking at what our options were to get around the island, we opted to rent bicycles so we could get some exercise while exploring. Antiparos has one main road that runs down the eastern side of the island. We stopped by a bakery in the town, and Kirb got a flaky cheese pastry and Mazz got a big, gross, chocolate-covered cream cake thing that she thought was going to be like a donut but wasn't, and it ended up in the trash before it was finished. We decided we would ride our bikes to the far end of the island and then find some place down there to get gyros, as the gyros we got in Athens were so good we'd been dreaming about them for a week.
The main sight on Antiparos is a cave, so we made our way off the main road until the hill leading there became steep enough that we had to get off our bikes and walk them. Getting up to the top took about 20-30 minutes, with a ferocious wind blowing straight into us the entire time. When we got to the top we were real sweaty and ready to get inside a cool, moist cave. We paid the entrance fee and got an informative brochure that told us this was a "vertical cave," meaning that our efforts to climb to the top of the hill resulted in immediately taking 400 steps down into its heart (and later back up). Oy, our quads. The Cave of Antiparos was used as a refuge during the Neolithic period, and was a cult place for the Goddess Artemis. Many of its stalactites and stalagmites have the names and dates of visitors from as far back as the 1600s, often graffitied with candle soot. Kirb didn't leave his name on anything but he left plenty of sweat behind lugging his ass up and down those stairs.
We tore back down the hill to the main road and cycled our way a few more miles to the town of Agrios Giorgios, which turned out to not be so much of a town as a bunch of scattered residences and a few restaurants situated on the water. There were no gyros to be found here, so we settled for some incredibly refreshing beers and tzatziki with bread.
Somehow it seemed like we were always peddling into a fierce headwind, no matter which direction we were going. The weather for that day on Antiparos was simply "Wind" on our phones. It made the going slow, and it only got slower when Kirb's legs cramped up and he could barely pedal uphill without doubling over in pain. Eventually we made it back to the town and returned the bikes, and hungrily made our way to the gyros shop we had seen the day before. It looked closed, but the door was open. Kirb peeked inside and asked the owner if they were going to be opening up again for dinner. "Yes," replied the man. "Next summer."
Unbeknownst to us, this first Monday of October was the beginning of the off-season for many businesses in Antiparos, with lots of people closing up and heading back to Athens until the following spring. We wandered the empty streets looking for gyros and found nothing, asking any locals we saw if they knew where a tired traveler could find a cheap Greek sandwich. They shrugged and apologized. Sandwich season, as impossible as it seemed, had ended that day. We went back to our patio to solemnly drink beers until whatever restaurants remained would open up again for dinner. Kirb depressedly ate a bunch of candy and took a cat nap on the outdoor day bed.
We walked to several restaurants in and around town looking for something to eat, but every place we wanted to go, all of which had been open the night before, were now closed for the season. After wandering the streets like malnourished animals for what seemed like an eternity, we spotted a light at the end of the blackness. It was a gyro shop - one we hadn't seen before - and it was open for business now that it was late enough in the evening for Greek people to want to eat dinner. For over 20 miles and 8 hours, we'd searched the island of Antiparos for gyros, and finally our search had come an end. The sandwiches were glorious. The gyros slowly returned mana to our haggard bodies and diminished our desire to destroy all life. We became whole again. Then, we went to a different place and ate a pizza.
This experience opened our eyes to a fundamental fact: we were wasting our lives not eating enough gyros. We had the rest of our miserable days on Earth to feel unfulfilled on a diet, but we only had one more day in Greece to eat cheap and delicious sandwiches. We decided that cheat day would be extended, and that our final day on Paros would be spent only eating gyros.
The first ones we got on Paros in Parakia were made with spiced lamb and were particularly good. After, we took the bus to explore the seaside town of Naousa and ordered a second round that weren't nearly as satisfying as the first, but tasty nonetheless. After walking along the waterfront and peeking inside some of the few shops that were still open, we made our way to a winery to see how the wine on Paros compared to Santorini. The Paros White at the Moraitis Winery is made with a grape varietal that went extinct everywhere in the world except the island of Paros due to the phylloxera (a type of aphid) blight that decimated wineries throughout Europe the 1800s. It was soft and smooth like pineapple juice, the kind of wine you could drink all day. Their 7-course sampling had several nice wines, priced at about half of what bottles cost on Santorini, but not quite of the same quality.
We had saved our bottle of Nykteri from Gavalas Winery for our final night, when we could drink it on our balcony for the last island sunset of our trip. Mazz maintains that it is one of her favorite bottles of wine that she has ever enjoyed.
For our final gyro adventure we made our way to the packed-out Brizoladiko Steak House, where we ordered a mixed grill for two that was so massive it prompted a Scottish couple behind us to remark how impressed they were that we could put that much meat inside of us. It was indeed impressive; we ate way too much meat. We waddled our way back to the hotel and took our pants off and had a lay down that quickly turned into a full asleep.
There's only six flights a day off of Paros. There are public busses that go to the airport. The times the busses go to the airport don't align with the times the flights leave. This can probably be taken as some sort of overarching metaphor for Greek public transit. Instead of saving some money but spending hours waiting inside a tiny airport, we paid the old guy at our hotel €20 to drive us there at an appropriate time. Though the weather was still very much "Wind," the prop plane made it easily back into Athens airport, where we had four hours to kill reading books until our flight back to Berlin.
Greece has so many options that it can be hard to make choices, and once you decide on something, it's easy to immediately feel like you made the wrong choice. We went into this trip essentially blind, picking up information as we went until things started to form a clearer picture. Because both of us are generally so disinterested in doing stereotypical tourist activities, part of us feels like we wasted a good chunk of the trip being basic bitches. But another part of us knows that you should travel the main path at least once before you decide to stray from it. Would Antiparos have seemed so idyllic if we hadn't just stood with thousands of people looking for transcendence in a Santorini sunset? Hard to say. But now that we've learned the basic ropes of traveling through the Greek Islands, it's easy to imagine coming back and plotting a completely different course. The possibilities are endless.
Side notes: One guy we came across was really surprised we hadn't seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Almost to the point of, "How could you possibly be in Greece and not have seen that movie?" We asked him if the way Greek people were portrayed in it was realistic, and he assured us it was the most realistic depiction of Greek people ever committed to film.
Did you know you can't flush toilet paper virtually anywhere in Greece? They have smaller pipes there that can't support it, and will clog if you try. Every bathroom has a garbage can with a hinged lid where you're supposed to put the dirty wads. When we got back to Berlin it felt like we were breaking the rules putting our TP in the toilet where it belongs.
There are wild dogs and cats EVERYWHERE in Greece. Before Mazz knew this she started vigorously petting a doggo she came across with both hands, only to remove them and see they were now stained brown. She just thought it was someone at the coffee shop's dog. Nope. Old people in the towns walk around with bags of cat food, sprinkling it here and there for all the street kitties. They're sort of everyone's pets in Greece. It’s equal parts cute and sad.