Berubes in Greece

  Take two! (I finished this entire post already.  Then the app crashed as I tried to save it.) Anyway, remember how I told you that we were going to spend the day just chilling?  Jes and I had been moving pretty hard the last few days and we were both getting pretty close to exhaustion.  Well if.you know me at all you probably knew that wasn't going to happen.  My ADD and FOMO kicked in and by bedtime last night I was already planning today's itinerary.  We both woke up before the alarm and after a quick shower I started unveiling the day's plan to Jes. That's when I noticed his look of simple morning hunger transition to dispair as he walked down the stairs uttering this entry's title words "Wow, you really suck at chilling!".  Ok fine. I get it!  I reassured him that I was completely fine going off on my own, as long as he was good to just chill on his own.  I told him I'm the same when travelling with his mom, where we often have at least...

Travel day today and we're both starting to feel a bit exhausted.  We've been pushing hard to fit as much as we can in the short time we have and it's finally caught up with us.  Luckily, Santorini is that type of place where we can just unwind for the next couple of days until it's time to come home.  We started off with a weird message from our Vrbo host in Santorini asking if we'd received an itinerary change notice from SeaJets, the company owning the ship that would take us from Hiraklion to Thira at 45 it's?  Of course, I've had my phone in airplane mode all week and just using a global wifi hub I brought with me for communication.  So I got a bit worried, but turns out the company had simply move us from the NAXOS ship to the EliteJet with the same times.  Crisis averted.  Or non existent really. We arrived at the port via a brand new Mercedez-Benz... Taxi?!? What's with that Europe? A Mercedez where I'm from is not what you buy to...

Maybe it's the getting older.  Maybe it's moving out to the country.  But I think I've had my quota of people for a while.  You know when you get annoyed at people for just being people?  They're not doing anything wrong.  Well, they are.  They just don't know it. They're just being people.  But they annoy you anyway?  So, ya that's me now. Like today... Today started out great.  Another year gone.  I'm retired, and in Greece with my son.  I literally have nothing to bitch about anymore.... Except maybe people. Today I hired a driver to drive us around in a black van to a few sites that were not within walking distance, and I surely was NOT going to attempt renting a car and driving amongst the Greek.  I seriously had been thinking that the inevitability of witnessing a deadly car crash was just around the corner.  I seriously don't understand how more Greeks don't die in car accidents, or of road-rage induced murder....

As I sat at the airport waiting for our transportation for the second leg of our trip, and the subsequent baggage claim chaos in Crete, I couldn't help but be reminded of everything we take for granted...primarily, social customs and manners.  I kept having to remind myself that people weren't deliberately being rude and inconsiderate, and that it was perhaps just a nature of the contrast between our cultures.  This has nothing to do with the Greek specifically, as what I'm referring to right now is what I observed at the airport, where a melting pot of cultures are all trying to assert themselves as victors in the battle for airport waiting area supremacy.  However, as a stereotypically polite Canadian, the tongue biting is starting to cause real damage to the inside of my mouth.  There are definitely some social conventions that we've grown to take for granted.  Lineups don't seem to matter.  Personal space is non-existant, and if I have to push you aside...