Source: The Old Country Honeymoon Where I Didn’t Want to Be a Diva Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: February 3, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

Not my photo, of the “airport.”

Kostas was waiting for us in the pickup area, which I recall being right vaguely in the middle of everything. I’m pretty sure he just skated past security due to being best friends with half the people who worked at the airport. Kostas, as it turned out, was very well-connected in Mytilene. He was a cantor in the church, and seemingly knew everyone in town. He was also the only one of Nick’s cousins who knew English and would be acting as our translator.

Kostas immediately leaned in for a friendly hug, and I could tell right away that I was going to like him. He had the same upbeat demeanor as a hired tour guide or concierge. He took us to his car, where we threw our bags in the back and we made our way to the family home–a small apartment building where Kostas lived with his mother, Big Thea. Big Thea also had a niece named Little Thea who lived a few doors down.

Once I had tried a little bit of everything, Big Thea began loading my plate up with larger portions of all the foods, shouting at me to eat more (at least I assume that’s what she was shouting, she might have also been shouting “Nice ass, sugartits!”). I loved to eat, but there was no way I could physically fit all this food in my body. I told her I would take a quick break after dinner and promised to eat the rest before I went to bed, which seemed to be good enough for her.

At this point, Little Thea pulled me into the “computer room” (for context, the entire apartment was kind of stuck in 1997, so there was an entire room dedicated to a massive desktop computer). She sat me down and began shouting “Google Earth!” at me. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to accomplish–did she want me to show her how to use Google Earth, which I had barely ever used? I typed “Google Earth” into the search bar and we waited five full minutes for it to load while we smiled at each other politely. Then, Little Thea pointed to the screen and said, “San Francisco?”

Ah, okay, so she wanted to see where we lived. I typed in our San Francisco address and she seemed a bit disappointed as a dilapidated apartment building with a broken lobby window showed up on the screen. I’m sure she thought we lived in some high-tech penthouse, perhaps located directly on the Golden Gate Bridge. Realizing this was a total letdown, she turned to me and said, “New York City?”

I started plugging in random locations, hoping at some point Little Thea would see whatever she was hoping to see, but everything seemed to disappoint her. We did this for about thirty minutes, and I was really about to lose it, especially when I saw Nick in the doorway, munching on cheese dipped in honey and doing a taunting dance at me.

That night, we went to bed, our bellies completely brimming with Greek food. Kostas offered to leave the windows open so we could get some fresh, balmy air. I absolutely loved this. Yes, our room wasn’t exactly built for sex, but it was romantic nonetheless and seeing where Nick’s family came from made me feel so warm and close to him.

The next day, Kostas offered to drive us all to their summer house. I was pretty surprised that they owned a summer house, since they lived in a fairly small apartment and I didn’t know where they got their money from (Big Thea didn’t work, and I didn’t think Kostas made much money being a cantor), but I didn’t want to ask. Nick clarified that they had inherited a house in the countryside along with a pretty sizable olive orchard. Because few people in Lesbos moved far away from their parents, they generally just inherited whatever house their parents lived in. Next to the summer house, Big Thea’s brother had a house, and next to that house was a house he had built specifically for his daughter and her husband. Not going to lie: I liked this arrangement and I was terribly jealous. We spent half our paychecks on rent when we could just live in a beautiful countryside home for free, built by Nick’s parents? I was ready to move to Greece.

The drive to the summer house left me extremely nauseous and faint with a terrible headache, like a wilting Victorian maiden. I wasn’t sure why, but I can only assume it was the winding roads and the heat. However, I was afraid to come off like a diva. I knew I was a difficult person, prone to spells of Karening, and really wanted to keep that to a minimum since these people were hosting us so generously. The house itself was beautiful–just imagine the first thing that would come to your mind if I said “Greek cottagecore.” Kostas directed me to lie down on the sofa in the living room, which I did for a while until Big Thea showed up with some mysterious tea.

Given that at the time, I was averse to eating half the herbs that existed because I read about birth control contraindications (and, hilariously, I thought we needed birth control) I wanted to ask her what was in this tea. But I didn’t, because I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell me and it could be rude. I also wasn’t sure how she felt about birth control, given how religious she was. So I drank it (it was surprisingly good.) She then sat next to me and rubbed my head for a little bit, which I found strangely comforting (we had already been to second base; this was nothing). Within five minutes, my headache and nausea were completely gone and I was ready to eat lunch. Somehow, within an hour of being at the summer house, Big Thea had assembled another gigantic feast, complete with roasted chicken, potatoes, asparagus, bread and cheese.

Once we were done with lunch, Kostas offered to give Nick a tour of the olive orchard. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but this didn’t sound interesting to me at all–I much preferred lying around the house and eating. But again, I didn’t want to risk being away from Nick, or appearing bitchy, so I offered to go with them.

It was hot and dry. Kostas drove us around seaside cliffs until we got to a rocky, elevated area where the silver-leaved olive trees rustled in the hot summer wind. Kostas told us that to see the olive trees, we would have to climb up the rocks, which I couldn’t do because I was wearing wedge espadrille sandals. I considered taking them off to climb, but then realized that put me in danger of cutting my foot and perhaps getting some kind of soil-borne infection. As anxious as it made me, I decided the safer thing to do would be to stay in the car. After all, Kostas promised they would only be about five minutes. My anxiety could handle five minutes away from Nick. Maybe.

As the five minutes came and went (and then ten, and then twenty) I began to panic. I should have just suffered through the climb and gone with them. My phone didn’t work out there, and I had absolutely no idea where they were. I couldn’t see them or hear them. Not to mention, I was a woman who didn’t speak the language of the country, stranded alone on an isolated rural road. This was exactly how horror movies started. I wondered if perhaps Nick was close enough that he could hear me if I called for him, so I got out of the car and shouted “Nick!” in a way that I hoped was loud enough for him to hear, but not so loud that he’d think I was being eaten by a herd of rabid sheep.

Nothing. I called again “NICK!” Nothing. “KOSTAS?! NICK?!” Fuck. They were too far away. I tried to get back in the car, but, of course, I had inadvertently locked myself out when I closed the car door. I burst into tears. I no longer cared if Kostas saw me at my craziest. I had tried my hardest to tamp down the anxiety while I was there, because I knew how important it was to make a good impression, but at this point I felt my life was in danger (and perhaps Nick and Kostas were also dead.) Just as I stopped screaming, I noticed what can only be described as an extremely curious swarm of bees flying toward me. The bees buzzed around me over and over again, loud whirring vibrating in my ears as they encircled my head. This was, quite literally, one of my worst nightmares–stranded on a road in 90 degree heat, Nick nowhere to be found, in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language, and well on my way to my face being devoured by bees like something out of those killer bee documentaries I had to watch in fifth grade in between specials about Saddam Hussein and acid rain.

I dropped to a seating position at the edge of the car and emitted some kind of primal scream, figuring at this point that I would take any rescuer, even if it wasn’t Kostas and Nick, whom I had already assumed were dead. After about five straight minutes of screaming into a void of blue sky and olive trees, I saw Kostas emerge from the rocks with Nick.

“I knew this was going to happen,” Nick said.

“No, you don’t get it, the bees!” I shouted, hysterical, my face beet-red and soaked with tears.

“What?” Kostas asked. “Are you okay?”

“The bees…they swarmed me…I didn’t know where you were…I thought I was going to be kidnapped by ISIS.”

Kostas looked confused. “ISIS?”

“It’s this thing she does,” Nick explained. He turned to me. “She’s obsessed with ISIS. Why did you get out of the car?”

“I didn’t know where you were! You said it would be five minutes! You were gone, like, forever!”

I hoped Kostas wouldn’t tell Big Thea about this. As sweet as she was, I was afraid she might try to perform an exorcism on me. On the other hand, there was a chance that her herb garden contained another tea, this one with effects similar to Valium, so perhaps I needed to keep it up.

Nick turned to Kostas. “I told you we shouldn’t be gone that long. She gets very worried.”

“Why would she be worried? It’s beautiful out here!”

“Well, I mean, she’s all alone and doesn’t speak the language. And I guess at some point there were bees?”

I looked around and couldn’t find any bees. Just my luck. It would be so me to get swarmed by phantom bees that traumatized me and gaslit me at the same time.

“No worries, no worries,” Kostas said. “We can go home.”

In the car on the way back, Nick told me he had been working with Kostas to try and figure out a business plan to sell their olives and olive oil. Apparently, despite owning a massive orchard, nobody in the family had thought to sell anything.

“We just have the olives,” Kostas explained. “They’re nice.”

“I keep telling him they could make so much money if they just sold olive oil,” Nick said.

Kostas waved it off. “We talk about it later.”

After a couple days in the summer house, we took a flight to Mykonos. I was used to getting to airports a good three hours early, an unfortunate habit I inherited from my extremely high-strung grandfather, but we found ourselves sitting around a breakfast table with Kostas and Big Thea with only one hour before our flight took off (I’m pretty sure it was already boarding). Not wanting to be rude, I asked Kostas how much time we needed before we had to worry about missing our flight.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he said. “Five more minutes.” He then slowly drizzled honey over a piece of cheese and began luxuriating over it, taking tiny bites between dainty sips of coffee.

“Kostas, uh…” Nick stammered. “I really feel like we need to get to the airport now.”

“I know someone,” he said. “Just relax.”

We watched as Kostas finished his breakfast, and then ran to the door with our luggage to try and get to the airport in time. At this point, Big Thea went into her bedroom and emerged with a series of vases and photo frames that she said we needed to take with us. Our bags were already pretty full, but Nick had previously warned me that refusing any gifts or favors was very rude, and that it was considered inappropriate to host a guest and not give them a huge amount of gifts when they left. We thanked her profusely and attempted stuffing underwear and socks into the vases to save room.

When we arrived at the airport, our flight had five more minutes before takeoff. I figured we had definitely missed the flight, and just hoped that Nick would be open to buying another ticket for tomorrow (although I guess the alternative would be staying in Mytilene forever, which wouldn’t be so bad, provided we did something about the bees.) As soon as we arrived, Kostas pulled one of the security agents aside, muttered something to him, and he allowed Nick and I to bypass security.

“I told you I knew someone,” Kostas said.

Although I had always pictured Mykonos as a super-luxe, modern place, Nick had booked us a hotel at a small cabin in a series of identical cabins right in the middle of town, as opposed to a luxury hotel. His reasoning was that we had our own large balcony and our own kitchen, so we could even make our own food. I also had a feeling the cost of Mykonos factored into it (I noticed quickly that everything in Mykonos was expensive, especially compared to Mytilene). I also realized that the hotels were farther away from town, which meant we would have had to take some kind of transportation into town every day had we stayed at a proper hotel. The cabs were inordinately expensive, and the alternative was a rented moped, which terrified me. So all things considered, the choice of the cabin was probably the best for both of our anxieties. On a romantic note, it also meant we could have our morning tea and coffee overlooking the ocean.

On our first day in Mykonos, we left in the morning to head to a beach. There, we found a small isolated grotto and kissed under the water–exactly the kind of thing that might happen in a travel brochure. Drunk with happiness and love for my new husband, I didn’t even consider how we would get back to the cabin. Nick and I both have horrible senses of direction. Nick’s is just regular-bad and mine is so bad that I’m genuinely convinced it’s part of an undiscovered mental disability. (As a teenager, I once broke down crying when I was unsuccessfully learning how to drive because I got lost going to the local post office, which was five minutes away from my house.)

As the sun beat down on us, dressed in only bathing suits and flip flops, Nick and I realized we were lost. We asked some locals where we were, but none of them seemed to know the street names. Most of the streets weren’t even marked. I started to panic that we would somehow never find our cabin and wind up living the rest of our lives on the streets of Mykonos.

I also started getting a little peeved at Nick. The longer we walked, the hungrier I became, even though we had breakfast just two hours earlier. We walked by a small outdoor restaurant that served gyros and I suggested we get some food there. Nick vehemently refused, saying it wasn’t part of our plan and that he hadn’t looked the restaurant up on Yelp. He also postulated that it was “a ripoff.” I didn’t care. I was hungry. Where was Big Thea when we needed her?! Nick insisted that he knew a better place for lunch. I asked him where it was. He obviously didn’t know.

We eventually made our way to some kind of dirt road outside the town, which we inexplicably thought was a good idea to follow. On the way there, a local on a moped stopped by and said “Where are you going?”

“We’re lost,” I said.

“You know this road leads to the other beach, right?” he asked.

“Oh. Yeah, of course.” Whatever, a beach would be fine. Maybe there would be food there.

“Yeah, that’s where we’re going,” Nick said, probably thinking the same thing.

“It’ll take you two hours to get there,” the guy on the moped said. “Are you sure you want to walk?”

“Yes,” Nick said.

After the guy passed, I begged Nick to just call a cab.

“How am I going to call one?! Our cell phones don’t work here. They’re all reserved out of some building in town and I don’t know how to get there.”

“There has to be a way!” I was starting to cry.

“If you had just let us rent a moped, none of this would be happening!”

“You don’t know how to ride one!”

“I could figure it out!”

“Yeah, right before we both die! And by the way, I’m starving!”

No. I couldn’t fight with Nick like this on our honeymoon. Was he already regretting marrying me? Had even one day gone by without me acting like a psycho? I was really having a hard time keeping my natural inclinations to be difficult under control. But surely, anyone would be losing it in this scenario. I was sunburned, practically naked, hungry, and lost on a dirt road. I guess if things got really desperate, we could eat the padding out of my Victoria’s Secret Miraculous push-up bikini top.

Eventually, Nick and I asked enough locals where we were to get us back to the cabin. By then, we had been lost for hours and it was time for dinner. We tried to put the unpleasantness behind us, and I reminded myself that lots of couples probably argued on their honeymoons. Of course we were going to argue. I just hoped Nick forgave me and didn’t see it as a sign that he had married the wrong person.

We went to the restaurant for dinner, the nicest restaurant Nick booked for the whole trip. I got to get dolled up and Nick got to eat some of the best roast lamb in the world, so it was a win-win. After we finished a bottle of Greek wine together, we started walking back to our cabin. Just as we thought we were halfway to our cabin, Nick turned to me and said, “You know where we’re going, right? Because I’m totally lost.”

One of our last stops on our trip was a beach party in Mykonos where we needed to take a bus to get there. Normally, I hated being bused around like a middle schooler, but realizing the alternative was walking for four hours, I was happy to get on the bus. For the first time on our trip, we were surrounded exclusively by hot, moneyed European tourists. I was fairly intimidated. I wasn’t that tan, I didn’t have sleek, fashionable clothes (I still thought ModCloth was the epitome of style), and I knew Nick had a plan to spend less than fifty dollars all day. I tried not to compare myself to the other women, all of them under ninety pounds with hair down to their butts and Hermes beach bags.

When we arrived at the beach party, I knew this was going to be a treacherous experience because nothing was free. There were towels, which cost $20 each. There were lounge chairs, which cost $75 per hour. There were bungalows, which probably cost as much as an ER visit in America. There was also a bar, where no drink was under $20. I could tell this bothered Nick, and it bothered me because I knew it bothered Nick. I had to remind myself that his anxiety with money probably existed at the same level as my anxiety about safety, and I knew how shitty it felt to have someone push my boundaries. But also, there was no way I was going to enjoy this experience sober without a place to sit.

“We don’t have to drink,” Nick announced. “I actually don’t feel like I need a drink right now. We’ve had a lot of wine on this trip. I wonder if they have free water.”

This was definitely not the place to be sober. There were go-go dancers in black thong bikinis, a DJ, and huge amounts of extremely tan Europeans humping each other while holding neon-colored cocktails. It was pretty impossible to sit anywhere without paying, so I feared this experience would involve standing on the sand silently, staring at the ocean, until the party was over.

Finally, Nick agreed that we could have a drink, but due to the cost of alcohol, that drink would have to be a pineapple juicebox from the corner store. I tried my hardest to pretend I was drunk, figuring that I might be able to employ self-hypnosis as a stand-in for vodka. We also couldn’t sit on the beach due to entry fees, so Nick and I were stuck on a wooden picnic table inside the pavilion, directly next to the DJ’s loudspeakers. I would have given almost anything to be back in Lesbos with Big Thea and Kostas. But we couldn’t fight again, not on our honeymoon. This was as good as this experience was going to get, so I figured I just shouldn’t focus on everything we didn’t have.

“Wanna dance?” I asked Nick.

“Sure,” he said. He held the juicebox while we ground our hips into each other like deviant middle schoolers at a bar mitzvah. Big Thea would have approved.

It was then that I looked at Nick–my husband–and realized that no matter how difficult this trip had been, no matter how many times I found myself lost, hungry and irritated, or swarmed by bees, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with anyone else. Perhaps our intention with our honeymoon was to enjoy Nick’s family’s culture and have a relaxing vacation, but I also felt that our honeymoon served as a crash course in conflict moderation. And now that Nick and I had both seen each other at our most unhinged, we could confidently say, as Kostas confirmed: we make-a good choice.