Symi: please, don't go

I travel a lot, but only a few of my travel stories make it here. Sometimes, I'm too bored to write, or some places are unworthy of their own story. There is also a third category of non-posts. It contains the places that are too nice and beautiful to share. I wrestled with the idea of placing Symi, a small island at the South-East corner of Aegean sea, to that category.

Symi is wild, dreamy and romantic, an ideal destination for summer tourists who seek a place to relax and recreate. The coast consists of small but deep bays with clear waters in various shades of blue (creating a sense of “dreamy”), the mainland is covered with dry stones, pine forests and monasteries (thus the feeling of “wild”) and the entrance village (Gialos) is unique, architecturally speaking at least (and extremely romantic).

Trip in Fez (Fes)

Every person occupies some time and some space. This unique area identifies each one of us. It's our mark in the time-space continuum. Maybe it is insignificant and finite, but it's your time and your space and nobody can take it from you. Of course there is an exception: when you travel by train, you have to give up some space and a lot of time.

We spent up to 33 hours in various trains and about 5 or 6 more in train stations waiting for other trains to arrive. Sometimes, when you tell the story to your friends back home, the whole train station situation sounds adventurous, but in fact it is very annoying and dull. That's how people learn to play boring games like scramble. You have to play a game while waiting at a train station. We carefully considered many board and card games to finally choose an oral word game, in order to fit with the oral tradition of Morocco (and also because we didn't carry any boards or cards with us). I don't know the name of this game, but the rules are easy: one person chooses a letter, another person chooses a category, and then everyone takes a turn. While we are in a “turn”, the player has to find one unique (a.k.a. not said by anyone else earlier) word that starts with that letter and belongs to that category. For example “Food starting with a K” might include “Kamel” or “Kous kous”, as we soon discovered (K and C sound very similar, as has been noted before).

Marrakech: Dirty but colorful

Europe is like an old, big, beautiful house with a garden, old furniture, family portraits, books and precious objects. Each object, each corner, each square cm of dust is related to an old story of glory and family pride. Sometimes the past has been modified to look better, but there always is an interesting past. You need more than a whole life to explore the old house and you have been born there, you 've lived your whole life in this building (and the garden).

One day you decide to open the front door, just to have a look. You push your head out, in the (not so clean) air and you stare at the amazing sight: this is the outside wall, just a tiny part of what is outside your Europe. It feels so different and alive. It's not about the stories you 've heard, it's about what you are seeing right here and now. What are you going to do next?

We decided to push our head out of the European front door, just to have a glance. Europe has many front doors, e.g. We could go to Turkey through Greece, or we could travel to Rusia. We chose Morocco, a country that is really close to Spain and Portugal, at least geographically. Morocco and its neighboring countries share a lot of cultural and historical elements, and since most of us had seen parts of Spain and/or Portugal, we thought it wouldn't be a huge shock. We just needed somebody to push as out.

Nisyros, The Monkey Island of Aegean Sea

Mandraki is the gateway to Nisyros island (and Volcano)

Long long ago I promised to my happy few readers a couple of posts about the Netherlands and London. You need to know that I usually keep my promises, but for me the word “usually” is roughly evaluated to 60%. And I 'm usually right on these calculations, ergo 60% of 60%, you do the math. The truth is I have all the photos and the memories, but I never took the time to write them down. These trips are stacked at the bottom of the list of my past trips I promised to publish here but haven't yet. Because this time I'm going to tell you about Monkey Island (aka Nisyros, Greece).