Greece summary

Top 10:
1 Non Greek meal
2 Pregnant or recently pregnant one eyed cats
3 Rainy days
4 Kittens
5 Times we psychically wanted to order the same thing.
6 Orders or aubergine imam.
7 Times we peed on ourselves. (Much more common when you squat everywhere.)
8 Orders of bad wine. White, red. It doesn't matter.
9 Alcoholic beverages on the night before my birthday- each.
10 Comments about how clear the water was.

For your entertainment I broke down Nicole's and my budget. However it does not include personal purchases such as clothes and whatnot. We spent accordingly:
7% Coffee and liquor
22% Hotel and hostel
27% Transport (not including airfare)
43% Food
Thank you all for reading about Greece! Gritseis! (I wish you all health.)

Sifnos- By Nicole

After a short ferry ride, we got off the boat in Sifnos in the port town of Kamares. Ok, town might be an exaggeration. The entire island has a population of only 2,500 so Kamares' collection of whitewashed houses, apartments and hotels straggling up the hill from the port and curving around the shallow, clear beach is actually best described as a village. Our hotel room was the biggest yet, with high ceilings, a small kitchen and a balcony overlooking the bay. We got situated and then set out to do what we do best – eat. We got and ice cream and walked around, checking out our dinner options. We later ate our most disappointing meal of the trip next to a loud table of 20 Germans. After all the Greek food we had been eating, not one dish was better than mediocre and the wine was hardly drinkable. We decided to call it an early night.
The next morning we finally ate rich and creamy Greek yogurt in a form other than Tzatziki, enjoying it with roasted almonds, Thyme honey and apples (Sara) or bananas (Nicole) on our balcony. Our plan for the day: explore the island and find a restaurant worthy of celebrating Sara's birthday the next day (we didn't want a repeat of the previous night's disappointing dinner).
We drove to the capital of the island, Apollonia (which I then spent the rest of the trip confusing with Pollonia on Milos) and decided to head directly to Kastro, an old walled village nearby with nice views and a well-known jewelry maker. There were a few adorable cafés at the entrance to the village, but we walked on and quickly became slightly disoriented in the empty, serpentine pedestrian streets. Like Venice, only with out water and people, we walked in circles, not really sure what we were looking for, but not finding anything anyway. The few natives in the village were painting and renovating and the only others out and about were a group of German tourists in sturdy hiking boots. It felt like a ghost town. We did stumble upon the jewelry maker who was busy renovating, painting and unpacking in preparation for the tourist season – he told us he would be ready to open in four days, but we could still come in and look at his wares. He made beautiful things and I believe him when he told us that his prices for gold jewelry were so much better than the competition and for 18k and his quality, etc., but that unfortunately didn't change the fact that
neither Sara nor I were in the market for rings over 500 Euros (+40% = USD). We headed back down to the cafés for our daily iced coffee.
Our next stop was Vathy, a small resort town (village) to check out the chi-chi hotel and restaurant, but decided that, while the food was probably good, it felt too lifeless. As there was nothing else to see there aside from a few German and French tourists rocking the European Speedo look on the small beach, we headed on to start looking for lunch. We ended up back in Apollonia to find everything closed and the only lunch option was "toast" (grilled-cheese sandwich of sorts) or cheese pie at a café or the one taverna that was open. Tired, annoyed and hungry, we went for the taverna and ate food that was just ok with service that was less than enthusiastic. Although the island hardly has any roads to choose between, we managed to get turned around on the way back down to Kamares. Sara then sat down to update the blog and I went for a walk, determined to check out all of Kamares' restaurants to find the ONE for the next evening. Walking around the bay, it was painfully obvious that we were a month "too" early – all the vacation rentals were still borded up, the shelves of mini-market promising organic and gluten-free products were bare and the beach
bars empty. It was a nice walk and I found a place to eat later – Delphini. That evening we dined on stuffed eggplant, slightly fishy swordfish and freshly made spinach pie. As an alternative to ouzo, raki found its way to our table again as our digestive after than meal. We then met up with some of the locals for a few drinks at the Old Captain, a beach bar across from our hotel where we rung in Sara's 30th (oh wait, I mean 25th) birthday with vodka tonic, lemon drops, blow jobs and something else......before moving the party up to our balcony to toast with our own concoction of Sparkling Christmas Raki (the cinnamon-honey raki we found on Crete plus Martini Spumanti sparkling wine) – much to the displeasure of our Swiss neighbors who asked us to move the party inside as they were sleeping with the balcony door open. Ooops.
The next day we took things slow, enjoying an iced coffee in the shade of some juniper trees on the beach of the little fishing village Faros while talking about what 30 meant to both of us and our hopes and dreams for this next year. We spent the hot afternoon curled up with our books (as Sara had a migraine headache) and then had a low-key yet tasty Italian dinner of Strozzopreti in a slightly spicy tomato sauce with Italian sausage and Peccorino Romano – our first non-Greek food in nearly 2 weeks.
We awakened the next morning to torrential rain – the Greek islands must have been sad to see us go! We packed up, dashed across the street through the rain to have breakfast at a covered café and then the sun came back out for our ferry trip back to Athens. We returned to a hot Athens just in time to dash into the Poet Sandalmaker's workshop to pick up another pair of the sandals which had served us so well over the last 14 days (I still have the tan lines on my feet!) before heading to our old room at the hotel in Plaka. We had dinner at the Taverna with the yummy okra and chicken and then returned to the hostel to lie awake in the dark listening to younger folk playing drinking games in the hotel courtyard below.

Our last morning in Greece included Gyros for breakfast, two of the worst (sweetest) coffees of our trip and a mad dash for last minute purchases before heading to the airport to fly back to Frankfurt (via Paris). We almost got stuck in Athens when the flight computer crashed, but after over 1.5 hour delay, they got us up and running just in time to barely miss our connecting flight in Paris. Air France put us on the last flight to Frankfurt and we finally arrived at my apartment without losing any luggage at 1030pm, tired, hungry, and missing the islands a little bit, but happy not to be on the road any longer.

Milos 2- By Nicole

Our second day in Milos started with going to rent a car so that we could explore the island. When we returned to Ioanna Pension, our host greeted us with "Potatoes! I give you potatoes!" We followed him to his field and he dug out a bunch of beautiful golden potatoes directly from the earth. He then proceeded to give us freshly picked lemons and fresh eggs from the chickens we could here clucking behind out room. We asked him how many cats he had – 25 – and then he announced: "I show you NEW cats!" and marched around a shed to proudly present 3 very cute little kittens guarded by their wary, one eyed momma. ("I show you new cats" became our phrase of choice for the rest of the trip!)
After oooh-ing and aaaah-ing over the kittens, we took off to explore the island. On the map, the island's roads are color-coded red (paved), yellow (not paved, bad condition – not allowed by our car rental company) and black (walking paths) so we headed toward Pollonia (red roads) to see what we might find along the way. After a few tries, we found one of the archeological sites marked on the map (Filakopi). What we also found there was an amazing little inlet carved into the soft sandstone cliffs – a sheltered little beach roped off in an attempt to discourage the curious from
climbing down to soft stone to the sand to peer out through the archway of rock separating the beach from open seas. Well, no one was there, so we climbed on down and took a look around! Very cool! All sorts of things carved into the sandstone walls and the water lapping gently at the beach.
After climbing back out before we were discovered, we checked out the archeological site – what to the uninformed looks to be carefully stacked rock walls among the undergrowth turned out to be the remains of a bronze-age Minoan town where some interesting pottery, statues and tablets had been found over the years. Not much the wiser, we returned to the car and decided to make crowns out of the local wild flowers: status. We picked our bunches and set off in the car in search of a suitable location to make our crowns. We found a little inlet half encircled by about 8 deserted summer cottages with a tiny fishing boat floating in the middle. It didn't look real – everything was so small and quaint it felt as if you had stepped into a fairy world. Perfect place to make our flower crowns!
We returned to civilization (Pollonia) crowned in our wreaths to find a place to eat lunch. We turned a lot of heads with our flower crowns, two of which belonged to the taverna owners where we decided to have lunch amid exclamations of "Brava!" and questions as to where we had out lovely wreaths. To the delight of the taverna owner, Sara wrote down our order in Greek and then we dined on some of the best Eggplant Imam, yummy fried baby calamari (I got to eat the tentacles because they were too icky for Sara), fresh Greek salad and decent white wine. This day was not even over and it was already my favorite day of this trip! What more can you want than beautiful sunshine, magical flower crowns, fun discoveries, lots of laughing with Sara (I show you new cats!) and really good food? I don't know – maybe what we did the rest of the day: got a little bit lost on the possibly not allowed yellow (unpaved) roads, picked wild sage and thyme while wondering what that buzzing noise was (we were really close to a rather large collection of little blue beehive boxes – one of the sources of the very delicious wild flower and thyme honey we had during our stay) and deciding to enjoy another delectable meal at the same taverna for dinner that night :-)
Our last morning on Milos, we made a wonderful breakfast of our hosts' edible gifts seasoned with fresh thyme from the hillside. We then relaxed for a bit after taking the car back (Sara schmoozed with the kittens and I took pictures of the room and ground so that I can rate this great place on Tripadvisor!) and then our host brought us to the ferry – next stop Sifnos!