A week on Kos, Greece

Our week on Kos (kohsh, not kawse) was relaxing and largely uneventful.

Highlights:
• Renting a “buggy” and cruising around the island’s winding roads (despite its narrow seats spawning a complex about my ass width 🫤)
• Sunset dinner up the mountain in Zia (complete with cremated 🔥 lamb chop)
• Lovely wine tasting with snack pairings, overlooking the vineyards and Aegean Sea
• Great Airbnb in Marmari, with neighboring donkeys braying at mealtimes, and a praying mantis visiting our clothes drying rack
• Getting “upgraded” at the Diamond Deluxe Hotel to a room with a round bed 😂 and a perfect view of the bar (wait….THEY can see US?!?) 🤦‍♀️

Geography: The island is arid with a mix of sandy and pebbly beaches (most of which are private and/or populated with for-rent sunbeds for €5-20/day depending on location and services provided).

Weather: There’s a fairly constant wind from the north and, although the sea wasn’t what *I* would call warm, it didn’t stop the hearty (i.e. crazy) types from partaking. As both places we stayed were on the north shore, we didn’t spend too much time on the beach as the warmer afternoon sun invariably came with more assertive winds and you had to turn your lounge chair away from the beautiful sea view to create a windblock or settle for windburn.🫤 We did go for a drive to the southern beaches which had milder weather and where we learned what an “exotic” beach is (hint: its not full of tropical plants & animals). ❌👙🩳🫣

Tourism: The number of resorts, hotels, and apartments available boggles the mind (see screenshot of hotel.com search 🤯), and those only slightly outnumber the car/buggy/quad/scooter/bike rental shops. Add in a vast number of restaurants and bars and it’s not hard to guess that tourism is #1 here. That said, everyone we encountered was nice and generally seemed happy to have us there. It probably doesn’t hurt that most businesses on the island close November 1 to April 30, time the locals we queried said they use for cleaning, maintenance, and some rest during the holidays. I got the sense that it must be absolutely nuts during the summer busy season.

Culture: Kos is the home of Hippocrates. Yes, THAT Hippocrates. There were a fair number of ruins around town but I think we missed the most impressive ones, opting instead for people watching along the waterfront. The pace is laidback, as with most tourist destinations, and the vendors/shop owners make sure you know what they have to offer but don’t chase you down the street.

Agriculture: The countryside looked pretty scrubby, possibly due to it being the end of the season and ~6-8 months since any significant rain. There didn’t seem to be much commercial agriculture beyond a few fields of potatoes, some vineyards, and quite a few olive groves. More common were afew rows of table produce—lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, corn and a lot of aubergine 🍆— planted here and there. Every cow I saw was tied out on a rope in a field that you wouldn’t think would sustain life and I really hope all those buckets had some water. 🙏

Food & Drink:
TLDR: Lots of touristy food; local cuisine very fresh, seafood-centric with almost no seasoning/spices and very little garlic. Affordable, tasty local wines, especially dry rosé. A few highlights, but we mostly missed the amazing depth of flavors in Turkish food.

It’s tough to get a bead on a super touristy destination’s food culture as generally it’s trying to cater to a bunch of different palates. Most restaurants in hotels and in town had the requisite burger, chips (fries), a few pasta options, Caesar salad and pizzas alongside some more targeted tourist food like full English breakfast and schnitzel. (Give me a few menus and I’ll tell you which nationalities visit a place.)

Then there was the “standard” Greek fare: souvlakis (grilled meat kebabs), gyros, Greek salads, tzatziki 🤤 and hummus. And so, so much bread and pitas.

Beyond that, this place is all about seafood: a few kinds of grilled fish, abundant octopus & calamari, then shrimp and mussels featured prominently on most restaurant menus. Everything was very fresh and prepared well but bold flavors (and, in some cases, any seasoning at all) are not really a thing here.

Fortunately, our lovely Airbnb hostess, Sia, had a bunch of recommendations near our house which was intentionally chosen for its country location, so we got a bit more of the local food flare. We found, of course, gorgeous Greek salads, tasty pizza with a local sausage, and €3 gyros! From our hotel later in the week, we went for a walk and ended up stopping for an early dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall place on the edge of town for souvlakis and hand-cut fried potatoes…tasted like home cookin’!

Prices were higher than Turkey, but lower than what you’d find in the U.S., partially due to more affordable food but mostly wine (~€6/glass, €25-40 for a decent local bottle but of course more 💰 options were available).Læs mere