The Old Country Honeymoon Where I Didn't Want to Be a Diva
Everyone likes a Greek honeymoon, and we were lucky enough to get a cheap and authentic one. Unfortunately, I'm a little high maintenance.
When we got married in our mid-twenties, my husband Nick and I knew where we were going to take our honeymoon, and we had known since long before we got engaged: Greece. I know what you’re thinking: Greece, for a honeymoon? Groundbreaking. And you’d be right, but we had a specific reason for this preference. Nick is Greek, and although his family has been in America for generations, they pretty much identify as having been born in Greece. Nick doesn’t speak Greek, but when we originally met he told me not only was his father born in Greece, but that he was fluent himself (both untrue, but alas.)
More importantly, they still have relatives in Greece (Lesbos, specifically; yes, my husband is a lesbian) despite having left generations ago. Nick had fond memories of visiting them as a child, and we knew that having our honeymoon there would be more authentic than your typical honeymoon, not to mention much cheaper. We were making middling salaries in San Francisco, paying non-middling rent (without the help of parents or relatives) so going to Greece and staying with distant cousins felt like a really smart “hack” for a budget honeymoon.
I had very limited vacation time for my honeymoon (I was working at a Japanese company called WowTag, where using any vacation was seen as “inadequately hungry” behavior). As a result, we wasted no time and jetted off to Greece literally the morning after our wedding, still hung over from the many warm tequila shots at our wedding. Before we left the hotel, Nick warned me that I should try to “look nice” for his cousins because Greek people apparently judge appearance very harshly. This was really not what I needed when I felt like my eyes were so sunken and bloodshot that I might have passed for one of those pop-up scare images on a prank eBaumsWorld video, but I wanted to impress his cousins, so I dutifully wore a mint green lace top from Bebe and a black and white striped maxi skirt. Not my finest fashion choice in hindsight, but this was 2014.
When we arrived at the airport in Athens, we then had to take another plane to get to Mytilene airport, where one of Nick’s cousins, Kostas, would drive us to the family home. The Athens airport was what you’d expect in any major European city, full of overpriced shops and people trying to get you to use their potentially-illegal taxi services. The Mytilene airport, on the other hand, looked like a loose gathering of people, some wearing components of police costumes, herding people into different rooms with an air of “Eh, hopefully this all works.” I half expected to see an errant goat running through the airport. Given my OCD obsession at the time with airport security, I found this laissez-faire attitude a bit disturbing, but then I realized that an airport that looked like it fit a maximum of 200 people at any given time was probably not a high-profile target.
Kostas was waiting for us in the pickup area, which I recall being right vaguely in the middle of everything. I’m pretty sure he just skated past security due to being best friends with half the people who worked at the airport. Kostas, as it turned out, was very well-connected in Mytilene. He was a cantor in the church, and seemingly knew everyone in town. He was also the only one of Nick’s cousins who knew English and would be acting as our translator.
Kostas immediately leaned in for a friendly hug, and I could tell right away that I was going to like him. He had the same upbeat demeanor as a hired tour guide or concierge. He took us to his car, where we threw our bags in the back and we made our way to the family home–a small apartment building where Kostas lived with his mother, Big Thea. Big Thea also had a niece named Little Thea who lived a few doors down.
Big Thea looked exactly like what you might imagine a sixty-year-old Greek woman on a small island to look like. She had permed hair dyed a shade of burgundy-red specifically reserved for older Eastern European ladies and American Gen X mall Goths named Crystal. She was short, curvy, and wore a long floral house dress with slippers. She greeted us at the door when we arrived, speaking effusively in Greek. I wondered for a moment if she thought we spoke Greek, or if she was just talking to herself, but I could tell she was saying something nice so I just nodded and smiled. Big Thea kissed us on both cheeks, then grabbed me by the arm and pulled me aside, muttering in Greek as she began, for lack of a better word, feeling me up.
