We are on Mykonos, the "high rent neighborhood" in the Greek Islands. The terrain here is as barren as the terrain around Phoenix or Tucson. The guide alleges that the name means "pile of rocks" and I can believe it. Yes, there are beaches; no, they don't compare with those in Hawaii. The architecture is crypto-pueblo, everything is whitewashed which is at least uniform.
I'd been expecting picturesque, this isn't even close. We've had an island tour, and we learn that new construction hereabouts would cost roughly 1/2 million U.S. dollars for 1100 square feet of vacation home. That makes sense in Aspen or Vail or Jackson or even Carmel, all of which are pretty places, not on Mykonos, which is not.
Istanbul was huge, not wonderful, just huge - something like 17 million inhabitants. We saw the requisite sights: Hagia Sofia, the blue mosque, the cistern featured in From Russian With Love, the Great Bazaar and suchlike. They were interesting, to be sure, but our general bias against huge cities was operational so we didn't love Istanbul. We did get talked into buying a carpet, something Turks have been doing for millenia.
The Internet cafe I'm sitting in now on Mykonos is smokey, many Europeans haven't yet gotten the word about quitting cigarettes. This is offensive, to say the least. Oh, well, my consolation is that almost everybody who is currently making me miserable is (too) slowly committing suicide.
