Celebrity Mediterranean Cruise - Mykonos, Greece

I woke up at 7 am and immediately headed up to the fitness center to get in a run before breakfast and Mykonos. Having been very well-fed over the past few days, I found myself running longer and faster than I usually do completing 4 miles in 38 minutes. After a shower, I woke Seth up and wished him a happy 40th birthday. I called Wade and Charlie to let them know that we hadn’t had breakfast yet – it was almost 9 am - but Charlie thought maybe they would stick around on the ship today. While eating breakfast, Wade wandered by and we chatted for a little bit including a lesson on who Dorothy is. He and Charlie were planning on going into Mykonos with Peter and Joyce.

We returned to our cabin to collect our things and headed to the theater to receive our tender tickets. It was about 10 am and there was no wait for the tender. We boarded immediately and were taken right into the main area of Mykonos.

After stopping to take a few pictures of the gorgeous scenery, we wandered into a jewelry store that Celebrity highly recommended and ended up walking out with a gorgeous Cabana necklace of white gold with the Greek key symbol encircling diamonds that encircled a ring of black onyx. I was thrilled that Seth insisted on buying this piece of jewelry for me even though it was HIS birthday today (although mine is in 5 days while we’re in Naples).

We wandered the town and saw cute cathedrals, the windmills, and Little Venice finding the scenery so beautiful except for the odd sewer smell as we walked the alleyways.

The wind was incredibly strong especially facing north. We picked up a few more gifts in the various shops down narrow winding alleyways heeding the advice we were given about buying what we wanted right away because going back to find a particular store would be extremely difficult to do. We had intended on renting an ATV to explore the island but decided against it because we were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to find our way back to the rental agency once we needed to return it. The streets of Mykonos were designed to confuse invaders and allow the locals to escape so they were extremely difficult for us to navigate. We, literally, wandered around and walked into shops that looked interesting to us.

We bought some Greek liqueur, a brown top for me and a coral colored one for Amina, 2 shirts for Seth, as well as a souvenir magnet, some honey, olive oil, and a Pashmina shawl for Mimi.

We originally went to Babulas Tavern on the waterfront for lunch but the menu did not appeal to us so we moved downstairs to the Kavos Café instead.

We seated ourselves and soon a large man offered us menus and then, in a little while, begrudgingly took our orders: pita sampler with 4 dips (tzatziki sauce, olive pate, taramasalata – fish roe dip, and melisanasalata – eggplant dip),meat gyro for Seth, and souvlaki for me.

The food was delicious but the service was terrible. We watched our waiter talking on his cell phone for over 30 minutes as we waited for our bill. Another waiter passed us 3 times as I waved my credit card at him hoping he would let us pay for our meal – each time he mumbled “please wait”. When our waiter finally came back to our table, he informed us that they did not take credit cards and that our bill would be 42 Euros. We only had 10 Euros and no USD. I walked up the hill to the EuroBank and made a cash advance on my credit card and returned to the café where we watched as our waiter talked on his cell phone again. I finally became impatient and gave 42 Euros to the other waiter telling him that we would no longer wait for our waiter. We left no tip and it felt good.

We did a little bit more shopping and found Amina a necklace to match her coral colored top then headed for the tender back to the ship. It was only 3 pm (last tender at 4:15) but the line for the tender was pretty long. As we tendered back to the ship, the waves were incredibly choppy probably due to the winds. At about 5:30, the Galaxy pulled out of Mykonos and started heading for Turkey.

When we returned to the cabin, Charlie had called and left a message to join the 2 of them along with Joyce and Peter for cocktails at 6 pm. After showering and freshening up, we made our way down to deck 6 and enjoyed drinks with them – I tried a chocolate martini which was very good. When they headed to early seating dinner, Seth and I went up to the Galaxy shops but when we found nothing of interest, we made our way down to the Celebrity movie theater to watch Pan’s Labyrinth showing at 7 pm. There was one other couple in the theater with us and at 7:10, one of them went out to ask about the movie. He came back in and then 15 minutes later, went to ask again about the movie. The movie finally got started after 7:30 but when it finished (it was a very good movie that I had seen before but Seth had not), it was past 9:30 pm – too late to make it to our late dinner seating.We wandered the ship for a bit looking for someplace to have dinner but the dinner in the Oasis Café was by reservation only so we ended up at the pizza/pasta bar and took food back to our cabin for dinner. We ordered apple pie from room service via the television monitor system and room service called us to confirm our order – making sure that all we wanted was just pie. We finished eating our dinner/dessert and called it a night setting our alarms for 6:30. We ordered a continental breakfast for the morning as our shore excursion group would be meeting at 7:15 am for Kusadasi/Ephesus tomorrow.