1 comments/ 3370 views/ 3 favorites The Tina Trip 01 - Athens By: risgrynsfisk Hi everyone. I have started to publish this story once before. I´m a beginner at this, and I found that the segments I published the story in then were too short. They felt chopped up, the rhythm wasn´t right. So now I´ll publish the story in three segments instead of fourteen. I hope you´ll like it. A lot of it is quite true, but certainly not everything. I´m grateful for feedback and I don´t mind nitpicking. I´m writing in a foreign language and I appreciate all help to get it right. Finding the right prepositions can be tricky, for instance. Ok, here we go: * CHAPTER 1 -- THE JOURNEY BEGINS 1984, but Big Brother doesn´t see me at all. 1984 was here at last. It was supposed to be an ominous year, but I was looking forward to it. This was going to be a good year, a travel-the-world year, a big-brother-doesn´t-see-me-at-all -year. I was going to Africa. I was excited about that but if I had known that I would meet Tina on the trip I would have been even more excited. Meeting Tina is the story I want to tell. And I want to tell it in English. It would be easier in Swedish, of course, but it all happened in English, with an occasional sprinkling of German. My journey began the very first day of the year. Hitchhiking in Sweden in January was pretty bad. Cold, obviously. Snow. Dark early in the afternoon. In other ways hitchhiking in the winter was pretty good. No competition and people feel sorry for you. Several of the drivers told me they never picked up hitch-hikers but what with the cold and my gigantic backpack and me looking harmless they´d made an exception. I suppose I do look harmless, in spite of being pretty big. Tall at least, almost two meters. Ridiculously thin, not that that was apparent with my being bundled up for winterhitching. Ridiculously thick glasses. Longish hair, scraggly beard. Big nose. I´m told I look like a nice guy. The drivers all asked where I was going, like they always do. It was a thrill to be able to say Kenya. They were duly impressed, or pretended to be. The feasibility of the project was questioned of course. And rightly so, the Middle East was a mess. My plan was to hitchhike to Athens and take a plane from there to Cairo. Most people who pick up hitchers are really nice, at least if you´re a bloke. If you´re a girl all kinds of creeps want to give you a ride. Of course you get the occasional asshole, like that bible-thumping nutpriest who pontificated on the wonderfulness of AIDS, that being God´s punishment on all those terrible homosexuals. Yep, we got our bigots in Sweden, too. I was pretty damn offended, I tell you. Not sufficiently offended to leave the car, though. Only one driver had managed that, a Turkish truckdriver who demanded sex. What with my sad lack of sexual experience some may have thought I should be happy for whatever I could get in that area, but no. I left, although the Yugoslavian countryside in the middle of the night and in pouring rain was quite unappealing too. Felt like I got a bit of hands-on (and not even my hands) experience of what life is like for women. I guess I ought to have left the car when that guy in Holland stopped by the roadside to do heroin, though. Slightly hairy situation. He said he´d show me that he had the fastest car in the world. And he did, to my great undelight. He was perfectly nice to me, though. He wanted to bring me to Hague and show me a good time in his whorehouse. This time, too, I failed to rectify my embarrassing virginity. Fictional friends in Amsterdam awaited me with breathless anticipation and must not be left hanging. All those assholes and dangerous drivers had been on previous trips. Every one who stopped this time around was perfectly nice. A short hitch with a hearse in Denmark was the only ride that stood out. It was a beautiful car, somewhat limoish. Vanilla, not black. If the driver had had sex with his passenger it would have been vanilla sex and totally perverted at the same time. I felt privileged to experience this fine vehicle while still alive. Somehow I doubted that I would enjoy it as much when deceased. I was happy with the ride but I managed to look suitably somber. I don´t know if there was a body in the back. I asked, but I didn´t understand the answer. Danes understand us, but we sure as hell don´t understand them. I read somewhere that Danish kids are among the slowest in the world to learn to speak because of the gutturality of Danish. The poor kids don´t understand either. This is the kind of research that gets quoted with glee in Sweden and probably repudiated in Denmark. But they can repudiate all they want since the rest of the world doesn´t understand what they say anyway. They, in turn, have this notion that Swedes are unable to drink in a civilized manner. I suppose there´s some truth to it, too. A lot of my beloved compatriots do tend to get totally smashed when they drink, and it´s cheaper by far to achieve that smashedness in Denmark. Sometimes I have pretended to be Dutch while in Denmark. I don´t have to answer for all those drunk Swedes and the Danes will agree to speak English with me, which they usually won´t if I´m an official Swede. But at least we don´t hate each other anymore, far as I know. We used to be at war all the time in centuries gone by. A few hundred years ago the city of Ronneby was ethnically purged by us Swedes. About ten thousand Danes were massacred, including women and children. Gives you a bit of long-range hope that today´s mortal enemies one day might be able to live in peace. Germany and Austria was a breeze. Best hitchingcountries in the world. I slept outdoors, having a good sleeping bag and a thin water/windproof extra bag. It was cold but not unbearably so, and waking up under the sky always is a special feeling. Makes you feel like you´re part of nature, even if nature consists of a few bushes behind a Gasthof. Those are German petrol stations/restaurants/stores that abound along the highways -- Autobahns. Good places to hitchhike between, getting into the cities is just a lot of bother. Then came the dreaded part. Yugoslavia. It is a shitty hitchhiking country. I´ve been through there a few times but never with ease. I hoped they would take pity on me because of the cold, but no. Eventually I got to Zagreb. Fed up with hitching I decided to take the train, which left in the morning. I found a nook (which is a word I´ve never seen without cranny, but I have to tell it like it was, no cranny there) to sleep in. When I woke up some fuckhead had pissed on me. I was very grateful for my waterproof outer sleeping bag, though it was a less than pleasant task to rinse it reasonably clean in a Yugoslavian train-toilet. Riding a train was a luxury. I reveled in every second. To appreciate the simple things in life, hitchhike in Yugoslavia. To appreciate all aspects of life, find yourself a Tina. I was soon to find mine. CHAPTER 2 -- MEETING TINA Friends without benefits again? Athens. Spring in the air. A spring in my steps. A feeling of promise. I didn´t yet know that Tina was there, of course, but maybe some part of my subconscious astral niceguy rhinoceros aura felt that there was something fantastic coming up. Or maybe I was just happy not to freeze my butt off. I suppose that you´ve gathered by now that I wasn´t much of a ladies man. Lots of friends who were girls but no girlfriends. It was this nice guy thing I had going. I was convinced that if I let my hidden sexuality out of its closet all those friends without benefits would be grossed out. I would then get ostracized and forced to dwell in a male chauvinist swamp, drinking beer and bitching about women. Friendzone was better than nothing and far better than the swamp. But I was sad about it, sadly convinced that I would die alone, unloved and unfucked. I found myself a ratty hotel, where I paid for a bed in a ten-bunk room. The hotel smelt of boiled cabbage, which was odd since I´ve never seen a Greek eating cabbage. I looked forward to sleeping in a bed again, but that was not to be. When I wanted to sleep all ten beds were taken, which seemed to be an everyday occurrence to the staff. Someone had sneaked in and taken my bed without paying and the hotel guy didn´t want to wake everybody up to try to find the culprit. There were no beds available, he told me, but he could offer me a nice piece of hard, cold stone floor on the landing of a stairway going nowhere. For a moment I considered making a fuss. A short moment, about three seconds. Oh well, at least no one was going to pee on me that night. That sounded like a song to me so I hummed it while I lay down to sleep -- quietly as to not wake up the girl who was already sleeping on the landing: Last night I had a real bad pissy fright Now I was screwed out of my bed, that´s not allright But the girl here next to me is out of sight And I don´t think I´ll get peed upon tonight This is something I do all the time. I make up songs, with rhyme if little reason, to accompany whatever I´m doing. I will spare you from the vast majority of these songs. They may be a little funny at the moment of conception, but not on paper. But I include this silly little ditty since it, in all its silly dittyness, would have a decisive impact on my life. When I woke up someone was holding my hand. I opened my eyes and that someone was looking into them. She was smiling. "Hi," she said. "You are drooling a bit." Quick check with free hand. Yep, beard was wet (and scraggly). "Don´t worry," she said, "It´s cute. Soo...you think I´m out of sight?" Apparently she hadn´t slept last night after all. I had complimented a pretty girl on aforementioned prettiness and she seemed cool about it. Maybe even warm about it. "You look like a nice guy." She said. Shit. Friend-zone here I come "I promised myself that this time I´d fall for a nice guy", she went on. "I´ve had it with assholes." Thus far, there had been a lot of "she said" and no "I said" in our conversation. I tried to think of something wittier to say than "Uh?" Failing that I said, well, that. She seemed happy enough with that less than stellar repartee, and told me, now sitting with legs crossed but still holding on to my hand, that she had pretended to sleep because most people are assholes especially men but my song was funny and she had peeked and I looked like a nice guy and then she fell asleep and when she woke up she was holding my hand and she was sure it was a sign and my drooling was sweet too. She was sure I was the one and ok, she´d felt like this before, ok, a lot of times, but this was different because I was obviously a nice guy. I found my glasses and her smile got even wider. "Oh, it´s so cute the way your eyes look so small in those glasses". Apparently I could do nothing un-cute this morning. I didn´t mind cute, and if I had I hadn´t been able to argue the point, being re-rendered speechless by her beauty. I didn´t want to be rude and dumbstare at her but I was utterly unable to look away. An objective objectifying observer may not have found her features all that outstanding; brownish hair, greyish eyes, mouth perhaps slightly larger than what was considered conventionally beautiful , teeth somewhat uneven. Nose supercute though, with a few freckles. Dimples. Oh God, the dimples! Breasts smallish, probably firm as far as I could tell from what limited information I had. I certainly wasn´t going to dumbstare at them. Nice guys don´t stare at tits, they sneak peeks on the sly. Short. She was short, I mean, though of course the peeks were short too. What made her spectacular was the vivacity. All that life and joy. The power of that joy would have been irresistible in any circumstance and having it directed straight at me made me feel like a bug on a windshield; squashed but exhilarated, going somewhere fast. In spite of my squashed condition I managed to speak: "This is the best wake-up of my life!" "Of course it is! This is the first time you wake up with me and we will be together until we die. I´m Tina and I know that you are Johan because the hotel-receipt peeked out of your pants so I peeked back. It´s my favorite name in the world now. Come on let´s have breakfast." Johan is my first first name, but no one ever calls me that, until now. I decided to go with the flow. If this Johan was someone that pretty girls smiled at I wanted to be him. Our first breakfast together consisted of bread and cheese and a bottle of water, sitting on a park bench. I, and apparently Tina too, was so used to travelling cheap that none of us even considered the possibility of something more festive or romantic. But we had a great time, telling each other those things that you tell someone who you don´t know at all but is destined to spend the rest of your life with. She was from Kreuzberg, the coolest part of Berlin. She was a librarian, the modern and hip kind. Love of books was another thing we had in common. Anyone surprised I liked science fiction? No. Thought so. Although simple, it still was my best breakfast ever. Following my best wake-up ever. It struck me that from now on almost everything I did would be the best ever, including my taking a dump, which was going to be soon. I´m a regular guy, I go in the morning. Tina laughed at that. In fact she laughed a lot. The walk back to the hotel, hand in hand with Tina, was the best walk in my life. And in spite of an unspeakably disgusting toilet the shitting was good. Perhaps not the best in my life though, I had a vivid memory from that time in Turkey when I had the runs and almost came in my pants the wrong way. The relief of being able to let go that time was hard to beat. When I came back Tina was arguing with two German girls. My German is far from perfect, but understanding is easier than speaking. There are grammatical rules out your ears, but a lot of words are similar to Swedish. Had they argued in Danish I wouldn´t have been able to understand a thing, but now I was able to make out that they thought that Tina was totally irresponsible, that she would lose her job, that she had a heart big as a hippopotamus (Flusspferd) but the brains of a gnat and that her parents would shit on her from dizzy heights. I concluded that Tina (who was completely unfazed) had told them about me. Tina spotted me and smiled with happy pride. "Here he is," she beamed. "Be nice." I said hello and introduced myself as Johan for the first time in my life. They were nice. Somewhat suspicious, but nice. They introduced themselves as Regina (tall, blond, wagneresque) and Regina again. The second Regina was short with brownish hair. Looked sort of like Tina, except totally different. She (being the short one?) had her name shortened to Gina. "Soo, Tina told us you´re both going to Africa?" Gina said. This re-re-rendered me into unable-to-speak mode. That was me now -- not stupid but regularly dumb. That seemed to be what life with Tina was like. Hopefully I would get used to it. "After knowing each other for half an hour." Regina said. Or, actually: "When you einander kennen for half Stunde." Her English wasn´t all that good, which fit right in with that valkyrian thing she had going. I was somewhat at a loss as to how this situation ought to be dealt with in proper nice-guy fashion. It would feel like I was illoyal to Tina if I let on that we hadn´t talked about travelling together at all. I had mentioned where I intended to go, though, and she´d mentioned that we would grow old together so why be surprised but I was. "I didn´t need more than five seconds to understand that Tina was a very special person" I said, pleased with this diplomatic way out. "You can say that again" Gina said. "Very special indeed. And I love her a lot. She is also fucking crazy!" "Gina, you turd! I am not. Well, maybe a little. But that is part of my charm." "This is the third time you fall in love this holiday alone." Ouch, that hurt. "It is not. Peter was an asshole. Dieter was a jerk. Johan is a nice guy, I´m sure he is the one." They kept on arguing. I felt a little sad. Obviously Tina was impulsive, to put it mildly. And it seemed likely that this grow-old-together dream would last a week or something. But all right, if a week was all I would get I´d be happy with that. Possibly heartbroken and miserable, but happy anyway. But sad. Meanwhile, TinaGinaRegina had arrived at a compromise acceptable to all. We would not hurry to Cairo right away. We would stay in Athens for a while and get to know each other before making big decisions with too much instant karma. My agreement was taken for granted and happily given. It seemed very sensible. Tina insisted that if we were to stay here we had to find a proper hotel were we could get a room of our own. With a big bed. I did, of course, agree to that too, with a mixture of absolute joy and absolute dread. "We need condoms." Tina said as we searched for the right hotel. "Lots of condoms." We found a drugstore with a decent selection of rubbers, though the lights seemed unnecessarily bright and the clerk unnecessarily young and female. I tried to look invisible and nonchalant at the same time and I actually think I managed to pull it off reasonably well at first. "We need heaps and heaps of condoms!" Tina announced loudly, thus shattering my attempts at invisible and severely damaging my attempts at nonchalant. "Big ones! Just look at him. Big nose, big feet. He will be magnificent." I paid the giggling clerk, rather more red-faced than I had hoped for. But a little embarrassment was a small prize to pay. We were going somewhere I´d never been and I couldn´t wait to get there, terrified or not. CHAPTER 3 -- SEX, ACTUALLY Dionysian revels? We found a hotel, aptly named the Dionysos. Everything was white and it smelt of some probably-forbidden-in-Sweden detergent. I don´t know if Dionysos would have been altogether enthusiastic about that antiseptic approach, but we found it a vast improvement on the grimy cabbage of yesterday. The joy/dread thing had now filled me completely and I could feel it oozing out of me through every pore. The fear smelt much like that detergent, so I had hopes it would go unnoticed. The joy, smelling sort of like fresh bread, I hoped she´d notice. The Hotel room looked...well, like a hotel room but whiter. Since anything better than squalor was luxurious to me I thought it looked very nice. Tina didn´t waste time looking at the room; "Orgy time!" she yelled and tackled me. Suddenly she was everywhere. She was kissing me, undressing herself, undressing me, squeezing my dick and tickling me at the same time. I was mostly on my back, patting her, kissing whatever part of her was accessible. I was nervous, of course, but it seemed that Tina was more than willing to take the lead which was a relief. But I worried about the dreaded twin monsters facing the neophyte lover -- the Scylla of not getting it up and the Charybdis of premature ejaculation. Scylla didn´t have a chance when Tina got going. She felt amazing. Was amazing. She looked proud of her handiwork, looking at my now completely un-scyllied dick. She expertly rolled on the condom. Ok, time for some anti-charybdic measures. I had read that the thing to do was to think of unsexy things. I vainly tried to think of stamp collections, dirty socks, Gary Glitter, hitchhiking in Yugoslavia, but it didn´t work very well. Tina was there and all I could think of was her and she was the most un-unsexy thing in the world. She had some adorable freckles on her left tit. I loved them forever. Just when Tina was about to take my virginity she stopped. She stopped, lay down beside me, hugged me python style and started to cry. Shit! So close! "I can´t do it!" She sobbed." Not with you!" Shit again. Confirmed once more that I am totally not fuckable. But my niceguy autopilot turned itself on. "What´s wrong, sugarpig?" I said, hugging her back. Not python style, though. More like very secretly pissed teddybear. The Tina Trip 01 - Athens "It was easy with all those other guys" (just fucking brilliant) "Sex was just fun. With you it gets...complicated." (ok, here it comes; I love you but not like that it´s not you it´s me you´re a great guy and let´s be friends forever) "I really love you. I feel too much!" Silence. I was thinking what I was thinking and making small comforting sounds. At both of us I guess. More silence. Then: "I was raped you see." In my pre-Tina days I had two dominant themes to my sexual fantasies. There were the ones about sexually confident women who took the initiative and seduced me, thus saving me from the risk of rejection. The second theme had me as the strong one and a girl in need of someone like me -- kind, secure and not at all like those bastards or immature jerks she´d been with before. Tina had now managed to fulfill both dreams at once, in spite of them being sort of opposites. What was wrong with the situation according to fantasy B was that I was supposed to be calm, experienced and in control. I certainly was none of the above but, hey, Tina needed me to at least give it a shot. Fake it until you make it, I thought. "Shit, I´m sorry." I said, hugging away. "I´m sorry too," Tina sobbed. "I wanted it to be fantastic for you. Sex isn´t usually a big deal, just simple fun. And now I fuck up the fucking and you must be real mad. And then I tell you about the rape. Do you think I´m disgusting now?" "Of course not. You are the sweetest candy-puff darlinggirl in the world and there´s nowhere I´d rather be than here with you." "But I feel so...dirty in a bad way." "If a seagull shits on your head you are not that shit." "Guess not. But I worry about this little dear. He has grown all softish again and it´s my fault." "I´m afraid calling him a little dear is not the best way to revive him. It makes him feel small and...small." "Come on, you don´t have to worry about size mister. Surely you know that?" No, I didn´t know that. This was a very interesting line of conversation that I was sure I would want to come back to. But not now. "This rape thing. Do you want to talk about it?" She hugged me even harder. "No. I never want to talk about that. I probably will, though. But not yet. Let´s talk about this big dear instead and his degree of stiffness." "The subject certainly is of interest to me and I know that he is eager to receive such a degree. I´m sure that stiffication will occur with a modicum of attention." I was much less nervous now. To a great extent, I´m sure, because Tina needed me to be reasonably relaxed. Tina removed the condom and took my dick in a firm grip. "Has he got a name?" "Not really. Could you give him one?" "I could. But if I name him I own him!" "Joint custody?" "All right. His name is...Polyphemos." "A one eyed giant. I like it, miss librarian. A little boastful, perhaps." "Yep. I want to boast about this giant, now that he is mine." She was doing nice things. Polyphemos woke up and stood to attention. "Mmm, I like that." "Me too, I´m glad I at least can do this for you." It seemed that actual screwing was out for now, but I was getting a handjob from the girl of my dreams. I was happyhappy. Polyphemos was happy too, so happy he cried for joy, big sticky tears through his one eye and yeah, I know the analogy is rather labored but I like it. My breath was labored and I liked that too. Tina seemed happy too, though she didn´t want me to try to get her off. "Just snuggle," she said. "Snuggling is what I need." I was happy to snuggle. I had teddybearing down pat and she was an adorable snugglebunny. We kissed and nibbled and fell asleep and woke up and life was great. I dreamt wonderful dreams that night, but they were not as wonderful as being awake. A Dionysian breakfast later we were walking/flying towards the craphotel to meet Regina x 2. A fat man in neon outfit ran past us at a good clip. "That guy has to be German," Tina said. "He is also fast and bulbous." "That´s right, The Mascara Snake," she miraculously answered. I stopped, shaking my head. "How can you be so perfect?" I asked. "All that beauty, sweetness and brains. And you´re a music nerd too?" "OK," she said. "Who´s the drummer of Three Dog Night?" "No idea." "Me neither. Never listened to them. They got a neat band name, though. Old trappers kept warm by bringing a dog or two when they slept. A three dog night was really cold." "Perfect indeed. A hot nerd librarian crazygirl. Who could ask for more?" "Of course I´m perfect," she said and farted loudly. "WE are perfect." And we were. CHAPTER 4 -- BYE BYE ATHENS A father´s blessing. Sort of. "You really glow today," Gina said. "Wild night?" "Not wild, no. We didn´t even fuck. I´m saving myself for marriage. Today we will do mundane soon-married things. Send Johan´s winter clothes home to Sweden. Find him shoes that are more Africa than those warm boots. Check about plane tickets. I have to call my boss. And my parents." "Good luck with that!" "They will throw shit at me, like you said., but Stuttgart is a long way away. I don´t think they will hit me from that distance. There may be bystander casualties though. Poor innocent Greek bystanders suddenly bombarded with German rich people missile shit." "From what some of them mutter about tourists that would be an everyday thing to many of them." Mission one was sending that package to my parents. We found a cardboard-box and filled it with my hot stuff except Tina. It took us longer than planned to pack my boots. It was frigging hopeless to find shoes that fit me. Apparently Greeks didn´t have feet like mine, and shoe-salesmen watched them with incredulity. It was clear that they never had seen anything like it. Tina comforted me by pointing out that obviously Greek men had to be woefully short-changed when it came to other essential body-parts. At last we found something shoeish that I could get my feet into, in a leather-stuff store for tourists. They were hawking handbags, belts and whatever -- all made in stiff, ugly beige- brown leather. The shoes looked likes dogshit with laces and they were even more uncomfortable than they were ugly. I hated them, but they would have to do. Hopefully they would soften with use and adapt to the shape of my feet. We took a strip of photos in one of those photostripmachines and put it in the hot stuff box. I wrote a little letter to my parents and told them that these were pictures of my wife-to-be. I knew they´d be happy, since they always had wanted a daughter who was crosseyed and stuck her tongue out. Tina used a phone at the Dionysos. Her talk with the boss was all sweetness and Tina was happy. "I knew he wasn´t going to sack me, he´s a romantic sap just like me. I told him about you and he gave me six months off. No pay of course, but I still have my job when I come back. Well, truth be told there were practical considerations too. He was very happy with my sub and in six months one of my colleagues is having a baby. Win win. Now I have to call my parents. Romantic saps they are not!" This conversation was very rapid and emotional. I couldn´t follow it all that well but obviously none of them was happy. "They want to talk to you", Tina said. "I can tell them no." "No, I´ll take it." It was her father at the other end. He sounded like a strict business-oriented kind of man. He spoke German, but slow enough for me to follow. I tried hard to be grammatically correct, to use the polite forms of address and to not break down in a quivering heap. I answered his questions truthfully and was able to inform him that I did not use drugs, that I was a moderate drinker and that I earned my money with honest work. I also told him that my parents were teachers and that I planned to be a doctor or a psychologist and, yes, I would be admitted to such schools -- did in fact plan to start those studies after the summer. He did not enquire about politics, religion or taste in books or music. He wanted to know where I planned to take his daughter and my estimation of how dangerous the journey would be. I assured him that I was not at all attracted to danger and that I definitely planned to survive. Finally he harrumphed and sort of gave us his blessing with the reservation that if anything happened to Tina he would have me killed. We and the Reginas later discussed whether this was a serious threat or a strict business-oriented kind of joke. We were undecided, votes split two-two. Tina was amazed that her father had accepted the situation and told me that if her father liked me I could accomplish anything because the whole world would love me. It was, of course, her they loved, though they had severe difficulties in expressing it. But Tina found 5000 D-mark more than expected on her bank-account. Sweet parental love. Tina did not respond well to jokes on that subject, by the way. Rich parents were perhaps not entirely uncommon amongst us alternative folks, but a bit of an embarrassment just the same. Our second night together we orally pleasured each other. I had read a few texts on this subject matter and was thus not entirely unprepared. Tina seemed pleased enough, even though she did not have an orgasm. I worried about that for a bit, but not as much as might have been expected. By and large I was amazed how much time I spent not worrying about sex. And getting a bona-fide blowjob from a bona-fide girlfriend was the bona-fide high point of my life thus far. Do strict vegans do oral sex? Logically they shouldn´t, right? Swallow or not, you surely ingest some animal matter. Tina was convinced that vegans didn´t care and did oral anyway, I was not so sure. We decided to ask the first vegan we met, but when we finally did we forgot to ask. Tina´s animal matter tasted delightful. A bit like marmalade but less sweet and more umami, that weird fifth taste they suddenly sprung on us. Munching her umami mucus made me more than happy. Saltier, too. Next day was rainy. We had fun in our room most of the day. Sex fun, yes, although we still did not go all the way. But we also had a marvelous amount of other fun. It was incredible -- her brain worked just like mine, except more Tinaishly. We could share a nerdly joy in a bands-and-artists-with-an-animal-in-the-name competition. I vividly remember how fun it was and I am sorely tempted to write down the entire list, from Iron Butterfly to Pigbag. I will not, though. I will be strong for you. Cheating was encouraged, by the way, and Simon and Garfunkel was accepted on the grounds that a gar is a kind of fish. Fun and games, people. Fun and games. I sang her a lot of love songs, too, praising every aspect of her from her elbows to her cute way of pronouncing my last name, which is no easy task for a non-swede. In the evening we had a farewell dinner for the Reginas, who were going back to Berlin. They were not sorry to leave Athens. They had had a good time on the islands, but Athens was a disappointment to them. I agreed that Athens is not a very charming city. It´s big, polluted, mostly ugly and dominated by cars. Everybody seems to be stressed out. Tina and the Reginas cried when we parted. Gina held a small speech and said that she still thought that Tina had a gnat-brain but that maybe happiness could be found by following the hippopotamus. Bye bye Gina. Bye bye Regina. Bye bye Athens. Cairo, here we come.