Is it Disneyland or is it Hawaii or possibly Rhodes? Well, there are medieval towers, Byzantine alleyways, synagogues, Turkish mosques, hordes of tourists, hotels that look like they should front the Kona beaches, hundreds of cafes, more plastic reproductions than you can imagine for sale… hmm, must be Rhodes.
We wandered through the Palace of the Grand Masters and viewed Roman and Hellenistic period (aka, pre-Roman) floor mosaics. Got another rough sampling of clay pots, pottery and a few sex scenes on the oil lamps. Derrell asked “Well, just how many clay pots can you look at and stay interested?” That was just as we rounded the corner and inspected the handles of some cooking pots that were phallic in shape. Well, that retrained our interest on the finer details of the cooking equipment. “Hi honey, I’m home! I bought a new cooking pot for you today. You did say cooking everyday was getting to be a drag… didn’t you?” The museum livened up only slightly after that.
We took a flight over from Crete to get here. The Rhodes airport is under-construction. Now that isn’t much of interest. What was for us was the challenge of finding the bus station to get to ‘Rhodes Town’. After asking one of the construction workers, it turns out that you need to walk to the road across a few parking lots and stand on the far side of the street (no crosswalk or posted signs pointing the way) to catch the bus. One battered sign that was uprooted and leaning against the wall marked the lonely stop, was supported by the graffiti written by some past tourists labeling the area in black marker in English and in Japanese as the ‘Rhodes Bus Stop!’.
By this time, we considered it a matter of principle to wait for the bus. Taxis were located at the airport; the bus was hidden without signs a huge walk away. With no posted signs and only the reassurance from our guidebook that there are 21 buses a day running from 5 am to 11 pm, we waited it out. Okay, we weren’t martyred too much, we did have a good bench in the shade with a fine breeze. To prove our resolve at shunning the airports push of 12 Euro taxis (the taxi stand was the Only(tm) thing you see when leaving the tiny airport), two different taxi drivers stopped by and offered reduced fares.. best offer of 8 Euros. Hey, not bad, but dammit we’ve got principles! We held our ground, and amazingly, a bus actually did roll up and deliver us to the town after a 50 minute wait. Hah! Another blow to the rigged tourist traps of the world. Oh, alright,… we would have gotten to town faster and that lady behind us wouldn’t have smoked on us during the ride and we would have had a cooler ride and not lost at least a pound in sweat and we wouldn’t of had to figure out where our hotel was and we would have had a shorter walk… but sometimes you just Need to go against the grain.
With enough squinting, Rhodes is actually a fine place to breeze through. The people are friendly, the food crappy and overpriced, the tourists looking enthusiastic, the water a mix of that Conde Nast tourquoise and lapis luzuli blue, a Balder’s Gate looking medieval wall surrounds the place… Overall, much prettier than Iraklio (Derrell: “Iraklio is a pit.”) and much more along our expectations of Greek tourism. We’ve seen seashell shops, dancing Hawaiian dolls, fake medieval suits of armour, Uganda gorrilla image t-shirts with the word ‘Greece’ below (honestly, who buys this shit?), and 20,000 jewelery shops. Combine it with sunburned kids, ghostly white legs of northern European dads in shorts toting a camcorder and a non-digital camera, icecream cones, Greek music blaring under vine canopied cafes.. and a slow Internet connection… and you’ve got a fine place to hang out for a day. ‘A day’ = ‘one day’, of course. Two days and we might start sending home plastic headless greek statuary.
