So after sharing many a beer with Walther over the past couple of nights, i've started to figure out what's going on at the Pension Manuel....apparantly Manuel is a "professeur de mathematiques" in name only, for last week he was a "professeur de geologie", and the week before a "professeur of english"...His days are spent drinking coffee, barraging tourists with horribly broken-english blah-blah, and playing with his 3-year-old daughter, Manuela (keep in mind that this man is 65 and his wife 60.....it gets stranger...), while Maria (the wife) does all the work.... Walther's role in this whole thing is to entertain guests at the pension and give travelling tips (so they stay longer), for which he receives free room, but from what i can tell he just tries to screw over Manuel at every oppurtunity by giving the tourists (ie: us) free meals and beer....why Manuel doesn't figure this out i have no idea, though Walther explains that several generations of inbreeding are most likely the cause... regardless, i enjoyed the whole thing since my beer and most meals were paid for, and Walther's entertainment was well worth it....with a single tear in our eye we said goodbye and have made our way to Kastolorizo, less than a km from the coast of Turkey

The island is quite small, and the population has been forced to emigrate twice (once due to the 1923 Greece/Turkey population exchange and again by order of the british during WWII so they could bomb the shit out of the place...for what reason is entirely unclear...) so there are many abandoned buildings and such...the people seem friendly though...it's quite an out of the way place for all the tourists are old and seem to know each other.....We've rented an awesome room for 30 euros a night (a bit expensive for us, its regularly 90 but construction outside means no self-respecting old folk would rent the place, its the cheapest place we could find...) the boat for turkey leaves friday morning so we'll have a day to kill tomorrow....

anyway, i'll write more tomorrow (internet is free!!!!!)

keep on rockin in the free world

ryan