As Soon As Dawn Appeared, Fresh And Rosy-Fingered.

[rionaleonhart]

The text message I sent to th_esaurus early on in my holiday:

The colours in Greece are very bright and warm, like someone's turned up the saturation. On the downside, today I had literal ants in my literal pants.

The message I sent towards the end:

I'M IN ITHACA, FUCK YOU ODYSSEUS


So, yes, I've spent the past week in Greece! On the extremely beautiful island of Kefalonia, specifically. I could swear the shore nearest us was the shore from the opening video of Final Fantasy VIII. The waves breaking on the beach looked exactly the same. I never thought the sea could actually be that colour, but apparently it can!

Here is the traditional write-up of things that amused me during the holiday. Cast: Harriet (me), Mum (my mother), Dad (my father), Joseph and Fred (my two younger brothers), and Eleanor (Joseph's girlfriend).



We went to a restaurant on our first evening. Mum sat opposite Joseph, me opposite Dad, Eleanor opposite Fred.

Eleanor: Fred and I are the only age-appropriate couple at this table.
(pause while what she's saying sinks in)
Harriet: WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT ELEANOR DON'T BE CREEPY


The second morning of the holiday, the entire family woke to find we'd all contracted Fred's sore throat.

Mum: Shall we all go and kill Fred?

We're all still coughing our throats to shreds. Bizarrely, Eleanor, who is ridiculously illness-prone, managed to escape it entirely. She was extremely bouncy and smug about being the only healthy person in the party.


Joseph: If Jesus wanted to do an AMA, how would he prove that he was him?
Fred: Verified account.


When Dad was driving us on a winding mountain road and Fred was not feeling his best:

Eleanor: Fred's put in a request for you to stop turning left.
(Fred, lying down in the back of the car, is unable to see the turnings)
Joseph: Oh, Fred, you won't like this.
(car turns sharply left)
Fred: Ugh, that's such a left!
Eleanor: It's okay, Fred, we're going to compensate for it now.
(car turns right)
Fred: I don't like rights. I just can stand them. Just fucking drive straight! Is that so much to ask?

Shortly afterwards:

Joseph: Okay, Fred, gentle right upcoming.
Fred: I don't care about rights.
(car turns left)
Fred: This is a left, you son of a bitch!


Eleanor: (bitterly) I met a great girl at a party, and we talked for forty minutes, and then I thought 'oh, I'll introduce her to my boyfriend'. So I brought Joe over—
Joseph: She worked for a major app developer—
Eleanor: —and the first thing he said—
Joseph: Look, I didn't even pitch the worst idea I could have, which was the Blowjob Techniques app.
Fred: (indignant) That was my idea!
Joseph: So I just told her about my Meet Market app idea, where you scroll through pictures of people and say how much you'd pay to go on a date with them, or how much they would have to pay to go on a date with you. If it matches up, you go on a date and the company takes a cut of the cost.
Eleanor: I don't think she was impressed.
Mum: Well, there must be something wrong with her if she didn't like Joe.
Eleanor: Not if his first impression was telling her about his prostitution app.
Joseph: I think the bigger problem is that it made me look like a raving free-market capitalist.
Eleanor: (very unhappily) I gave her my e-mail address, but she never contacted me.

(Harriet: I suppose I can't put the Meet Market discussion in my holiday write-up, can I?
Joseph: What, because someone might steal the idea? Honestly, I just want to see my dream realised, so go for it.)


We saw a couple of loggerhead sea turtles swimming around in the harbour, huge (huge - I had no idea turtles could be so large!) and ancient-looking and beautiful. One of them was veined with bright blue. I found it quite a moving experience, largely, I'm ashamed to say, because it felt like I was looking at Pokémon.


Driving through mountains:

Mum: There's no sign of civilisation here at all, is there?
Dad: Well, what could they do with this land? (mostly to himself) They could have more goats. Could they have more goats? Obviously you can only have a limited number of goats.


We went riding! I wanted to feel like John Marston, but, although the scenery was suitably Red Dead (at one point we passed a dilapidated tin shack with a goat's skull mounted on the wire fence), it's hard to believe you're a badass former outlaw when the person leading you on a strap keeps shouting 'Momo!' at your misbehaving horse. (Then again, what did I expect from Aang's lemur reincarnated?)

Harriet: John Marston's thighs must be so sore all the time.
Joseph: It's not his thighs I'm worried about.


Dad ran out of reading material and resorted to Being Binky, the autobiography of a Made in Chelsea star, which someone had left in the villa.

Dad: Binky is starting to annoy me. She's always complaining about her life.
Harriet: If you don't like hearing about Binky's life, have you considered reading something other than Binky's memoirs?

Later I overheard Mum (who does not, as far as I know, watch Made in Chelsea) getting bizarrely impassioned about Binky. 'How do you think Binky feels about that? You don't know Binky.'


We drove quite close to the entrance of a monastery and then drove away again, rather than paying the fee to visit.

Dad: So, how was that?
Eleanor: It was a religious experience.
Joseph: How much did we save?
Dad: Well, we didn't save our immortal souls.


Fred: Do you know why these trees are all painted white?
Joseph: There was an explosion at a Tipp-Ex factory.
Harriet: Was it covered up?


Joseph: Did you know our great-great-great uncle invented the Frisbee?
Eleanor: No, he didn't. You're bullshitting, Joe.
Fred: His name was Arthur B Fris.
Harriet: The Fris A was a terrible failure.
Eleanor: You guys, I think Harriet's funnier than all of you.
Fred: But we're providing the set-up for her jokes! She's paying us to do it!


Eleanor: We saw an eel. It was really gnarled and horrible.
Fred: It was probably an old octopus tentacle that broke off and came to life.
Eleanor: When we were in the sea I told Fred about my fear of an octopus grabbing my leg, so of course he started swimming underwater when I wasn't looking...


I found a pretty blue stone on the beach and returned to Eleanor with it.

Harriet: Eleanor, I got you a rock.
Eleanor: Yay! Ugg smash rock! (passes it to Joseph, who immediately slams a much larger rock down on it)
Harriet: NO


Eleanor: (to Joseph) I just found Fred in our wardrobe, leafing through my lacy underwear.
Joseph: I'm going to have to hit you for that. (approaches Fred)
Eleanor: Wait, wait, do you want the context? He was going to hide in our wardrobe to scare us, but he broke a hanger and everything fell on top of him.

A little later, I heard a roar from Joseph and investigated to find Joseph and Eleanor emerging from Fred's bedroom.

Eleanor: We thought we'd hide in his wardrobe.
Joseph: Maybe we should have waited until he was naked.
Fred: (putting his hand on Joseph's shoulder, with the smug air of a man one step ahead) What you don't know is I'm in your wardrobe right now.



On our last full day of the holiday, we went to Ithaca by boat. I wanted to go to Ithaca solely to stick it to Odysseus (I think Odysseus is a great character but don't much like him as a person), but I actually got strangely emotional looking at the island from offshore, thinking about him seeing it again at last after all those years.

(And then Poseidon sent a storm to batter us. That guy is really weird about people going to Ithaca.)

Comments

[marginaliana]

Fred: Do you know why these trees are all painted white?
Joseph: There was an explosion at a Tipp-Ex factory.
Harriet: Was it covered up?

I'm in pain. OMG. Pain, I tell you.

[kadrin]

On the extremely beautiful island of Kefalonia, specifically. I could swear the shore nearest us was the shore from the opening video of Final Fantasy VIII.

KEFALONIA MORE LIKE KEFKALONIA

Anyone? Anyone?

Eleanor: You guys, I think Harriet's funnier than all of you.

...Well, you're right, Eleanor, but it was a valiant effort on my part.

[rionaleonhart]

You've just reminded me that I forgot to add the 'truly appalling jokes' tag to this entry! What a dreadful oversight. Thank you.

[nixwilliams]

Eeeeyyyy, a Riona family holiday post! It's what this website is all about! :D :D :D

[rionaleonhart]

Frankly, I don't understand why Dreamwidth hasn't offered to fund our family holidays yet.

[nixwilliams]

Fact. Get on it, DW.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Dad ran out of reading material and resorted to Being Binky, the autobiography of a Made in Chelsea star, which someone had left in the villa.

Dad: Binky is starting to annoy me. She's always complaining about her life.
Harriet: If you don't like hearing about Binky's life, have you considered reading something other than Binky's memoirs?

I feel for your dad. Running out of reading material on holiday is a nightmarish experience. It happened to me on a family holiday as a teenager, and I started having feverish dreams about libraries every night.

(You and your family are, as ever, hilarious.)

[rionaleonhart]

He read the entirety of Being Binky and I'm not sure that he enjoyed a second of it. Fortunately, I'm currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire (which I'll have to make an entry about at some point), and it would have taken me some very determined reading to get through A Clash of Kings in one week.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

At least if your dad ever needs to know facts about Made in Chelsea he will be prepared. Pub quiz secret weapon? But it's a shame that being forced by necessity into reading it didn't provide any enjoyment - that is how I read Northern Lights, and it was an excellent surprise. (I was almost eleven and had tried to read it several times, but kept getting bored and bogged down. Then we went on holiday and were stuck on a train in Thailand in the middle of floods for four days, and I had no other choice. It turned out to be amazing.)

I was reading Bring up the Bodies on my last holiday, which lasted me for most of it. Long books are a holiday must.

[rionaleonhart]

I actually had a semi-similar 'fortuitous reluctant reading' experience with Northern Lights! Like you, I was bored by it at first, but one day my mum insisted that I read it. I'm not sure why she was determined to make me read it, because she hadn't read it herself at the time, but grumpily I lay down with this stupid book and surprise, it's great!

(I, er, hope you were well supplied with food and water on your Thailand flood train. Well, I suppose you were well supplied with water in any case, but I hope you had something to drink.)

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Maybe it is just a book that children have to be forced into reading. They should put that in the blurb: "You might find this immensely dull at first, but do not stop; it will be great eventually, promise".

Sort of? There were helicopters dropping bags of rice and the local people had driven their livestock onto the tracks (the only high ground), so some pigs got slaughtered (I got to see one being shaved, although some of the pork we received later was distinctly bristly). We also had some pineapples, which we soon got very tiredof. The water in the toilets was turned off, so they quickly became filthy and my sister was ill; when out water ran out after four days (coincidentally, my and my siblings' 11th birthday) we walked along the tracks to the main road and got to the airport. It felt like an excellent adventure at the time! (Possibly not for my parents.) I feel slightly guilty about that now due to the fact that it was a serious natural disaster.

[clo.livejournal.com]

I love The Odyssey because I first experienced it being read aloud (we'd take a chapter each every class) in Classics A-Level and whoever was reading would pause every so often to offer a running commentary on all the things Odysseus was doing that they disagreed with - and yet we all cheered when he got to Ithaca. He's so marvellously self-centered and yet ridiculously endearing at the same time. (It also helped a lot that we read The Aeneid the next year and we all hated Aeneas for being such a monumental jerkface that Odysseus came out of it looking way more likeable). In short: I have Ithaca!envy for you actually getting to go! I was in Cyprus last October and we passed a sign saying CYCLOPS CAVE 2KM but my Cypriot friend flat out refused to walk to it in 30degree heat, so now I have to go back to Cyprus at some point just to do this one thing because, The Odyssey. It's well over 2000 years old; how are we still this invested. Argh.

(I love your family holiday posts. The Tipp-Ex line in particular was epic. :D )

[rionaleonhart]

I've never forgiven him for going to all of the trouble of disguising himself as a beggar and determining who were the good suitors and who were the bad ones from the way they treated him AND THEN KILLING ALL OF THEM ANYWAY, ODYSSEUS, WHAT WAS THAT, but I do love The Odyssey and it was great to see Ithaca. I'm sad that you missed out on being imprisoned by Polyphemus!

[clo.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhh I'd forgotten he did that! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE WILY, ODYSSEUS. FALSE ADVERTISING.

...when you put it that way, it makes me think that maybe my friend was on to something with staying far away. Maybe she realised we hadn't planned ahead and hired a convenient crew of sailors to sacrifice towards our getaway plan.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

"I could swear the shore nearest us was the shore from the opening video of Final Fantasy VIII."

But did you bond with any GFs?

[rionaleonhart]

I... suppose I bonded with Joseph's GF?

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

Yes, but can she throw fireballs at people and/or is she a giant cactus?

(Imagine your brother's girlfriend being Doomtrain.)

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I still enormously enjoy your travelogues for the experience of a family holiday without having to actually go on holiday with a family.

[rionaleonhart]

I'm glad to be able to provide this service! Although you might need to imagine some petty arguments in there for the full 'vicarious family holiday' experience.

[milliebee.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, you're kidding! I just got back from a holiday in the Greek island of Rhodes! I wish I had material this good to write about.

The trees are painted white to stop ants hurting them. Or at least that's what our tour guide said.

[rionaleonhart]

I hope you enjoyed it! (And thank you for solving the tree mystery!)