And Now For Something Completely Different: The Pink Palace, Part 2 of 2

After sleeping all day we hit the six-hour-long happy-hour, then went to dinner. The dining complex is a huge, windowless, pink, disco-ball hangin', sixty-foot bar totin', dance-floor cafeteria. Upon taking a seat, one of the guys at our table said, "Are you Canadian, too?" We shocked everyone by informing them that no, in fact, we were not. Despite our outsider status, the people we sat with were friendly, and the food was great, beginning with a re-hydrating, salty soup, a Greek salad, and a deliciously spiced meat sauce over pasta. With beers costing 1.50 euro, it's a great deal. Next, we headed for the bar and chatted with some of the Canadians from our bus, one of whom, when he wasn't unsuccessfully hitting on short-skirted women, kept telling us that it's better to be single at the Pink Palace, and another of whom, upon learning where we'd traveled from, said, "San Francisco…yeah…aren't there a lot of fags there?" Which kind of killed the mood. We finally escaped to our room and found a party raging next door. Drinking heavily was the blonde who'd informed us that alcohol wasn't allowed inside the rooms. I swung across the balconies a few times looking down three stories, then two hundred sloping feet onto the moonlit shoreline.

The next day we rented kayaks and, rather than join the kayak-safari trip, opted to do our own thing. We'd heard from others that the quad-safari was too slow. The kayaks, described as sea-kayaks, had open cockpits and were very bulky, but they did the trick. We explored up the coast and out to a huge pinnacle of rock sticking out of the waves a hundred feet off shore. Looking up it towered straight to the sun with sea-birds nesting and cackling above. The sheer immensity of it was awesome. We almost unloaded, then noticed the thousands of sea-urchins with two inch needles sticking out. The waves of the Mediterranean grew a bit big around the next peninsula so we stopped on a beach that could only be reached by water. Later we found a sea-cave and paddled inside and found streaks of light coming from two-hundred feet above us. We were underneath a massive cliff, alone, with nothing but the sound of waves rolling in and gently breaking farther inside the cave's recesses.

That night, the party in the room next to ours was raging again. We met a chill couple and enjoyed too many sugar-filled drinks (decidedly, the bartenders were trying to kill us via glucose). There was an orgy taking place a few doors down that included a very unsure stray dog; when it managed to escape we gave it refuge on our balcony, wary of any strange fluids. The day before, The Pink Palace's cleaning ladies had brutally beaten the dog with brooms – cruelty to animals is not uncommon in Greece – until a couple of lodgers saved it.

It crossed my mind, that in many ways the dog's life mirrored the experience of the travelers passing through The Palace: caught in something unpredictable, uncertain of where the next hour will take you, never mind the next day; hedonism takes you in, pulls you along until your hangover, like a broom-wielding cleaning lady, pounds you over the head.

We stayed one final day, working hard to avoid machismo and left on the morning of the weekly toga-party. I don't think we missed anything we hadn't seen before.

Some suggestions:

* Check out the town! It's like five minutes away and has tons of food and drink at cheap-ass prices.
* Note that yr fifth night is free and plan ahead.
* Be wary of the end of happy-hour, yr care-free buzz-bill might surprise you.
* Concerning guided vs. unguided trips around the island, we had a great time on our own but later heard that the kayak safari went cliff jumping and hiked up to an abandoned Buddhist monestary, which sounded kinda fun. It's yr call.
* Do not rely on The Pink Palace staff for information concerning ferries and make sure they check to see whether anyone else is leaving when you are, thereby avoiding a 25 euro cab ride with a very unfriendly local.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

The man from Langenau writes a letter, deep in thought. Slowly, he paints with large, earnest, erect letters:
“My good mother,
be full of pride: I bear the flag,
do not hold sorrow: I bear the flag,
hold love for me: I bear the flag--”

Then he puts the letter inside his wool coat, in the secret place, next to the rose petal. And he thinks: before long it will take on the fragrance. And he thinks: maybe, in some time, another will find it…. And he thinks: …; therefore the enemy is near.