We are staying at a relatively small hotel, called Krits. We have a room with three beds. I’m taking the liberty of concluding that Greece is a threesome friendly country.

The staff is genuinely friendly.

The breakfast buffet is small and exactly the same every day, but it’s good enough. I’m going through a revival of my childhood binging on syrupy, chocolate covered cereals.

In the evening the fare is monotonous as well. No serious alternatives for vegans and not for vegetarians either. I don’t mind too much, but I know lots of people who would freak.

You can eat outside on a huge parlor, which is a huge plus. There’s a pool and a garden. The beach is a ten minutes of walking away.

The hotel is very clean. We don’t have warm water at the moment, you can’t flush toilet paper, it has to go in the bin, and the shower head does the sort of thing when someone’s arm gets cut off in a horror movie.

There’s also something that inspires our bowels to make us sprint to the toilet four times a day, but the huge balcony compensates for a lot of all this minor discomfort.

Plus the neighbours -Brazilian? Puerto Rican? – treat us to dance shows on their roof top. (See picture)

The beach is nothing special and cramped. The sand is particularly sticky.

To have any comfort on the crowded and very narrow beach you are advised to rent chairs and an umbrella. This will set you back 10 euros for the entire day for two people. If you want to go bananas you can also order food and drinks at steep prices from beach waiters who’ll drop your goodies right into your lap.

Observing a beach is a good exercise in seeing all the cravings, unnecessary and trivial wants people have.

Quite absurd is that every flees the beach at the first drop of rain. It seems people who like to swim in the sea don’t like to get wet…

The most popular beach here is Star Beach. It has pools and other attractions. I don’t see the thrill of it, but perhaps it’s a more interesting place to take children to.

If you want to risk damaging your spine, neck or eyes you can go for a bungee jump.

Interesting is that Greeks yell a lot. They also wave their arms vivaciously. They do not do this to entertain tourists. It’s a cultural thing.

There are some fine restaurants one kilometer, less than a mile, from the hotel. We went to a Chinese-Idonesian one. Totally reasonable prices. One of the few restaurants I know that serves a truly impressive dessert. We ordered dessert to make the meal last longer as it was raining. It was a hot brownie, still hardening in a ceramic pot with ice cream and whipped cream.

We also discovered the perfect gift shops. Lots of little thingies, original handcrafted items and a sociable, young shopkeeper. He gave us a big discount on everything we pointed at, but I suppose that’s his regular selling trick. He just pretends to give discounts. It does work I must say. Even if you see through it, you are happy you can get something cheaper than you initially thought.

We both gifts for the family and are poised to go back.

As to other tourists:

There’s an overabundance of Dutch people. You can hear Dutch everywhere and even the menu at the Chinese restaurant was in Dutch. Some bars have displays enticing tourists with the claim that their staff speaks Dutch.

I also hear a lot of Russian. This doesn’t mean they are Russian. The people I overheard this morning were from Armenia. Lots of advertisements are written in Russian. Most are for food and… fur coats.

You hear a lot of German as well. Not that much French. So far I haven’t seen any Asian tourists.

There’s a great presence of Slovaks. No matter where we sit down we hear Slovak. Funny detail: the waiter at the beach was trying very hard to seduce one of the tourists and she was…. Slovak.

Most of all though you get the impression that you are in a Dutch enclave near a Greek sea. Not only do they sell Dutch beer in shops, it’s even the main beer in lots of restaurants.

With that many Dutch people present you can be assured that:

  • The night scene sees a lot of casual sex
  • The night scene is LOUD
  • The hotels are clean
  • The prices are low
  • There are lots of all you can eat buffets to be found

You can expect hot sunny weather almost every day.

When it’s rainy you can expect the beach to completely deserted. Which is why we went for a nice walk along the beach and had it all to ourselves when it looked like it was going to rain. I mean, you need to take advantage of humans’ erratic, paradoxical and predictable reflexes.

I’ve read two books in four days and started in four others.

I finished a book by a Greek author -a real coincidence- Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Talking to my daughter about the economy’ and ‘The myth of the lost cause’, a book related to the legacy of the American Civil War.

I also confess to the theft of two books from the library of abandoned tourist books at the hotel. One is a breezy summer read in jolly English and the other is a Dutch thriller that I have stolen for my students of Dutch in Slovakia as I never read books in Dutch myself.

My wife has finally got some rest. Which was long overdue.

I am not too bored, even though I don’t have my laptop with me, we can’t watch any movies or documentaries, nor can I play the prehistoric DOS game, CIV I, yes, CIV I, while listening to YouTube docs, but I could teach through skype, and there are hundreds of books in this mini-ipad I use for blogging.

If you would delete the flashy, screaming commercialisation of the beaches it would be a fine place.