Santorini

Hey all, I imagine this will be reasonably short since I haven't really done much in the last couple days. Left Thessaloniki at 11pm and arrived in Athens at 5.30am, at the port which was handy for the 7.30 ferry I was catching!

So eight hours later I arrived on Santorini and was collected by John of Katarina and John Hostel, the hostel in Perissa I'd been recommended. Perissa is home to the black sand beaches so by 4.30 I was on a beach! It was beautiful, and strange to walk into the water and change from sand to rock! Slippery but fun! The water was cold, the sun was hot, perfection :)

Quiet night, I just ate dinner and read outside till it got cold. Nothing extraordinary but it felt nice and holiday-ish. The only other person in my dorm is a Czech guy, Mark, who is on his annual holiday so we went to a nearby bar for a drink and met Gina, from Romania, who is working here for a while. It was a nice night and I was in bed by 10.

So Wednesday I decided to explore. I was going to hire a scooter (it's so the done thing) but on my license I could only get a quad-bike and it would cost 21 euros (lame) so I decided public transport would do just fine leaving me with an extra 15.60 to spend. I took the bus to Fira, the capital and wandered around for a few hours. I walked down the 588 steps to the port and then road a donkey back up! I can't put photos on this computer but soon I will post a picture of me on a 'donkey' and I want honest opinions about whether I actually road a donkey. I saw plenty of donkeys in Tanzania and this seemed very tall and smooth. There were definitely a few horses which had had their manes trimmed to pretend to be donkeys but I think maybe I had a non-reproducing hybrid: a mule. Still, it was fun, even if my touristy experience may be a fake! There was an American girl who was sort of freaking out so I felt pretty good about my lack of panic, not that it was exactly a panic-inducing ride. You're not in any kind of control, the donkeys just push past each other and follow the path up so it could be a bit nerve-racking but nothing extraordinary! I wandered some more, ate ice cream, checked out the museum and the cathedral (but rather underwhelming) and decided to move on.

I got the bus to Oia (said Ee-a) at about 3pm because I'd heard that was the place to be for the sunset. It's a beautiful town, the epitome of Santorini! When you see pictures of Santorini with the white houses and blue roofs then it's probably there. I spent a few hours exploring and got a souvlaki for dinner before heading out with all the other tourists to watch the sunset! I met Dimitri, a nice Athenian man, who was visiting his friend and we chatted about how safety in Athens has gotten so bad in the last ten years, among other things. The sunset was pretty impressive but not as good as in Tanzania I think, still took a few hundred pictures. Bus back to Perissa and another drink with my international friends!

So now it's Thursday, I've done some laundry (a very necessary task) and chatted to you all and now I'm going to go for a walk on the beach and get some groceries and buy my ferry ticket! So that's it, Nafplio next which is meant to be the prettiest town in Greece! There's some stiff competition there but I'm determined to be an unbiased judge.