What you remember and how you remember it
In Babylon 4,000 years ago, it was accepted practice that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because this calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon.
You would have to try very hard to have a bad honeymoon. No matter where you go for your trip, your sole responsibility is to dote on the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with; every day, you wake up and say, “I love you SO much.” To which your partner replies, “No, I love YOU so much.” And so on and so forth; this is all you have to do.
We chose Greece.
I. Athens
Athens is a pretty cruddy city —it’s nearly impossible to take a single step without walking into cigarette smoke. But Athens should not be avoided for the pure history of the place. Seeing the Parthenon is like pushing your way in for a spot at the Mona Lisa. Fellow tourists need to be cropped out of romantic photos, but the experience is worth it.
The city has a leisure culture as well. There are lots of old men sitting on benches, drinking iced frappes (sugary under-caffeinated coffee) in a typical European café fashion. The greatest part about walking around Athens is having the usual city experience of pollution and frantic crosswalks interrupted by 2,000-year-old (fact check?) ruins that run spontaneously through the city.
II. Santorini
The key component to a honeymoon is a beautiful backdrop, and almost every direction you look in Santorini looks like it’s lifted off a postcard. These kinds of moments will be used for all of those deathbed memories we stock up. An integral part of our daily life in Santorini was watching the sunset, along with our established ritual of Metaxa and cribbage.
We spent most of our days by the pool, reading for our “Honeymoon book club” (we read Love in the Time of Cholera together), venturing into town at night to walk down a thousand feet of stairs to the very bottom of the island to eat fresh fish dinners before hiking allll the way back up the stairs for dessert.
It’s uncertain whether the people of Santorini are worried about the Greek economy. If there’s any concern at all, it’s for the discretionary pleasures of tourists. And most of the island people have figured out the perfect work schedule: work very hard every single day for six months then take the rest of the year off. Not bad eh? We actually met real people named Aphrodite and Athena.
All doors and window frames on Santorini have to be blue or green and all church domes are blue. The water is as clear as the Caribbean, but more of a crystal blue than a green. Which brought us to a serious debate: Was the color of the Greek flag created to match the ocean or the church?
III. Milos
With 58 beaches and a population of 5,000, the island of Milos is about the size of Burbank. We discovered 12 beaches in our time there and each beach had a different feel to it, with distinctive sand and rocks, people, and swimming options at each stop.
Milos is how Hawaii must have been many, many years ago before the tourist onslaught. It’s unused and pastoral, not to mention inexpensive. We had a ball.
It took 20 minutes to say “goodbye” to Demitra, the woman running our hotel, every morning because she showered us with so many kisses after feeding us a gigantic Greek breakfast. It was exciting to be so integrated with local life and meeting people who had been having the same patterns of conversation for a lifetime now. We could see these emotive conversations at our favorite restaurant in all of Greece, in the little town square where the entire village would come out and talk, and talk, and talk, all night long.
Henry was able to navigate the windy country roads with our little Fiat, through very few signs, most of which only consisted of arrows. And goat crossings. We took a boat ride to see the hidden caves of Kleptico, where pirates would hide before capturing boats headed to Crete. Compared to Santorini, everyone on Milos was much more low key and relaxed. A lot of the people we met loved the fact that we were from Los Angeles. Some of them even wanted to know, “What are you doing here??”
On our second to last night there, we were extremely fortunate to witness a lunar eclipse. After the near full moon turned bright orange, it completely disappeared for a fraction of the evening. The sky was devoid of the moon but full of bright stars. It left us awestruck — it was definitely an experience we never would’ve been able to have in Los Angeles. And, on our very last night, we had a full moon honeymoon.
