7 shots = a T-shirt, a Reunion - Ios, Greece - Days 175-177
I left my new family (or old family, since I'm still convinced Michela's mum, Carla, is actually just my mum in disguise) and headed to Athens, armed with cash, to face this debt crisis head on. Or go to beautiful islands and spend my life swimming and eating. Whatever. I arrived in Athens at midnight and caught a taxi that cost more than my flight (damn Europe) to my hostel for the night, where I had not one, but two beautiful faces waiting for me. Emilia, that bubble of love, was old news by this point, though as amazing as always. But it was Taous, friend for almost 10 years that I'd spent every day of Australian summer with that I was most excited about. So many hugs, jumping, and tired excitement was had in that small dorm room. We had months to catch up on and a boat to catch at 7am, so after being told to shh we put our catch up on hold and waited until our arrival in IOS to catch up on all things camp, travel and life related. What did we know about Ios when we decided to go there? Not much. It was meant to be a small, nice island, with a solid night life. This is a pretty apt description of most of the Greek Islands so we sort of just left it for us to find out when we arrived. We got our ferry and had some solid naps before getting picked up and taken to our hostel. We were staying right next to the beach and had our dorm room to ourselves i.e. We were living the dream. And now for my favourite the part of every day, food time! We found ourselves a tiny cafe that we adopted as our own over the next two days, although none of us quite know why because they really never had what we wanted to order. But they did have €2.50 gyros, our new diet for the next week. We had the beginning of our 10 day catch up over a two hour lunch right by the water. We were on an island and our island relaxation started in cheap food style. After spending the afternoon by the beach and the pool, we had some celebratory reuniting cocktails before heading into to town for dinner. I, unfortunately, was super sick and this was fairly annoying (sorry guys), so we called it a night early and headed back. But only after eating some fried cheese. The next day, after I'd been solidly sick and gotten over it, we spent the morning by the beach before heading into town to get lost among those gorgeous streets that make the Greek Islands so iconic. White houses, churches, and restaurants filled the streets and we climbed to the highest point for a view over it all (you'd expect nothing less, right?). After feeling like we were living in a postcard, we returned to our beach to investigate a bar we'd seen earlier. This bar may be the best bar I've been to on this entire trip. It was empty bar one young family, and a little pricey for Greek standards, but it had hanging beds, lounges, and a pool, all while overlooking a beach. The drinks came with nibbles, a European standard that we need to adopt in Australia. We drank mojitos while lying on a swing bed big enough for all three of us to lay out comfortably on. It's a shock I ever left, really. But a nightlife awaited us, as did some amazing muscle tees. Ios is known for its nightlife. What we did not anticipate is that that nightlife would be filled with Australians and that pretty much all the pubs would be Aussie owned. This island is home to the pub crawl. Streets upon windy streets of bars without cover charge mean you can jump easily between them all. They also do this thing where you get a t shirt if you do seven shots. We were getting t shirts. It was decided. And thus our scavenger hunt started. We had our eyes on specific shirts we'd seen people around wearing and so off we went to find the appropriate bars to get those shirts. In between all this, we ended up in a hardcore EDM club, a bar with a band covering only Australian hits, a bar themed like Peter Pan, a 90s hip hop bar that I could have never left, and a bar that had a shot where they lit the bar on fire for you to toast a marshmallow over. We each did our seven shots (that were cocktail shots rather than straight vodka/tequila/whatever so we could still walk straight by the end of it all) and got our shirts, ready to look like ever other Aussie that made it to the Greek Islands. And we danced. we totally crushed it. This leads us to the amazing race challenge for this leg of the trip: a bar crawl scavenger hunt! You'll start by having to find our amazing hanging bed bar by the beach, who will give you a cryptic clue with one of the names of the bars in town. It might start simple, for example, a jäger bottle label would lead you to jägerbar. From here, you'd have to do a shot before being given a clue to the next bar. This time it might be a bit more difficult, say, a basketball singlet, as one of the bars had these instead of the standard muscle tees everywhere else had. An obscure quote from Peter Pan would lead you to The Lost Boys Bar, or a clown emoji might take you to Circus. Once you've visited seven bars and done seven shots, you'll receive a shirt with your next destination on it: Fira, Santorini. And I'll see you there for our next post, where we do a four hour hike and swim in the spot from the sisterhood of the travelling pants. Until then, Sarah x