amazing race

 I’m in a weird place right now, mentally.  I remember how excited (and really, really worried and nervous) we were to come to India.  And now, with a month left (less!) in India, which will most likely be my last time ever in this country (INDIA=I’ll Never Do It Again), I’m torn between enjoying our last days here and just waiting for it to all be over, finally. 

Last Friday was a particularly dreadful day.  It was SO unbearably hot, I hid in my darkened classroom, counting and calculating the days and hours left before June 11th.  Once we got home from school, things were worse.  The electricity was off, there were ants everywhere and I was done, just done.   And then I thought what the hell? What’s wrong with me?  People plan and save for years for a trip to India, and here we are wasting it!  So we hopped in the car and headed down to Pondicherry for some Indian enjoyment.   Good shopping, good food and pink sunsets behind palm trees were just enough to make me love this place again.  And should sustain me in a blissful India haze for at least another week.  We’ll see. 

Last night was a test, though.   The night before, I was lying in bed and noticed that there was an unusual amount of ants crawling on me.  One or two ants at any given time on your arm, leg, or in your ear, is normal in our house.  But the other night I looked at my arm and saw five of them.  I followed their trail to underneath my pillow, which I lifted and found, to my horror, hundreds of ants, right there in the bed.  I started flailing wildly, crushing ants and roaring.  Brad came in and helped, but there were just too many, and they just kept coming.  That night, we slept in the other bed. 

So, yesterday the school came to spray, and it smelled toxic and horrible, but what was worse was to see the hundreds of dead bugs piled all over the house.  Ants, cockroaches, baby cockroaches, horrible, horrible, horrible. 

Anyway, I’ve said all this to say that in the battle between enjoying our time left and yearning for home, I’m still right in the middle.  Torn.  Torn like a cockroach corpse, dissected by ants, taken apart piece by piece, and marched off, back to the nest.

That’s enough of that, let’s go back to Greece.  

At our wedding my dad gave a super great toast, and said, among other nice things that our lives are like an episode of The Amazing Race, and in fact our trip to Rhodes was much like that: full or roadblocks and untimely messages, helpful locals and gloriously, a final pit stop.

To begin with there was the issue of the locked luggage, the first of our roadblocks.  As you know, we conquered that one, but not without enormous effort and stress.  The ferry ride was uneventful, windy, but nice.  We stopped to let people off at another island that looked really small and cute, but we had our mission: Rhodes.

While in Kos we booked an apartment using VRBO, a vacation-rental site we’ve used with great success many times.  In Kos, though, we only had intermittent internet service (there wasn’t any internet at the crazy people’s house).  With VRBO the owner sends directions and contacts after booking is complete, but we had no easy way of checking our email to find those directions, so we figured, well, let’s just head to Rhodes and see if anyone is waiting for us at the ferry.

There wasn’t. 

No problem, we thought, we’ll find internet here.  We easily found the town-center (an obscene tourist trap), but full of friendly waiters who wanted us to come in!  Sit down! Have a drink, please!  We asked around and found a place with internet, up a steep flight of stairs and on a tiny balcony.  There we logged in and saw this message:

Hello,


OK, please call +22410 xxxx talk to Galatia,


take a taxi to Napoli in Ixia tel. 22410 xxxx


email or call me at 001340 718 xxxx


best


Hera

What the hell kind of message is that?  Anyway, we chose the second option.  Taxi to Napoli in Ixia, wherever that was.  The friendly waiter was a little helpful, but not so much.  We asked, “Do you know Ixia?”

“Ixia! Yes! That is near my house!”

The taxi driver was more helpful, took us right to Ixia, a town! and to the door of Napoli, a restaurant!  We were on track.

We pulled our suitcases through the door, then stood at the entrance wondering what would be next.  A small, round man greeted us, asked how he could help.

“We rented an apartment online.  We were told to come here?”

“Yes! Yes!”  he cried, throwing up his arms and ushering us in.  “I am Nicholas!  I am the one you’re looking for!”

And so, we made it. 

After all that we were rewarded because Napoli turned out to be a pizza restaurant, a pretty good one.

One pizza later, we were taken to our apartment, a tiny one-room place that was our home for four days.  Four days of swimming, walking, eating, drinking, just generally getting fat and lazy.

I'm tired of all this writing.  Here are some pictures:

Lindos beach

I went swimming even though it was so, so cold.  I just couldn't resist this water!

One day we went wine tasting

After eating this meal, we were sure we would have heart attacks.  

Next, back to Istanbul, via Athens.  And probably some more whining about the heat.