An abrupt departure from Santorini

So our first meeting with our Gate One tour did not start off well. Rachel and I packed our stuff the night before and knew we had to meet our group at about 10:40 in the lobby. So we had our breakfast and then went to our office to check our mail. Once Rachel finished checking hers, I logged in for a second, then Rachel came running in saying, "the bus is here, we gotta go, they are waiting for us!!" What? can someone give us some warning?? anyone? So we hightail it to our room, lug our suitcases down our flight of stairs and haul ass to the lobby. We had to rush our goodbyes to our breakfast friend Kostos. He looked bewildered, but then he kind of always looked like that. I think it was because we only spoke English, and his English was very limited to a few key words and phrases. Mainly: "good sleep?" "hello" and my personal favorite, we discovered that he liked to call an end to the breakfast service by playing that Yanni Cash song. So on one of our last days, he comes over to us and he's all, "this is very good. good song" and so we were like, "yeah, we know. What is it called?" he then started saying something that sounded like "blah blah blah, turkish franco, do you know?" Sadly, neither of us had any clue what he was talking about and so that put our quest to find out the real name of Yanni Cash to a bitter end.

Another favorite Greek friend from the Hermes was Nikos--he could only really say, "Hi", "hi guys", and "beer?"

Our last two friends from the Hermes was the lady that worked in the morning, (I think her name was like Irakli or something like that) and then our friend Vassilias, who we liked to call V. His grasp of English was really good, so we had a long chat with him about politics of all things. He was very up on the US presidential race...moreso than either me or rachel.

Anyway, that concluded a stay at the Hermes which started off sketchy, but ended up to be quite pleasant.

On to the tour...so we get to the lobby and this woman is waiting there, her name was Sandi, and she was a booch. She was all irritated and saying the bus is waiting, please hurry. well hoochie, maybe you should have tried to let us know that you were picking us up. Thanks for nothing ho bag. Then on the bus ride to the ferry, we find out that that she's not going to be on the boat with us. Because "she is afraid of boats" then she shows us where the ship the Sea Diamond sank earlier this year. Lady, seriously? Not the way to win any awards for making sure your tour clients are kept at ease. they drop us off at the port to basically fend for ourselves, and then it turns out that Rachel and I arent even sitting together. The ferry terminal was a hot hot mess. It was just heinous. There were people everywhere and there was no order--pure chaos. So finally when we need to get on to the boat, I didnt feel so bad about Big Red (my gigantic suitcase) because there were a ton of people that had like 2 rolling luggage AND a carry-on bag. These were peeps from our tour--we added a week, but the tour is only 11 days. Even I don't pack that heavy for an eleven day trip. Luckily there was no one in the seat next to Rachel so I talked the guy into letting me sit there. I befriended the guy in the seat next to me (his name is Chad--he's part of the lovely family we keep meeting up with in Athens...our only friends we made from our godforsaken tour group) Anyway, the ferry ride which was supposed to be only 2.5 hours turned out to be 3.5 hours of rocky sea voyage. The boat we were on was called the Flying Cat, and seriously that thing was hauling ass in the water. Rachel and I were both on Greek dramamine (it's called epostep or something like that) so we didnt get sick, but it could have easily turned for the worst. When we finally got to Mykonos, we got into a mini van and were taken to our next hotel. The hotel was.....um....well i guess it was kinda nice. However the hotel was converted from an old mansion, and so it was random because you had to use the key to lock the door from the inside. But it was all ghetto because as with most of the hotels we've encountered in Europe, you need to leave the key in this slot in order for the power to work, so this hotel had a contraption that you have a plastic part to insert into the power switch, and then the key was on a key ring, so if you went out at night you had to detatch the key from the plastic card to unlock the door. SUPER GHETTO. Anyway, the room itself was fine, at least it had a full tub and a shower head. However not a full shower door. Well beggars can't be choosers I suppose. Since most of the day was shot being on the ferry we rested in the room for a bit and then walked down the hill to go into "town" the town was about 3 blocks from the hotel down this hill that had lots of speeding traffic, but not a lot of sidewalk to walk on, so it was sort of renegade walking to get down the hill. We got to the bottom of the hill and walked the town of Chora in like 10 minutes. Everything once again looked the same. I think that Mykonos and me just weren't meant to be good friends. We stopped at a gyros place and had an alright gyro and then took the trek back up to the hotel. Party girls being super hardcore on a friday night alright. We ended up buying beer from the mini market and just sitting around with it in the courtyard. yep. ghetto. But at least we had eachother. It was fine, I didn't really want to walk that hill in the dark, pay 14 euro a drink at a random bar getting suffocated by eurotrash (music and peeps) so a Mythos in the courtyard was just fine by me.