My Big Fat Greek Nightmare (Part Three of Three)

After a lot of long distance phone calls and reassurance from my family, I decided it was time to leave. But there was no way I was leaving without being paid for at least one month of this Greek nightmare. So I booked my flights for the end of my first month, I had two weeks left to pass and I did my best to act casual.

But the excitement was too much. The Greek brothers watched me suspiciously. 

It became clear I was going to need to appear a little more miserable. I started an extensive exercise regime so that I would be too exhausted to smile. I tried exploring the island on long, long, long runs. I spent most of these runs being chased by goats. 

After one particularly alarming near-death experience. I asked them what I should do when the goats attacked. It was the general consensus that I should lie down on the ground. I imagined the result of such a ridiculous suggestion and opted to avoid lying down in the path of charging goats.

To pass the time I tried socialising. After someone produced an old coke bottle filled with a clear liquor called Raki, I decided it was best not to drink anything I was offered. This resulted in me being the only sober one at multiple parties and therefore being the only one concerned for general health and safety. 

It also resulted in me being the only one even mildly alarmed by some of the bizarre things that happened at these parties. 

To be fair I got myself into my own fair share of bizarre situations. I spent a good five minutes hanging onto our trellis for dear life after deciding it was the perfect place to do pull-ups. I completely forgot the fact that I had never managed to do one before and decided the added death-drop would push me to be able to achieve one. 

Finally, after the slowest and strangest two weeks of my life, it was time to leave. My bags were packed and all I had to do was walk the two miles to the airport, against the wind, in the blazing heat of midday. I got about four hundred meters before I started praying. 

And surprisingly my prayers were answered. Albeit, my prayers weren't very specific and the non-english speaking Albanian man who swooped me up into his dodgy red van while he kept shouting "Taxi, Taxi," was a little alarming. But when faced with heat stroke or abduction I now know that I will ask no questions and take abduction any day. It's important to know these things about yourself.

So that was that. The Albanian man, thankfully, dropped me at the airport in one semi-sane-piece. All I had to do was board my plane and I was free. There I was sitting in the window seat of the same rust bucket I flew in on, when I turned to see who sat down beside me. It was my Greek suitor from the bar who had wanted to raise goats behind the airport with me. 

My Big Fat Greek Nightmare (Part Two of Three)

My first days in Greece were spent with a childish fervour for everything. I spent hours just staring at the blue ocean, walking barefoot in the sand and attempting to cartwheel with joy. The cartwheeling was painful and didn't get me very far, but it seemed necessary in order to capture the feeling. Who could possibly go to Greece and not cartwheel?

 I took pictures of everything. Uploaded them to Facebook and smiled to myself as everyone reported back their jealousy.

It wasn't long before I started to really notice how "hot" it was. I spent much of my time gasping for water and looking a little like this...

I started working and was reintroduced to the brothers. All of whom were as odd as I remembered and all of whom maintained their strange personalities with odd persistence. The grunting brother continued to merely grunt, my boss continued to warble on about all sorts of nonsense, and the other brother spent much of his time waxing lyrical about Jesus being Greek. I was relieved when my boss introduced me to his daughters, but that was short lived as one was the kind of child that spends all her time finding spiders to throw at you and the other had been expecting me to be best friends with One Direction.

Work was boring at first. A simple list of cleaning tasks and then I could go home. The cycle home was to be achieved by cycling on a bike built for a ten year old, it was actually the ten year old's bike as apparently I was short enough not to need an adults one, against a wind that practically stopped the bike in it's tracks.

 . I spent my free hours running up mountains 

And inventing ways of generating air conditioning in my apartment.

It soon transpired that I was allergic to the sun and broke out in a hideous rash. The only way to avoid the rash was to remain inside.

Then work started to get busier. We started to get an assortment of customers. Mostly Greek men who were friends of the brothers and most of them were quite old and creepy. At first I was polite but then things like this started to happen. 

At bar parties I was expected to mingle with the customers and generally make sure they were having fun. This resulted in me being groped on the dance floor while trying to take drink orders. This had not been part of the job description. I became suddenly aware that... 

The men soon got weirder. There was one that came to the bar every day and spoke for five hours straight about Kentucky. Anytime it went silent he would bulge his eyes out and scream "Yee Haw Kentucky". He was to say the least a charmer. 

There were other men too, liberal ones who tried to explain to you that some Greek men acted that way because of the way foreign girls were... 

And then there was just the stereotypical Greek men that tried all sorts of inventive chat up lines on me. 

Finally there was my boss and his mood swings. He would scream relentlessly at me till I cried one minute and the next try to pat me on the back and send me for a walk. It was all getting a little much. 

I began to plot realistically about how I was going to escape the situation...

Thankfully in the midst of everything I realised I could Skype my sisters in pigeon-irish and nobody would know what I was saying. I could tell them what was really happening...

It was obvious I needed to plan an elaborate escape and so, with the help of the Irish language and my sisters, I began to plot.