To the Islands, Part I

The entire time that I have been in Greece, which is now almost two months, people have been telling that I have to go to the islands. Other than one of the Mediterranean's largest islands (Crete), Greece also has two large groups of islands: the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. Now I was planning on going to the islands, but I thought that it wouldn't be very fun to go by myself. Luckily another graduate student from Princeton, Jason, happened to also be staying in Athens after his summer program at the American school ended. So a few days beforehand we got together and bought ferry tickets to Naxos, the largest and most fertile island of the Cyclades.
Unfortunately we were not able to get tickets on the same ferry, so I left a day before Jason. The outbound ferry was large and very well-furnished, in addition to being cheap (22 Euro). The ferry left at sunset so I wasn't able to see very much of the sea and coast, but it was a great trip nonetheless. I spent the entire time in the onboard cafe reading. This summer I have read more fiction than any time since high school; I'm going to have leave a lot of books behind when I head home. In all I've bought about 15 books since I left the States, but I can't ship them back or take them on the flight home because of weight limits.
Actually, this leads me to an irresistible tangent about shipping anything from Greece. Last week my friend Jason and I went to the various post offices and shipping services in Athens so that we could ship back some of our books. First of all, we thought that the national post office would have cheap bulk rates. So I lugged my 7.5 kg box of books to the Hellenic Postal Service (ELTA) and asked for rates. The unbelievably rude clerk told us that it would cost 65 Euro, and that they didn't have bulk. So we went next to DHL. After spending two hours playing phone tag with every other DHL office in Greece, we learned that they also had never heard of bulk shipping for private items. This was an amazing instance of incompetence, because DHL's website has an entire section devoted to the subject, but no one would admit they didn't know how to do it. So for my roughly 15 lbs. of books the price would have been 270 Euro, but the DHL lady felt bad for us at the end of this game of phone tag and said she would only charge us 160 Euro. What a joke. Same thing with FedEx. This whole episode made me miss the United States. Say what you want about my country, but if you want something done quickly and cheaply, you just can't beat America. This whole damn episode would have taken about 10 minutes and it would have cost 20 bucks, and instead we had to walk around Athens for four hours without reaching our goal. Trying to get my books sent back made my earlier dealings with the Turkish bureaucracy in order to get my research visa (which I did get!) seem simple by comparison. So I'm just going to leave some books behind and hope that my luggage doesn't go over the weight limit.
Ah, so back to the ferry. We reached Naxos after a six-hour trip, and I went to the hostel I was staying at, the Hotel Soula. I shared a room with five other people, all of them vacationing on the island: one Australian, a Brit, two Canadians, and a Belgian. Now, this leads me to my next detailed excursus. The Greek islands are a major vacation/partying area for the youth of the EU and the British commonwealth. Germans and Italians probably constitute the largest group of regular vacationers, but the college crowd is mostly British, Canadian, and Australian, which I thought was somewhat strange. Actually, during my four days on the island, Jason and I never say or met another American. The islands are analogous to Cancun and Baja for the American college-spring break crowd. So in addition to the abundance of archaeological ruins there are a lot of night clubs and bars. This partying crowd also gives the islands a lot of bad press. My roommates were fine, and I enjoyed one night in particular which we spent talking about our various travel experiences, but my friend Jason, who was staying in another room at the hostel, had a bad episode where his roommates, this time one Australian and two Canadians, started trashing his room after a night of drunken carousing. My travels in the islands have led me to reconsider my views on binge drinking; in the past, I regarded binge drinking as a mainly American phenomenon, brought about my unreasonable restrictions on alcohol consumption (keep in mind that I grew up in Nevada, where one might say we are a little more lax about regulating morality). I now think that binge drinking is a integral part of the English-speaking world. I don't know why this is, but getting ridiculously drunk does not seem to be a part of Continental European culture. The only obviously drunk people I have seen in Athens are British and American college kids, with one exception: I did once walk by a belligerent drunk sitting at a restaurant table near the Acropolis who flipped over the table and started shouting in Greek at the other diners and passers-by such as myself. Well, I have things to do, but I will finish this story soon!