Spartacus/ Grande Grotta
It was absurdly crowded today: there were lines, for a hard climb called Spartacus, which I have never seen before. I did Jellyfish Pie a vue, then we fled to the Grande Grotta to escape the huge (20 people) spanish crew that had congregated.
Chloe tried "Aphrodite"
photo by mark
and figured out a workable sequence. We watched a really tall french guy on Zawinul Syndicate. ZS is a huge climb on tufas, with several mean looking cruxes on it. He was there with his wife and daughter, so when he climbed his wife was belaying him, and their daughter would periodically wander off. While he was on the climb, she scrambled to the top of a boulder and was teetering there while her mother demanded that she get down (she refused). She also managed to find a used piece of chewing gum, which she happily tossed into her mouth and chewed. If you have been to Kalymnos, you know that every flat surface in any sheltered area (like the Grand Grotta) is covered in goat shit pellets, which made the whole gum incident even more gut wrenching. At one point she put something else in her mouth and started crying: one can only guess what it was. Meanwhile, her dad was trying to get through the cruxes and scolding her whenever he got to rests. He fought through almost all of the climb until he got within a meter of the chains, got tired, started screaming "Nooooooo!", then lobbed off. Echos of "Meeeeeeeeeeer-duhhhhhhhhhhhh" echoed through the cave as he came to grips with having spent nearly 40 minutes carefully trying to onsight the climb. When he got down I heard him mutter to himself: "zawinul syndicate... c'est moi qui est nul!!". "Nul" means useless, crap.
We watched another impressive on sight of Priapos, and I went for a run on Aegialis. 
Aegialis seemed pretty impossible to link, but a Greek guy named Spiros was leaving draws on it so I vowed to come back and do better. Chloe seconded it and did great 
In order to get better knee bars, I also resolved to engineer knee pad embedded climbing pants.
We had cheeseburgers, shakes and fries at Glaros. Calamari overload.
