Santorini

I’ll say this straight-out: Santorini deserves its reputation as a tourist spot. This is place is gorgeous—I don’t even know where to begin! (Obviously, photos would make this whole thing a lot easier.) Anyway, we even all took photos of the hotel we stayed at (if you go there on a budget, I highly recommend Villa Manos—they’re incredibly nice, and the place is so clean); well, honestly, all of Santorini is worthy of pictures. On the one hand you have a cacophony of shops and adorable little domed churches and houses with the wide, Cycladic arches—far more than in Hora (the capital city of Naxos); but once again, this is a major tourist destination; God knows what they do in the off season (I hear it’s like a ghost town, actually). Don’t let the tourism get you down! Enjoy it, relax…. I’d love to be back in Santorini right now. (I don’t know how obvious it’s been, but I’ve been posting these later when I actually have Internet access…actually, I didn’t check my email once, not to mention visit other websites, from the 20th through the 26th.)

Admittedly, the drive up from the port (Athinias, I think it’s called) is kind of terrifying. See, the roads are tiny and narrow, but they somehow have two lanes and people just zoom around the corners….

Anyway, even with photos, it’s impossible to convey what it’s like to be there, and it will remain so until I learn how to draw sound: the chatter, random Greek folk music that’s obviously only playing to get the tourists in; although sometimes they go ahead with the Europop and Eurotrash, which primarily consists of bad covers or bizarre remixes of ‘80s and ‘90s American music.

But another thing you should know: the narrowness of the island means you can pretty much see the Aegean all the time…it’s wonderful. I have missed salt water so much; and of course it also means that, no matter where the sun is in the sky, you have a lovely view.

We went to try and find a certain souvlaki place, spent half an hour—it turned out—just walking around it, going down all these side streets, finally asking for directions to the main square a block away down the same road from the main square, and then, when we finally got there…it was closed for Easter Monday. FML (except not really, I mean, can you legitimately bitch about anything while on Santorini? NO).

Unrelated story: on the ferry to Santorini from Naxos, there were some dudes playing a mandolin and a guitar; I’d call it Greek folk music. This only heightened my conviction that we were to suffer the same fate as the third-class passengers on the Titanic (seriously, the instrumental theme was playing in my head every time I went walking about on the ferry…except for the awesome moment on the way to Naxos from Piraeus where we hit a patch of fog and everyone pulled out their iPods and played “Fog Bound” from the first ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’—I listened in—and we all waited for Davy Jones to show up and maybe pull off some mad organ skills with his face). But anyway, I haven’t been able to get ‘Titanic’ out of my head even though I’ve been on a bunch of ferries by now within a relatively short period of time. Goes to show what weird things can influence your childhood….