This morning we woke up after noon, having got onboard with the island rhythm, and around 2:00pm headed out to Paradise Beach. David made it up the hill in the minivan with a little backslide but no stall, well done. We secured loungers and palapas and went to the beachside restaurant for a bite to eat. Our waiter, named George (86% of the men on the island are named George), greatly resembled Keith Richards circa 1980. George, who introduced himself as “Dzorge”, apologized for being very hung over from a night of partying and scooched my mother over and sat down next to her on the bench to rest, “I cannot thstand, tzorry.” To take our food order, he asked that we give him no more than 1 item at a time so he could write each item down before he forgot what it was and only then were we to speak again. George was diligent, albeit still quite far above the recommended blood alcohol level for the operating a pad and pen. As he struggled to write down our order, a young nubile teeny bikini clad Corona-girl at the Corona booth caught his eye. He rose with great difficulty from his seat and approached her, speaking some Greek to her and laughing from behind his dark sunglasses. She shunned him politely and with lighting speed. Corona girl had her standards. He returned slowly shaking his curly black locks from side to side in disbelief, “The young tzenerazon is noh roman-tique, iz a tzame.”
We later learned that the woman working in the bikini shop was the mother of his 13 year old son and no doubt the beach boutiques are littered with women whose children can make similar claims. George, ever the health nut in his inebriated state, refused to let Justin order a burger and fries, “Iz no hchealthy(hchealthy is to be read NOT with a ch-sound but rather with first syllable sounding like a throat clearing action), order tzomethin Gereek.” George made sure to tell Dave to come back around 5pm when the real partying begins and George is the DJ. “I am fah-moose, you come and tzee.” Chloe was quick to pull David aside and beg him not to return and “tzee” anything.
A side note on Chloe, she is now down to a dozen Frenchie references a day which is substantial progress. She also has become a regular reader of this blog and has informed me that my last installment was sub-par and that perhaps if I added a few more Frenchie anecdotes the quality might be much improved.
That evening more windmill sunsets and shopping. Justin got a fabulous haircut, at a local salon where the owner insisted upon knowing whether “tzee fathah eez Gereek?”. I shook my head, no. She pressed on insisting, “Neh, eez Gereek.” Again I shook my head. She refused to believe me and grabbed the abundance of Justin’s dark brown hair, causing him to wince ever so slightly, and gestured to me as if to say, don't lie to me woman this head of hair can only be Greek. Then she smiled at me knowingly, a lightbulb seemed to go off in her well-teased head, she nodded at me actively and motioning knowingly with her head toward Justin said, “Ah I tzee.” I must be keeping Justin’s true paternity from him. She would drop the subject out of deference for the boy. She must know Dzorge I thought, and I must not be the first fair, blond woman to bring her illegitimate son in for a haircut. Oh Dzorge, you heartbreaker.
I then went on to do some rather successful jewelry shopping with Chloe and some less successful beach cover-up shopping where Chloe put her foot down and said, “I stood by you with the jewelry Mom, but I will not stand by you with these ugly cover-ups.” I didn’t know it was so serious a matter, but fair is fair and we left cover-up less.
Well into the “nothing gets started until 5pm” rhythm of the island, the next day we headed out around 3pm for Super Paradise beach. It is meant to be even better than Paradise but we were not sure how nor why. Once we settled into our loungers and palapas it became clear that the “better” was due to the presence of naked sunbathers. You can just imagine Justin and Livvy’s giggles and stares. The naked women were thin and fit and quite attractive with their deep tans and soft skin. I found the pencil-thin bikini waxed landing strip of hair adorning several of them to be amusing. It sort of called out and said, I may be nude but I won’t take it all off.
The men however did not wax nor apparently work out or avoid fatty foods, and this I feel is most unfortunate. I tried my best to avoid glancing in their direction but like a car wreck, it is difficult not to stare at ugly fat nude men on a beach as you pass by. I think that unless a strict maximum body fat ratio be enforced to nude sunbathers immediately, then the beach should be renamed Less-than Super Paradise and a warning issued to all tourists. Justin was rather concerned about the potential of the naked people getting sunburn but soon got over it as I assured him I had seen them applying sunscreen absolutely everywhere. He thanked me for not even going topless.
That evening David and I hung out at Nobu at the Belvedere hotel sipping Lychee Martinis, while the kids went to town with my mother.
The next morning we booked airfare to Santorini as it was too windy for the high speed ferry to sail and packed up our bags. Justin left an entire laundry bag full of the miniature bath products he’d collected over the 6 night stay in the room for the maid, as now the bath product collecting game for anything other than Occitane or Molton Brown was purely for sport. I left an extra large tip for the chamber maids, my feeble attempt at an apology.
We hopped aboard our teeny tiny prop-plane and were treated to the lone and I daresay superfluous flight attendant’s Greek and English safety instructions. The plane was so small that the buxom attendant had to literally elbow her way to the front of the aircraft and then wedge herself between Justin and a passenger on the other side of the aisle in order to show us the proper way to inflate our life vests in the unlikely event of a crash. The attendant then elbowed her way to the rear of the plane and back up to the front again with a small wicker basket of individually wrapped mints (which was the in-flight food service). She pulled aside the curtain to the cockpit and placed the basket on the floor directly beneath the co-pilot’s left arm. She then moved his arm on top of the basket to hold it steady and that is where the candy and the arm remained for take-off and landing, in full accordance with FAA procedures I am sure.
Once up in the air the passenger opposite the aisle from Justin began to fluff her airsick bag and dry heave. Barfing girl, as I dubbed her, thankfully did not have any food in her stomach, but was clearly upset by the turbulence. Justin was threatening to throw up from her wretching, and so I spent the entire 20 minute flight distracting Justin as best I could hunting for dolphins in the blue sea beneath us. I did manage to snap a pic of barfing girl as well as an incensed Justin but have been forbidden from posting those.
We landed safely and made it to our hotel in Fira where Justin took his first unprompted shower of the entire holiday.
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