October 25, 2003

European Vacation Part 9: Dinner with Kostas Vallassos.

After we got back to the resort, we realized that we'd left the keys to our condo locked in our rental car which was parked back at the scooter rental place. Fatty and Grant elected to stay at the resort and relax while Chris and I headed off our scooters to retrieve the keys

chris a, grant — Here's our condo's little porch out front.

The scooter rental place was near the fortress in downtown Rethymnon so after we picked up the keys, Chris and I decided to take an exploratory drive around the fort and through town.

chris a — Which led to us getting hopelessly lost. With all the narrow, windy roads it took us a good 25 minutes to find our way out of town and back to the road that led home.

chris a — Here's us riding down a sidestreet clearly not meant for scooter traffic. Doh!

fatty — After taking naps and showering, we all got back on our scooters, gassed them up...

grant — ...took a few more "look at us...ON SCOOTERS!" pictures, and then returned them back to the rental place. We grabbed our rental car and drove into town looking for a place to grab a nice dinner.

chris a, kostas, me — We wandered the streets for almost an hour trying to decide on where we wanted to eat (ok, trying to find the place that had the most hot girls dining there). The problem was, there was so many restaurants (and so many hot girls) that we couldn't make up our minds. Finally, as we neared the point of collapse from hunger, we were courted by this dude, Kostas Vallasso, and he was so friendly and funny that we decided to eat as his place.

chris a, fatty, grant, me — Hungry boys.

Nothing whets the appetitie like a long day of SCOOTERIN! We ordered a giant Greek salad, two mixed grill platters, souvlaki, moussaki, and several plates of olives.

Fatty captured this awesome pic of me turning all quick to try to flash some local girls the "Hey, come join us!" disco smile. No dice. I gotta work on that shit.

chris a, fatty — Fatty and Chris.

kostas, me — About halfway through our meal, Kostas come outside and sat down with us. When he found out that Chris spoke fluent Greek, he became even friendlier (which we didn't think was possible) and started bringing out carafe after carafe of two locally-made village wines.

kostas — By the way, I'd like to take a real quick "time-out" to point out something that Grant noticed: That our friend Kostas Vallassos bears a stunning resemblance to Dr. Robotnik, the bad guy from the seminal, early 90's Sega Genesis videogame, Sonic the Hedgehog.

grant, me — After we plowed our way through our second carafe of the red...

chris a, fatty, grant — ...he brought out more white wine. Amidst all the merriment (shit-talking and recalled moments of scooter-glory), we suddenly realized that we were all completely shit-hammered. When we (slurringly) asked him, "Kostassssch, why are we schooooo drunk?" He explained that the local wines contained approximately 14% alcohol. (Which explains why these pics are starting to get as blurry as our vision was).

kostas, me — After another hour or so of (sobering) conversation, Kostas brought out a few trays of fresh fruit and several rounds of Raki, which is a bitter digestif made from the distillate of grape stems during wine production (not unlike the Italian grappa).

chris a, fatty, grant, kostas — Thanks, Kostas!

We survived the raki. Mission accomplished.

fatty — After dinner, Grant went to the car to take a nap while Chris, Fatty and I got ice cream and debated whether or not we were up for another (most-likely uneventful) night out on the town (By the way, check out a totally butt-ass wasted Fatty double-fistin' it with TWO cones!). As we sat outside eating our ice cream, I noticed, lo and behold, that there was a super-cute girl working the door of the club across the street giving us the hairy eyeball. So after I finished my ice cream, I walked across the street to chat her up and discovered...

...that she was only fourteen years old! Doh! Turns out her family owned the club and twice a week she worked the door to earn some extra money (ummm, her allowance, I guess). It was a little past 2am and we were all knackered from our long day of scootering (and too much wine at dinner) so we decided to pack it in early and head back to the resort. We arrived at our car to find Grant sprawled out across the backseat asleep...and decided to do what any friends in our situation would do: scare the living shit out of him. We all got on one side of the car and at the count of three started rocked the (tiny) car back and forth as hard as we could while screaming. Grant leapt awake (screaming along with us) and nearly soiled himself. I tried to take a pic of it, but the flash bounced off the car's glass and it didn't come out. Sorry.

Back at the resort: here's Fatty's pic of the hotel pool at night.

fatty — And here's Fatty using the timer on his camera in pursuit of "the perfect photo for his JDate.com profile." Seriously, everytime we turned around, this kid was snapping clandestine self-portraits to later use to ensnare hot, cyber Jewesses. More on this later.