Weekend adventures

Day one (Friday, 3 October)
-Get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to be out of the apartment by 5:30 to catch the metro to Piraeus for a 7:00 ferry. I am accompanied on this adventure by two of my roommates and two of their friends, for a grand total of five people.
-Eight hour ferry ride to Santorini. The ferry stops at Paros and Naxos before it gets to Santorini. On the Piraeus-Paros leg of the ride, there is a professional magician from Spain doing card tricks. He calls himself Ben-hur after the Charles Heston film, but his real name is Manuel. He doesn't know very much Greek, and the Greeks didn't know very much Spanish, so he was doing his patter in English as a lingua franca, but it was cool being able to understand some to a lot of all three languages being used in the performance. After the ferry makes port in Paros, Ben-hur and wife disembark (to the tune of Coventry Carol, weirdly enough. The ferry was playing it as its Muzak while people were getting off the ferry, I have no idea why), and I sit down near where I was standing to watch his performance and pull out my knitting. The Greeks nearby ask me about it, but as my Greek is barely good enough to say "I am a student from the United States. Yes, I am knitting," they ignored me after a bit and were chatting in Greek, of which I understood only a little.
-Finally, we make land in Santorini. Coming into Santorini: you are in a volcanic caldera, created when the volcanic island of Thera exploded in about 1550 BCE, and you see sheer rock cliffs going down to the water. There are three main islands in the Santorini group, but the island of Thera itself is the one that people actually live on. Our hostel has sent down a van to convey all of the people from the ferry to the hostel (about 10 people). The van winds up switchbacks up the face of the cliff and drives us to our hostel. The hostel is extremely nice, more like a hotel than a hostel.
-After we put down our stuff and freshen up a bit, we take the KTEL to the village of Oia to watch the sunset. Oia is a very picturesque little village, all over white walls and blue highlights and arches, on the edge of the cliffs (as I think all villages in Santorini are, so that they can have access to the water). It's the village that all of the postcard pictures of Santorini were taken in. And the sunset from there is pretty. We have dinner at a taverna along with another one of my roommates' friends who happened to be there and the friend's friend who was visiting from spending the semester abroad in Cairo. I had meatballs in tomato sauce, which was disturbingly like chicken tikka masala (except with meatballs, not chicken), considering that it was labeled a "Greek dish" and we are really far away from India).
-Then back to the hostel.

Day two (Saturday, 4 October):
-Up at 8ish to go into town. We walked into Fira and visited the Museum of Prehistoric Thera, which has a collection of Theran pottery and frescoes, including the one from the House of the Ladies and the one with monkeys gathering saffron. I really enjoyed getting to look at everything.
-Then we wandered around Fira for a bit before we caught a bus that took us to the port. We signed up to take a "Santorini in one day" kind of tour, which normally I don't approve of, but we did only have one real day on Santorini and it seemed to get us to all of the places where you're supposed to visit when you're there, and we didn't have to worry about working out the transportation links by ourselves, so it was probably justified.
-The tour: at the port, we got onto a boat which could have been a sailing ship (it had the masts and everything), except that they didn't have the sails up and we were moving the entire time under the diesel engine. The boat took us to the volcano, which we got to hike up. It was a much better hike than the one down the Agia Irini gorge. For one thing, this one was actually on a pretty decent trail, with fractured volcanic fill underneath rather than barely there trail with large rounded water-eroded stones, so it was much easier to walk on. At the top of the volcano, the tour guide told us all about how we had to let go of our idealized notion of how volcanoes formed nice peaks at the top and about how volcanoes that have explosive eruptions tended to have calderas at the top and how the way that they could tell that this was a still active volcano was the heat from the geothermal vents and the volcanic gasses that still came out, which I already knew and didn't really need to be told, but I guess that most of the people who come to Santorini don't come from volcanic regions.
-Next, we all climbed back aboard the boat which took us to a hotspring. So we all jumped out the side of the boat and swam over to the hotspring, which was pleasantly warm. There were some guys in the hotspring who were playing chicken, which was mildly amusing to watch, although they were really blurry, because of course I wasn't wearing my glasses for this. Then after about 20 minutes, we swam back to the boat and climbed back on board. Swimming in open water is much different than swimming in a pool, and I'm out of practice even for that, so it was not the easiest thing I've done in the past couple of weeks, especially as my strongest stroke normally is backstroke, which you can't really do in open water.
-The next stop on this tour was a small island "where there's a simple village, where they've only had electricity for twenty-five years" (not quite verbatim from the tour operator), where we were supposed to have lunch at one of the six or so tavernas that this supposedly small, simple island not used to tourism had right at the cliff base on the few meters of land that separated the cliff and the water. I walked a bit further down the strand, as far as they had buildings (probably about 300 meters, maybe). There was a little church, Agios Nicolaos, which was barely accessible from land and had a small dock attached to it, which was interesting.
-After this stop, we got back aboard the ship and they took us back to the port, with a couple of stops at small ports along the way so that tourists could get off and do touristy stuff in the respective villages that the ports belonged to.
-The tour being over, we went back to our hostel to freshen up and then went into Fira for dinner. We ate at a taverna again, and since three of the four other people I was with were vegetarian, they ordered off of the appetizer menu, while I ordered souvlaki kopotokolou off of the main menu. This resulted in them all getting their food and finishing it before I even got my food. It was really awkward.
-Then we wandered around Fira for a while shopping, mostly because everyone else wanted to shop than because I was particularly inclined. Then it was back to our hostel to go to bed so that we could be up to catch our ferry the next morning.

Day three (Sunday 5 October):
-Up early so that we could catch a ride down to the port from our hostel.
-Then a 7:00 am ferry from Santorini to Pireaus, via Naxos and Poros. I sleep for the first two or so hours, including apparently through our port of call at Naxos and all of the resultant commotion. The ferry is pretty rough, and it made a lot of people sea-sick. I wasn't too bad, but even I was feeling somewhat sea-sick, which is weird because I never get sick on ferries. And the water wasn't really all that bad. It was kind of rough, but not terribly so. And I kind of feel that if you've seen water every day of your life before you go away to college, then you really shouldn't get sea-sick. The fact that everyone else was also getting sick, and I was a lot better than the rest of them, makes me feels somewhat better, but it was still kind of ridiculous. I spent most of the ferry ride sleeping/dozing, which made the ride go faster, I guess.
-Then we finally got into Piraeus, at about 3:30 PM, and took the Metro back to our apartment. Even after we got off of the ferry, it still felt like we were on the boat for the rest of the night.

Overall impression of Santorini/the weekend:
-Honestly, Santorini left me extremely underwhelmed. It is incessantly promoted as being the most beautiful, the most romantic, the most picturesque, the most et cetera of the Greek islands. And sure, it is pretty, it is picturesque, it probably is romantic (someone else will have to double-check me on that last one), but it didn't seem superlative to me in any way. I think that the reason for this may be two-fold. For one, there is no depth to Santorini the way there is to other places. 90 percent of Santorini's economy is tourism-related, so that's basically all that there is there. And everything exists for the sake of tourism, which makes all of the prettiness and picturesqueness extremely self-aware, except that they won't admit that it's self-aware, the which combination irritates me no end. There is also no real history or anything to Santorini. What they don't tell you in all of the tourist literature is that pretty much everything on Santorini was leveled in an earthquake in the 1950's, and consequently everything that you see is modern, built in the same style as what had gone before, but also deliberately constructed to make Santorini a tourist base. So all of the stuff they try to sell you about how Santorini is a pastoral place where life has gone on in much the same way for ages is not quite accurate. The history to Santorini is more of the Neolithic variety, but the archaeological site of Akrotiri has been closed for the past few years, ever since the protective roof over the site collapsed and killed some people. The second reason why I think that Santorini was underwhelming to me is that I'm too used to that kind of a landscape, terrible as it is to say. Listening to my travel companions, I got the impression that the reason why Santorini was so beautiful was that you were on an island, you could look across the water, and see other islands, the which may have been amazing to my roommates from the waterless Midwest, but until I went away to college I could look across water and see land every day of my life (although to be fair the land I could see didn't meet the water in a sheer cliff and was considerably greener). Volcanoes, water, cliffs, this is what I'm used to. Sunsets over the water, sure, the view from Oia is pretty, but I was pretty old before I ever saw water to my east.

I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I thought that Santorini was too famous for being famous, when it really didn't seem all that special to me. It was pretty, to be sure, but it wasn't spectacular like Crete was. And I guess I'm a little disappointed that it was supposed to be superlative, and it wasn't.

Am I glad I went? Yes.

Would I go again, or recommend that other people take the ten-hour ferry from Athens to get there? Probably not, unless they ever reopen the site of Akrotiri. That would be really cool to visit, and there would actually be something there.

And I guess that if I'm complaining about Santorini, I must be doing pretty well.