Oia and away...

Santorini is so beautiful it's difficult for me to imagine how people can bear to live there year round. Every time I looked up I felt like I got hit in the head with a beauty stick and consequently walked around in a daze most of the time. Besides the gargantuan striped cliffs, the black volcano sulking in the caldera, and the ubiquitous white houses with blue, green, and aqua shutters, there's the ocean in seven different shades of blue-green with an occasional bit of purple thrown in just to confuse the tourists. In the evening a haze on the horizon blended the sunset colors into watercolor washes over a third of the sky.

K, who lived in California for 10 years, was a little nervous hanging out on the edge of a crater and the towns certainly do look as if they're poised to slide right into the caldera at the first sign of a tremble. I bought two photos of the volcano smoking, one from 1926, the other from 1935. Imagine waking up and looking out your front door to see this:


We met some lovely people in Oia and two of the nicest were Assia, who works at one of our favorite jewelry stores, and her son Toni, who works at our hands down favorite restaurant in Santorini. We met Assia while shopping for gifts. The store, Lithos, like most of the jewelry stores in Santorini, has lots of lava bead jewelry, but they also have other really wonderful jewelry by Greek artists - we thought it was the best jewelry store we'd seen since 21st Century, our favorite store on Hydra. Assia was charming and helpful and, when we'd finished buying way too much, we asked her where to go for a good, not so expensive, dinner. (This was on our first night in Oia, after the sunset I wrote about last time. As we walked the main pedestrian street getting oriented and looking for dinner, we were struck by how expensive and upscale the restaurants were -- not the usual tavernas we'd come to expect and love.) She recommended Thomas Grill, where her son Toni works.

Thomas Grill turned out to be a family-style restaurant that was busy, but not so busy we couldn't find a table. A friendly looking young man approached and we asked if he were Toni. No, but he called Toni out to seat us. K said, "Your mother sent us" which caused the staff and half the customers to laugh out loud and Toni to blush bright red. He recovered, seated us, and we had a truly fantastic meal followed by a very nice conversation with Toni. Turns out that he and his mother are Bulgarian and they only live on Santorini during the tourist season. We had a wonderful time and went back there for dinner the next night as well. At that point we might as well have been family. The host took us to "our table" and, after another great meal, Toni came out not just with complimentary ouzo, but also with two bright yellow Thomas Grill t-shirts for us. Pictures were taken, followed by handshakes all around. (That's Toni on the left and Thomas in the center. I'm afraid I don't know the name of the woman.)

On the way back to the hotel we stopped in at Lithos to tell Assia how much we liked the restaurant. She was helping a customer but when she looked up and saw the Thomas Grill t-shirt I was holding up she started laughing and came to give us hugs. The customer was pressed into service as a photographer and we went on our way, promising to send copies of the pictures.

Our three days on Santorini started with the worst hotel experience of the entire trip, but we ended up feeling that we had come to a magical place. Much too soon we were on our way back to Athens and then a hellish 10 hour flight on Olympic Airlines that started by being four hours late getting off the ground and deteriorated from there. A hint if you're planning on traveling anytime soon: don't watch the two hour pilot of Lost the day before you have to get on an airplane or you're likely to end up clutching your partner's arm yelling "Oh, shit!" when you hit turbulence. In my defense I'll say that it was pretty serious turbulence and the older couple next to us were busy crossing themselves repeatedly while I was expostulating.

Paros, part 2 and on to Santorini

One minute I'm basking in the Greek sun, the next I'm back in NJ in the muggy rain. Expulsion from Eden can't have been any worse than this. Truth be told, I was ready to come home - or at least ready to have my workshop, bed, and cats close to hand again. Could all three have been transported to a lovely Cycladic house on Paros, I would've been very happy to stay.

The second half of our stay on Paros was in Naoussa a formerly sleepy fishing village which has now turned into an upscale resort town. There are still piles of nets on the docks but a Greek friend said he thought they were "for the tourists," not the fish. The center of town is chock-a-block with restaurants, cafes, souvlakerias, and clubs. At night it's like a carnival, with colored lights strung in the trees, vendors standing at carts or walking through the crowds, and music coming from every direction. This young entrepreneur was selling roasted corn and the ubiquitous balloons on sticks. SpongeBob Square Pants and his friend Patrick were very popular.

We stayed at the Stelia Mare Hotel, which is about a 15 minute walk from the center of town. Coming from the Pension Sofia we were stunned by the scale and relative luxury of the place. Our executive suite was maybe four times the size of our room at the Sofia and came complete with a kitchen larger than most NYC apartment kitchens, a living room/dining room area, large balcony, and truly spacious bathroom. The breakfast buffet was exhaustive: cheese and spinach pies, croissants, two types of fresh bread, Greek yogurt, honey, melon, cereals, local cream cheese, fresh tomatoes, boiled eggs, scrambled or fried eggs, bacon or sausage, hash browns, and Greek cookies. Unfortunately, the coffee was awful and even paying for a cappuccino didn't improve matters much. The people who work there are professional and charming. Still, our hearts belonged to the Pension Sofia, which gave us a lovely home at a quarter of the price of our executive suite.

Thankfully, Paros and Santorini are in the same group of islands, so we didn't have to troop back to Piraeus to get to our next island stop. I truly loved our time in Paros - it has the perfect mix of good beaches, good food, good shopping, and gorgeous scenery. Nevertheless, the highlight of our trip was Santorini.

Approaching the island by ferry you see sheer cliffs striped in black, red, and white, topped with white towns that drip over the cliff edges like icing. The ferry lands at Athinios port, which is a sliver of a town clinging to the base of the cliffs. It's a dusty, noisy strip of shops, with tour buses, vans, cars, and motorbikes weaving in and out of the crowds of suitcase-rolling tourists. It looks like something out of the Star Wars frontier scenes.

The first night we stayed in a small hotel in Firostefani, a suburb of Fira, the main town on the island of Thira, which is the largest of the group of islands that make up Santorini. The hotel, which, like all the others we stayed in, I had found on the internet, was not good. Even if we hadn't just come from the lap of luxury it wouldn't have been good. To be fair, the room was very large and it faced the caldera, meaning the view was stunning. It even had a living room/dining room area and a kitchen - but everything was shabby and dingy. The furniture looked vaguely early American, like it had been purchased from the Sears catalogue circa 1965. There were no lamps, only wall or ceiling mounted spotlights with bare bulbs. The bathroom was small and had the kind of shower that consists of a drain in the floor and a shower head on the wall. We decided to make the best of it and went off to dinner in Fira, where we had a fabulous meal at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the caldera and overlooked by a neighboring church.

Getting to and from the restaurant was a bit of a trial. We walked (30 minutes each way), by choice on the way there and of necessity on the way home. Getting a cab in town is impossible and we had no idea how to find a bus. Also, the streets that look so nice and straight on the map are actually winding paths that detour around corners and dead-end into shops, which is to say, we got lost. A few times. The center of Fira is a souk with roofed arcades that open into miniature squares, but the stores are much more high-end than anything we'd seen up to that point. It was crammed with people in snaking lines like the sidewalks in Provincetown at high season. By the time we finally got home we were exhausted and didn't much care whether the room smelled slightly of insecticide or not - which it did.

Next time, we find paradise in Oia.