Go Away, Tan Lines.

I no longer remember what life was like when I wasn’t itchy. I’m pretty sure that I’m allergic to nearly every plant and insect in Greece and, as a result, I’m fighting a losing battle with my environment on a daily basis. Mosquitos love me so I combat their love by covering nearly my entire body from 6pm onward… They are now collectively focusing on biting my neck and face though which has been fun. Most of the cats here have fleas so on the rare occasion that I forget this very real fact and pick one of them up, I spend the next several days biting my lip and trying not to scratch flea bites. If it’s not the cats’ fleas, it’s the wild collection of adorable hedgehogs that come into the stable at night to eat the leftover cat food- those bad boys are crawling with fleas and they drop them off like a bus service each time they arrive for dinner. The storm flies also seem to flock to me and they make me feel like I’m in a permanent state of creepy crawlies.

The hay, too, is different enough that whenever I get a tiny scrape from it, I have hives surrounding said scrape for at least 24 hours. I mean, what the hell? Greece would be 100000x closer to paradise if I wasn’t permanently uncomfortable.

On the plus side, I’ve stopped having my annual allergic reaction to the sun so I spend a couple afternoons each week slathered in SPF and laying out by the sea or in the back field soaking up some rays while reading a book or taking a nap. I’m getting so brown it’s amazing.

Brown… With about a million cuts, scratches, bruises, and insect bites on top.