I will make this my last posting on Greek tour, but I will answer any practical questions if you have. Thank you for having been friendly audience for my sharing of the experience. :-)
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Today I will tell you something about the people who didn't like the tour since I already told you about the fun events. We had thirty-two people on the bus, and there were three people who really had hard time enjoying the trip. Coincidentally they were kind of bizarre, too. They weren't bizarre because they didn't enjoy the tour, but they didn't like the tour because they were rather bizarre people.
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One couple from Dallas (a Chinese woman who grew up in Singapore and a Caucasian man) joined us the third day of our tour. This was their first leg of a three-week tour and they were going to Egypt after doing Greece. The woman talked when they sat with other people, which wasn't very often, but the man was very non-responsive almost to the point being borderline rude.
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The woman informed us the first night we met that she had traveled thirty-seven countries so far. It would have been great fun to hear about her experiences in various countries, but the direction of the conversation always turned into how Greece had nothing to offer for her and her companion. This couple never joined optional excursions to see anything interesting, and never stayed at the guide's lectures because they usually spent all of the stops in jewelry stores. But they were also the first (and the only) ones who complained how boring the tour was. The people on the tour were nice enough to be civil with them but some called them "coach class royalties" behind their backs - especially when the couple were the last ones to show up for the bus (which was ALWAYS), or make demands for special arrangements (like a king-size bed, or asking the whole bus to skip the archeological site to go to fancier place for shopping instead). It was actually pretty incredible that people like that would join a group tour at all.
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Their complaints about Greece might have been legitimate, I would not know, but since they behaved so poorly, I tend not to think that there was really something to their words.
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There was another young woman (twenty years old) who had hard time with the tour, too, but it didn't have much to do with being in Greece. She got drunk one night and banged everybody's door to wake people up. She told the whole tour group that she was a prostitute and she would like to stay behind in the monastery to live with nuns and cleanse herself. We figured out later that she was also on drug. It was really a sad situation to watch especially for a mother like me who has a son who is just a little older than the young woman in trouble.
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She got so embarrassed after that particular night that she stopped talking to anybody except for the tour director, "Michael" the healer that I told you about, and myself, throughout the tour. Whenever she came back to my seat in the bus to talk to me, she wanted to know about my twenties. I tried to be as honest as I could, but since my youth was never nearly as wild as hers, I wasn't sure if I was giving her any comfort. She promised that she will seek medical help after the tour, but I am not holding my breath on it.
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So I guess the tour wasn't fun for everybody after all, but I got a lot out of it and I am very happy that I had the opportunity.
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Now, here is the trivia question:
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In English speaking countries, if you don't understand something, you say "It's all Greek to me". What do Greek people say when they don't understand what something means? I will post the answer later.
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