Arriving about an hour late, we met our driver waiting with our sign who then complained that he waited for an extra hour that he could have picked other people up in that time. Little did we know that this dude was actually the husband (possibly) of the operator (and maybe owner) of the hotel that we were staying at.

We were quickly introduced to the Greek road rules, or the lack there of. You want to turn left in the left turn lane and you don’t like how many cars are waiting at the red left turn arrow? No problems, pull out drive to the front and drive infront of oncoming traffic and go through. At this point it became apparent that the rules weren’t even a rough guideline.

Our hotel was situated in the “old town” section of Rhodes, which is inside the walls of an old castle.

To our surprise the driver takes us over a bridge barely big enough for the compact car that we were in. There was a large door that looked like it was used for carts drawn by horses in one of the walls after the moat. Thinking that this was the end of the road for us neither of us expected what would happened next. The driver continues to drive the car into this spot just as we notice two holes in either side of this door in an oddly located spot (about the height of a side mirror on a car), then following this was the most professionally executed 3 point turn I have seen in my life. There was literally less than a foot of room for error.

With the three point turn executed off we were speeding down cobbled stone street dodging people, cats, dogs, scooters and basically anything else unfortunate to be in our path of travel.

Upon arriving at the hotel we were greeted by an awesome sight of vine covered walls that looked like they had been growing for many many years.

After 24 hours of being away you start to get a little batshit crazy, so we decided it would be good to do a quick trip around the old town and then hit the hay. This is the first point that we should have said “Maybe we should study that map a bit”. Nope!

So after getting lost about 4 times we found this place (Ta Kipona). There appears to be two types of restaurants in old town, the tourist traps and the places that the locals eat at. We didn’t want to order from pictures of poorly photographed hamburgers or steaks that looked like they were from plastic play sets.

Ta Kipona was a place where the locals appeared to go when they were looking for some fine dining  It was a unique style of eating, the waiter quickly explained that they would bring us the different courses and we would decide based on what they showed us, we could sample and if we liked it, we kept eating it if not, we sent it back.

First up was the bread round, some old very soft doughed bread. We were then given the surprise option of purchasing something that the chef had just thrown together today, fried butter batter with Gorgonzola cheese, feta, olive oil and some herbs in little triangles. There wasn’t any argument there and they were blissfully awesome.

Onto the next course, the appetizers  we went with spice cheese and tzaziki. This is likely to be the best tzaziki.  I have had so far (time is writing end of phase 1). We originally went with octopus and spicey cheese however it was not cooked to Jill’s preference so we tested the “Send it back” option and it worked surprisingly well.

At this point we were midway through our first carafe of house wine (each restaurant has their own wine).

Onto the mains, I decided to go with spicey kebabs and Jill took the sea food option of sea bass. My kebabs weren’t that spicey however I realized after this that there isn’t a great deal of spicey greek food. The fact that they weren’t too spicey didn’t detract from the overall goodness of the way the meat was cooked. Jill’s seabass was divine. After we finished up our mains we decided to skip on dessert. The waiter brought us some on the house shot glasses with a weird nugurt in it that both jill and I didn’t much care for. All in all, awesome first meal. Jill’s edit for historical accuracy: We also were brought out complementary baklava, which was wonderful. We’ve gotten quite a few “on the house” extras while we have been here!