Ok, so I know this will primarily appeal to guys, but for $12.99 (Target) I don’t think anyone can go wrong; these are some heavily padded slippers. Now that we’ve gone from a high rise to a traditional house it’s a bit more chilly, especially in the basement. Now if only they could say “Doh!”….hmm…..
We went to the Acropolis Museum in the morning since it is closed on Mondays, which is when we were at the actual Acropolis earlier in the week. It is an incredibly crowded museum, maybe because it’s only been open for a few months. I think the Archaeological Museum has a lot more to see, actually. We’re leaving the hotel in about five hours to catch our 5am flight. We’ll be home at noon Central time. I can’t wait to see my own bed again. Good bye, Greece. It’s been fun.
Got home about 1pm Central. Doing a football marathon right now to catch up on all of the Badger/Packer games I missed. Must stay awake….must stay awake…..
The Agora is a really interesting site to see. Unlike the Acropolis, there are a lot of artifacts housed on-site so that you can spend time looking at the ruins of the Agora and also the artifacts that have been found there. After that we hopped in a cab to the Archaeological Museum, which is loaded with room after room of artifacts. This is definitely a place where you can spend the entire day or split it into two days. I almost wish we hadn’t visited the Agora first since it was hard to actually make it through the entire museum after that. Probably the most astounding thing I saw in the museum was my former boss, the now retired Secretary of the Senate Mr. Patrick Flahaven. I swear that there must be some strange alignment in the cosmos because not only do I run into him in St. Paul from time to time, but here, in a city of six million eight time zones from our home. He and his wife were just finishing up a tour around the Mediterranean and it’s good to see he’s putting his retirement to good use. Now for the museum. It is truly incredible and words can’t really do it justice. All I can say is that you might walk out of there actually tired of seeing statues cut out of marble; there’s just an enormous amount of them. Tomorrow is our last day! Better make it count.
Cindy was intent on starting the day very early at 8am. We started out at their parliament building to watch the changing of the guards, complete with marching band, which only takes place once per week on Sunday morning. We then headed to the Acropolis and surrounding sites. It’s interesting to see, but it’s really just a lot of ruins and not any artifacts. My personal opinion is that seeing artifacts in a museum is more interesting than seeing ruins, but that’s just me. We ended the day by taking a cable car up to the top of the highest point in the city to have dinner and watch the sunset.
It was probably a good day to be leaving Santorini since it rained most of the day. Cindy was more sad to leave than I was; the island is small and I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic after nearly a week. Here are some of my final thoughts about the island.
- Churches: They’re everywhere. Dozens upon dozens. Except that they’re usually one room and about five hundred square feet in size and look locked up and abandoned. A lot of them are stuck in far flung places on the island, sometimes hanging off of nearly inaccessible cliffs. I need to do some research because with such a small island I can’t figure out why there are so many churches that are of such a small size as to appear unusable as a place of religious worship. My only thought is that before the island was accessible by car that perhaps people needed a small church in every corner of the island.
- Street Animals: Like a lot of warm weather places Santorini has an issue with stray cats and dogs. There was a cat at each of the places we stayed that befriended me. Each of them were born sometime this year and were probably around six months old. If I could have taken home Bucky#2 and Little Leopard I probably would have. There were some really nice dogs wandering around, too.
- Abandoned Buildings: On certain parts of the main island and even more so on Therasia there are vast quantities of abandoned buildings. Some are from long ago and crumbling and some are much more recent. There are a lot of places that we happened upon that made me wonder about who lived there and why they left. To be fair, Santorini has suffered through a number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and each time one of those occurs people pack up and leave never to come back.
More thoughts as they come to me……
We intended to head to the beach today, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. Instead we walked down the stairs in Oia to the water and then back up and around the north side of the island. When we got back up into Oia Cindy wanted to shop so I went back to our room and hung out by the pool. It was really windy, but the sun was out so it was warm. We went to watch our last sunset in Santorini, had dinner, and called it a night.
There’s a four hour hike from Oia to Fira that we wanted to try. It was a beautiful hike, but tiring since the terrain across the island is quite rough. I think it only took us about two and a half hours once we got going, which was a challenge in and of itself. We kind of ran into the same problem we had with the hotel last night in that we knew there was a trail somewhere nearby, but it wasn’t really marked in any fashion so after going in circles multiple times we finally figured it out. It was nice being back in Fira where it’s still fairly busy even though we’re near the end of the tourist season here. We hopped on a bus and were quickly on our way back to Oia. It clouded up and there wasn’t really a sunset tonight. It looked like it was going to storm with a lot of lightening in the distance, but it only sprinkled briefly. It’s strange being in this multilevel cliffside complex where we’re the only people around. I think I’m starting to have my own episode of Lost; I’m ready to get off the island. It will be nice to move on to Athens on Saturday.
Our last day at El Greco Hotel. Sad to leave as it will probably end up being my favorite place we stayed. Checked out and left our bags so we could go to the “Black Beach” for the afternoon. It turned out to be a nice day and I spent most of our time at the beach in the water. We’ve been riding the bus to all of the far away places we’ve wanted to visit on the island and decided that we’d splurge on a cab versus walking from the bus station back to the hotel to get our bags only to have to haul them back to the bus station. Oia (or Ia) is a few miles away on the northern most section of the island and you can easily see it from Fira. The place we’re staying at in Oia is of a more traditional style and is built right into the side of the mountain. We had a really hard time finding it from the main walkway as it wasn’t clearly marked and after backtracking and asking random people multiple times we finally found it. The only problem is nobody was there. Someone at the villas next door saw us and called to get someone to check us in. It’s hard to explain because these aren’t hotels so there’s not really a main office or building for that matter; it’s just a complex of villas and stairs built into the side of a mountain. We got our room key and quickly realized we were the only guests. We are definitely right at the end of their tourist season and you can tell over here. The pool hasn’t been cleaned in a while, most of the outside furniture is put away for the winter, and there’s just not anyone around. On the plus side we have a great view of the caldera. El Greco on the other hand was mostly full when we were there. It’s a little disappointing because we had far better everything at El Greco and it was a lot cheaper. Oia is smaller than Fira and as such there’s not as much going on. There’s still a main drag with restaurants and shops and it is one of the favorite places to watch the sunset on the island, though. After getting our things settled we went to watch the sunset and have dinner.
Today was our first beach day in Santorini, but the weather didn’t cooperate much. Scattered showers, clouds, and a fierce wind were the theme of the day. We still hopped on a bus to check out the “Red Beach” and I was fully intent on actually swimming until we got there and were greeted by four to five foot waves. We walked around town and stopped for a beer at Murphy’s Irish Pub, which had an actual Irishman behind the counter. On our walk back to the hotel it started to pour and the wind coming in off the sea was some of the most intense I’ve ever experienced. You can’t win them all.
Today may have been my favorite day so far on this trip. Right now we’re staying up near the main town of Fira and there’s basically two ways to get down to the Old Port, by taking the nearly six hundred stairs or riding the cable car. (You can also ride horses/donkeys down the stairs, but we felt bad for the animals). We opted to take the stairs down where we proceeded to board a large wooden schooner that took us over to the volcano that formed all of the surrounding islands. We hiked up the volcano and had a look at the crater. All of the magma and activity is underground so it’s not like a volcano you’d see in the movies. There are a couple of places where steam is being created from the heat and from a distance the volcano looks like it is smoking a bit. After a walk around we got back on the boat and headed to an area of hot springs off the side of the volcano. The boat anchored and anyone who wanted to jump off and have a swim could do so. After our swim it was back on the boat to the island of Therasia. There are only a few hundred people who live on this island, but there are still a number of small restaurants when you dock that basically cater to the volcano tours. There are also steps that go up the side of the mountain to the village of Therasia. Cindy and I decided to go up since we had nearly two hours to kill on our stop. It was a little sad and lonely at the top as I’d say half of the buildings were abandoned. It’s really a very isolated place since everything has to come over from the main island via boat. We got back to Fira a little after 5pm and although I was up for taking the stairs Cindy convinced me to take the cable car. We were so worn out from the whole day that we just decided to hang out at the hotel tonight. Kalinichta!
