Our kids have become local celebrities, and get kisses blown to them everywhere we go from locals and tourists alike.
Aimee and I had a similar thought in Viet Nam, but traveling with kids probably opens more doors than it closes. We’re automatically in with the locals, and have an immediate bond with other traveling families.
Finding ourselves with the type of open afternoon we’d spend at the park in Athens, we took a Milos approach to entertaining a toddler. No metro on the island, but there is a bus that drives up and down the stunning coastline.
Mimi was enthralled, and exclaimed several times, “We’re on a bus! We’re on a bus!” If it were always this easy.
And there isn’t a zoo, but there is a world-class beach carved into the volcanic rock.
Sarakiniko Beach was too beautiful and too unique to only go once, so we spent yesterday evening soaking it up one more time.
To our surprise, we weren’t the only family there. Mimi met two year olds from Spain, France, and Israel, while Quinn received coos in at least five languages.
We head to Sifnos tomorrow to meet up with Nona, Grael, and their son (more on that later), so this is our final night on Milos. We’re really going to miss this place.
Some stray observations:
1) Mimi’s coordination hasn’t caught up yet with her desire to run on cobblestone streets. But I don’t think any of the scars will be permanent.
2) Receipts are a big deal around here. Restaurant servers really make a big show of handing you a printed receipt, and every business has a big sign in it saying that you don’t need to pay if you don’t get a receipt. Further, all of the cash registers are hooked up to some type of networked monitoring device. My guess is that all of that is tied to the national debt restructuring. Part of the Greek economic crisis stemmed from a persistent decrease in tax revenue. Politicians said that the citizens were ducking their obligations, while the citizens said that the politicians squandered what they did receive. I’m no economist, but common sense tells me that it’s probably a combination of both. Either way, everyone can agree that taxes on tourist revenue are low hanging fruit, and should definitely be collected. Even the tourists feel that way. If a few cents of every gyro purchase is needed to keep this place going, sign me up to help. I’ll even toss in an extra baklava or two. You know, for economic diplomacy and all that. Just doing my part.
3) The Venus de Milo is housed in the Louvre, after being obtained under disputed circumstances. And equally priceless pieces of the Acropolis are housed in the British Museum, while Greece’s official requests to have them returned have so far been fruitless. Greece has gone through millennia of ups and downs, and unfortunately didn’t have a particularly strong central government during the heyday of colonialism. With no one to protect the country’s artifacts, countless relics were looted or destroyed by visiting ships from all over the world. But this isn’t just a recent problem. The author of the book I keep referencing makes several wistful claims about how much more we’d know about the ancient Greeks if this library or that school wasn’t sacked by the Romans, Persians, Ottomans, Venetians, etc. But one interesting and ironic anecdote was about us actually knowing more because of a looted castle. A great deal of what we do know about the very early ancient Greeks came from a set of clay tablets that were preserved by a castle fire that occurred nearly three thousand years ago. Before kilns were invented, clay tablets were essential ancient scratch paper. So the set that was preserved gave historians one of the earliest looks into early European society.
[By the way, that link about the Acropolis pieces in the British Museum is worth clicking. It’s a characteristically bizarre story about modern Greek politics involving the far left and far right forming a coalition government, the World Court, and a famous international human rights lawyer who happens to be married to George Clooney. Nuts.]
4) The early leaders of both Ancient Greece and our own country prized individual freedom above all else while also owning slaves. I don’t know how to reconcile that.
5) Don’t worry, my beach daydreaming hasn’t just been about looted artifacts and tax revenue. I’ve also been thinking about these:
This pastry shop is about 100 yards from our hotel. We’ve gone there at least once daily since we arrived on the island. And then usually go back again once more after the kids go to bed.
This was last night’s decadence, an ice cream waffle that disappeared in about 7 seconds.
The photo is poorly exposed because we were eating it in the dark. We snuck out to the alleyway behind our hotel room, and ate it there because we didn’t want to wake up Mimi. Not so much because we didn’t want her to have any, but more because we didn’t want to split it three ways. We’re not proud. But we’re not really ashamed, either.
We’ll miss you, Milos.
