In August, I spent 15 days in Turkey and Greece and the strangest part of the trip was staying at a party hostel called Francesco’s on the island Ios. If cities create narratives for you as you walk through them, Ios’s story is called “Drunk Australians.”

My sister, Annie, and I took a slow, six-hour ferry from Mykonos to Ios where we were retrieved by a Francesco’s employee, an Australian expat named Nick, who stuffed us in a van with a pack of Australians —  Australians who liked to party. While he drove us from the port to the hostel, Nick gave us a run-down on how to party in Ios, which included the sentence, “There’s some historical shit, but you don’t care about that.” As he spoke, a couple of female Australians whispered to all the girls in the van about Nick’s reputation: enough Australians traveled to this hostel and home again that they were able to gossip about each employee. One of the employees was a known bastard, who liked to lure girls to bed and then kick them out immediately after sex. Nick, who was not hot, was the one who described all the clubs in Ios to us.

At the hostel, we were led to a bar where the hostel owner Francesco (obviously) made an appearance and asked a bartender (with the best boobs I’ve seen in my life) to pour Annie and I a shot of flavored vodka. We took our shots, and walked around Ios before returning to Francesco’s bar at 10:30 at night for our second free shot: the “Welcome Shot” every new hostel member got at the start of their stay.

Everyone in the hostel who wanted to party — piles of Australians, and a few Canadians (Northern Australians) — hung out at the hostel bar until about 12:30. Then the hostel employees closed the bar and literally herded us through Ios Town to a club, which Francesco also owned. Like sheep, we stumbled drunkenly through the cobblestone streets, clutching white walls on narrowly spaced buildings to keep our balance. Our sheepdogs were a bunch of burly Australians, who worked for Francesco and wore tank tops from all of the Ios clubs: Disco 69, Blue Note, Circus Club, Orange, Jager Bar. A drunk girl with a husky, worn-out voice, wearing a Blue Note tank top, told me she’d extended her stay in Ios an extra five days. The narrow avenues were packed, three or four Australians deep, between the jagged white walls of all the Ios clubs and late-night gyros places, music and light bursting out of each doorway so the street felt as alive as Istanbul’s Grand Bazar at midday.

At Blue Note, they played Top 40 dance remixes and the drinks were two for 5 euros all night long, but at some point I stopped buying for myself. Paul Theroux wrote, “The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume” but apparently, it covers foreign drink-buying.

The clubs were like college make-out parties, and everyone really did vaguely know each other they way you do on campus, because they were mostly Australian. Stumbling from bar to bar through streets full of tourists, I was foreign and outnumbered because I was American, but not because they were Greek. Surrounded by Turks in a techno club in Istanbul that no other tourists had found (yet?), I was foreign, but it felt authentic to be awkwardly American. Ios was a funhouse mirror, where the type of people we called Destination Partiers — people who travel to party, not to sightsee — rule the night; no Greeks to be seen except the Greeks selling something. It was seedy, indulgent, and made my skin itch, but in hindsight, it was as real as any bar full of Greeks, as real as the Acropolis in Athens. Our world is made up of both the “authentic” and the “inauthentic” — the boundaries between them and the definitions of the words are complicated, so I won’t try to draw straight lines here. But experiencing a tourist scene is its own kind of tourism.

By the next morning, Annie and I were done with clubbing. On our second night in the hostel bar, we sat on the ledge with the vast labyrinth of twisting Ios streets below us, having by instinct taken one step outside of the proceedings, despite being completely inside of them the night before. We started calling our fellow hostel-goers “Destination Partiers” after we’d already partied like them, not before.

In Istanbul, we spent five days sightseeing. Later, in Santorini, we climbed to the crater of an active volcano and swam in the hot springs. In Ios, we drank with the Australians. In a way, these are all the same thing, although only one of them leaves you with a wicked hangover.


 
 
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