While I wait in what must surely be the longest and most curly-haired check-in queue since the exodus from Egypt, here are a few sketches from the last day or so.
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I went back to the surprisingly heavy-metal Rock Bar in the old town, hoping for another great performance of Hotel California, but found the place much toned down, body-count wise if not musically. Some raging blood-soaked and bemasked metal was playing on the TV and four European rock fans in their sixties were drinking beer. I sat at the bar with a man who instantly offered me a cigarillo and proceeded to tell me, in lightly accented East German, about the various sailing trips he'd been doing around the Aegean, and the historically inspired and frankly terrifying brand of Viking metal he was into. We watched YouTube videos of sweaty long-haired Nordic men screaming about the rise of Valhalla, then he toddled home alone. I requested Under The Bridge as a palette cleanser and was humoured by the bar staff.
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After the gym yesterday (!) I went for an evening swim in the sea, just as the sun was going behind the platoon of giant hotels. I was drying off and had just begun the complex process of getting my pants back on behind a tiny hotel towel, seated on the shingle facing away from the water, when a Greek woman came whooping and leaping from the waves. "Oooh, eeee" she shrieked, as I tugged uneffectively at the damp elastic. "Fish! Fish!" she cried. I knew I had to throw propriety to the wind and performed the final bum-cheek covering standing up, without the towel. I turned around and a vibrating and glimmering shoal of tiny silver fish had been beached by the incoming tide, thousands of them all along the length of the beach. There followed a hilarious caper as fully grown men and women scrambled to fling the pathetically gaping little fishies back into the depths, only for many of them to be instantly washed back ashore. The original whooping woman petted, baby-talked to and generally admired the strong and slippery minnows until we all decided together that it was time to give up the fight and flee the inrushing waves. I was left to put my trousers on, thoughtfully, on one of the thousands of long-empty sunbeds.
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On this morning's golf cart ride down to the bus station, my aged host asked me if I'd met a wife in Rhodes. I said that I hadn't but that maybe I would in Tel Aviv. "She will appear" he said, smiling back at me. Then he took both hands of the wheel and made a little explosion motion with them. "Poof," he said, "like that."
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