Day 2--my birthday in Lindos

You have never seen two people peel out as fast as Jim and I did once we finally located our rental car. We headed to Lindos, which is an ancient city tucked into the hills on the coast and houses an Acropolis. We were happy when we got there:







Lindos reminded us a lot of some of the Italian villages we visited, but it was all white washed. Throughout the city were these tiny churches:


We visited one church where, because I was wearing shorts, I had to get decent. They gave me a piano wrap for my legs. The church was very cool on the inside, with ancient frescos and multi-colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling, but no pictures inside the church were allowed, so we'll just have to remember it.



Jim with the sea and the city behind him:


A street in Lindos:


And finally we ate at a GREEK restaurant!


A beautiful picture of me on some anonymous stairs, which would become the first thing we would see every day in Lindos.


After lunch we headed down to a clear bay, where Jim did some snorkling




I stayed on the beach, evesdropping on a family of four. The parents were drunk and the father's underpants had been stolen by a beach dog, who eventually returned them to much fanfare. I was hoping the dog would take the drunk parents away, too, but she only took their flip flops.

After Jim's swim, we headed back up to a cute cafe overlooking the city and watched people below us making their way up various trails and roads. We also acted most sophisticatedly:



Intrigued by what we perceived to be sounds of torture down the hill, we headed off in search of the source of the noise. On the way, we passed a large family of fuzzy orange kittens, the first group of about six hundred ferel cats we saw in the village. MOre on that later.

On our way down to investigate the noise, we also noticed that there were lots of signs that read "rooms for rent, enquire within." So we enquired, but the rooms were full. We continued our trek down.

It turns out that the sounds of torture were actually the sounds of donkeys. They really do say hee-haw and sound like someone is branding them or electocuting them. In Lindos, lots of lazy tourists ride up to the Acropolis on the backs of suffering donkeys. The donkeys are kept in a cab stand type situation and the tourists go to the donkey stand, pay their fee, ride up to the top and then the donkeys come back down again to pick up the next person. These donkeys were apparently on break. I tried to hatch a plan to rescue them, but was pretty sure that England wasn't going to let me come back with three donkeys. So we just made a plan to get them some carrots instead.




On our way back up the hill, we saw another sign for rooms to rent and this is when we met our saviour, Christina!! She showed us around with much enthusiasm and we could smell the fresh clean sheets and the sea air and could hear the donkeys braying in the distance and knew we had to stay in this charming little town. Once again, we peeled out, fixated on packing up our room at the resort and checked out of there in record time. Jim even managed to get most of our money back. Freedom! Here we are in our new room:




Happily, we went to eat another Greek meal and stuffed and warm and surrounded by cleanliness and nice people, we went to sleep in our new abode. No floods, no roaches, no unappealing people. It was heaven.