October 7: Rhodes City
The previous night, we’d taken a taxi back to Kritika to avoid having to figure out the buses. This morning, we thought we’d take the bus into town to collect our rental car.
We sat at the bus stop and waited. And waited. Finally, a northbound bus approached—and drove right past us without stopping. It was crammed full of people probably collected at the hotels south of us. Maybe buses weren’t going to be an option after all.
After a few more minutes of this, we walked back up the beach road into town. It’s not a terrible walk, but 25 minutes to reach the outskirts is too long of a walk to be reasonable transportation.
Our car was a red Toyota Avgo. “Avgo” means “egg” in Greek. The rental guy assured Chris that the transmission wasn’t broken, bogginess notwithstanding, and we drove off into the Rhodes City traffic. We didn’t learn until later that it “sported” a 3-cylinder engine, at which point Chris, who had been driving it, said, “That explains a lot.”
The thing about driving in Rhodes—well, there are two thing. First, there’s the matter that the city was built long before there were cars, so modern traffic is completely shoehorned into a tiny space. That’s normal in Greece. Second, at least half the cars on the road are probably rentals, which means fewer than half the drivers know where they’re going.
Our mission for the morning was to visit the iStorm (sic, a fake Apple Store) for a hard disk, and H&M for boring wardrobe staples.
Then we visited a proper grocery store for proper food. On a trip like this a visit to a real grocery store, when you have a real kitchen at your disposal, is better than any Theme Park.
After dinner, we watched The Guns of Navarone to see if we could spot locations. We did recognize Lindos and some spots on the east coast. But I find those old movies too long and much too stilted; David Niven was particularly irritating. I may never manage to get through Zorba the Greek. Also the Amazon Prime print of Guns… was really, really dark; there was a presumably exciting scene involving a shipwreck and our heroes scaling a sheer cliff, but we could see nothing of the action whatsoever.