Delos

Once upon an ancient time there was an island in the center of the Cyclades where Greek gods were born and huge amounts of slaves were sold in their name, where mere mortals were neither allowed to give birth nor to die, and where a rich merchant couple had nothing better to do with their money than erect statues of themselves in their own courtyard. Now it's a place where hairpieces are found lying on columns, where little girls still peek over the walls of the boy's dormitory, where nine stone lions built to protect the city from ruin lie in ruin themselves, and people can't help but ask themselves, "Were the Greek gods real?"

This place is Delos.Going to Delos was the first planned activity of our trip and of course we were excited. So we set our alarms, woke up bright and early, and hurried to the front of our hotel to catch the bus...to find out it wouldn't come for another hour or so. So we hitched up our shorts, tied back our hair, and walked--on a perilously windy street with no shoulder. We arrived in Mykonos Town in one piece--which was weird because we started out as 6 separate entities--just in time to catch the ferry and land on the island already populated by hundreds of other tourists crowding around the front gate in order to buy a relatively overpriced ticket to a barren city overgrown with weeds and a sparse museum. I was overjoyed.Compared to other archaeological sites, Delos is left fairly open to the generally unguided and unrestrained tourists. Of course some people took it upon themselves to see more than was obviously open to them and naturally, being an archaeologist...I was the exact same way. We had just barely made it past the most famous part of Delos, the Naxian lions guarding the Sacred Way (built around 600 B.C.), and were admiring curiously intact pottery jars when the horn from our boat sounded signaling its preparation for the return trip. Seeing as it was only 1:20 and seeing as I didn't hear Becky instruct us on the departure times I thought we had until 2:00 and was, as a result, unhurried. My friends however began to walk quickly...and the horn sounded again. So we ran and we ran and Becky tripped and the dry vegetation took 2,500 years of pent up vengeance out on her leg and still we ran and continued running into the sun with the repeated strains of Becky yelling, "12:00, 1:30, 3:00!!" behind us. We hopped onboard the ferry and snagged the last few spots in the shade completely unaware that our near miss was portentous of things to come. When we arrived back in town we ate at a little shop painted entirely in pink where McCall and I choreographed a dance using only our heads and the very long but very scanty sandwiches we got for lunch.

Up until this ill-fated afternoon we had done a very good job of sticking together despite our varied interests and personal agendas. We wandered for awhile between a jewelry store and a store with natural sponges and then moved on to other stores and other suckers until it became impossible to reunite because a third of our group had magically disappeared. Just prior to this, of course, some of us had determined to return to our hotel and our personal/public beach. Instead we were forced to meet at our predetermined and apparently predestined location--the bus stop--from which there was evidently only one viable option. This was to continue on to Paradise Beach--a beach infamously attractive to tourists from all over the world, a beach wholly European in its personal publicity, a beach where I spent the rest of the afternoon apologizing to God for the very fact that I was there--so I'm sorry I don't have any pictures.