Interesting I was reading a book and one of the characters was explaining her day in Greece in the late 1960’s. Get up have breakfast and walk to one end of the village to get bread for breakfast and lunch. Read. Have a nap and walk to the other end of the village for wine and then out to the only restaurant in the village for dinner. This is an accurate portrayal of life of a tourist in a small Greek village. It is like that in Ios except we had swimming added to the mix. As that hippie said a couple of years ago on the boat in Greece you live in the moment. Life slows down. Eat, sleep and swim. Not complicated but very complicated with a totally different rhythm. I have a feeling this idyllic life is not going to be the case in Bulgaria. Today we were up at 11:30. Wild Bill has left thank goodness. We had an early lunch of a mess of scrambled eggs and hunks of fresh baked bread with that great Ios honey. We played checkers until three when the furnace like conditions were less oppressive. We walked down to the village below at 3 and plopped down in the sand beside a couple from Vancouver. The girl went to school with my cousin Jane! Small world. I played Frisbee in the water with her husband. On the way home we saw a kid taking some buns into a bakery so we bought a couple and they were just baked and delicious. We went to our favourite restaurant by the windmill and had dinner with the Vancouverites. We had an ice cream at a local cafe and watched some amateur talent festival on television. Simplicity or just an entirely different way of life?
16July1973: Ios, Greece: On the Verge of a Tourist Explosion
These hippies may be scorned by Mr. and Mrs. Straightlaced but what they have done is launched a beachhead like on Guadalcanal except they are not US marines but kids looking for a slice of undiscovered heaven. They abound in big numbers here and mark my word tourism is going to explode on this island and when that happens the hippies will discover a bit of paradise elsewhere. Like there were 75 people this morning waiting at the bank. Rooms are scarce and you have to wait to get a table at a restaurant. After the bank I bought some breakfast including a carpussi (watermelon). Greek watermelons are the best in the world. They are sweet and juicy and often we put it in the ocean to chill it down and eat the whole melon on the beach. Sometimes we put a couple bottles of beer in a mesh bag to cool them down. How long before they build a Sheraton Hotel here?
A Bird's Eye View of Fashion, Food, Travel, Culture, Beverage and Curiosity 