Islands, and Cliffsides, and Volcanoes...Oh My!

Hello fellow “readers!”  Steph, I give you one job and you can’t even follow through; now I have to go another entire blog without a name for my loyal fans.  But anyways, it’s good to be back and writing to you all again.  I say “back” because I have just gone through a long no-internet stint due to my travels to far away islands, which happened to be the first time traveling for the Three Caballeros and I in 2 whole weeks! This time we went to a place that scholars have long maintained is the best island ever (citation needed)…Santorini!  Yep, Santorini: an island of cliffside vistas, beautiful sunsets, black sand beaches, explosive volcanoes, and apparently the occasional rain.  Get ready “readers,” cause this is easily the longest post yet (but I will now lure you all in with the promise of pictures at the end, so keep reading).

Being the intelligent weekend traveler that I am, I brought only a duffel bag with two shirts, a few pair of shorts, and my swimsuit.  What else could I need?  I had a pair of jeans thrown in, but took them out at the last minute because “cold” isn’t in Santorini’s vocabulary (so I thought).  Luckily, I at least grabbed a sweatshirt because we were once again waking up to travel at the early time of 5:30 AM.  We arrived at the Port of Piraeus for our 7:20 AM ferry and boarded along with the rest of the masses.  If you’ve never seen an island ferry, it’s basically a floating parking garage with a couple cabins thrown on the top deck to satisfy the people who don’t want to sit in their cars.  Since we didn’t have cars and also didn’t have cabins (see “angry travel agent” in the last post), we wandered around until we found some good airplane-style seats inside the top deck.  At first these seats seemed as if they’d be fine, but that was until we all woke up every half hour to find that our heads were no longer attached correctly to our necks.  Scott did not have a very good rest on the ferry, and instead was forced to watch every Greek’s favorite midday game show…Human Tetris (which really was quite entertaining).  Walking outside on the deck was useless, too, because of the wind and rain that made it feel as if someone was throwing salt into your face.

8 hours later, we were told to start heading towards the exits of the ferry because we were coming up to the island’s port.  The view awaiting us on the decks outside was unprecedented, even with the heavy cloud cover.  You see, Santorini used to be a large, everyday island that was pretty much a giant circle.  That was until the volcano at the center got very angry and blew up in what is widely considered the largest explosion in history.  More than half the island was thrown into the air countless miles, leaving a crescent moon shaped island with a second island (basically the remains of the volcano, called Nea Kameni) in the middle of it, along with a few other random shards that survived the blast.  What this explosion did do, however, was give Santorini some of the best cliffs ever (I’ve since decided that the whole explosion thingy was done on purpose in order to gain more tourists).  This is called the “caldera” and it looks like one half of the Grand Canyon with a sea hundreds of meters below.  This cliff didn’t stop the Santorinians (?) from still living on the island, though, and it also didn’t stop them from building their houses as close to the edge as possible.  From below, this was one of the most stunning sights I had ever seen.

Since it was already 4 PM and it was still raining, there wasn’t much tourist stuff we could do.  But, like all good Minnesotans, the rain couldn’t stop us from hitting the beach and our hotel swimming pool.  The night ended with me going to my first Greek dance club and of course showing everyone the art of breaking it down.

Saturday was easily the most important day of the weekend, and best of all it was sunny and warm most of the day.  We woke up at 10 AM and took a bus back to the port that we landed at to take an all-inclusive tour of the islands.  We got on a pirate-looking vessel and made our way across the inlet to the volcanic island in the middle.  As our guide pointed out to us, there are two types of volcanoes.  The first is a spewing volcano where lava comes directly out of the top without being blocked (such as in Hawaii).  These may sometimes create small catastrophes, but never anything too big.  The volcano that blew up Santorini, however, is an explosive volcano.  The eight different existing craters are all blocked by large rocks and mud that cause the volcano to slow build up pressure.  Think Mt. Vesuvius or St. Helen’s, but much bigger.  Oh, and this one’s still active (who knew that this blog could be so informative…I deserve money for stuff like this).

After climbing around the top of the volcano for a while and trying our best to disturb it, we climbed back down, reboarded the boat, and set off for a second small island right by the volcano.  This island was actually part of the volcano at one point and still has hot springs that feed right into a small lagoon.  The boat couldn’t dock anywhere here, but we were given the option to dive off and swim into the hot (actually more like lukewarm) springs.  The warm water felt quite good, but the best part was the therapeutic mud that covered the bottom of the springs.  Like any obnoxious college group, we proceeded to cover ourselves with the mud in war paint fashion while everyone else gave us weird looks.  Their loss: we were exfoliated and they weren’t.

Next, we made a brief stop at a third island to eat lunch.  On the menu that day: octopus.  We had to, right?  We then hopped on the boat and headed back to the main island, but this time we went to the northwest side of the crescent moon to the town of Oia (pronounced Ee-ah).  This is the one you may see in all the postcards and pictures because it has all whitewashed houses and churches, along with a beautiful, uninterrupted view of the sunset.  We docked once again on the bottom of the giant cliffs and were given a choice of how to proceed up.  We could either walk (yea right) or ride donkeys.  Since we’re all donkeys, we chose the lazy asses…wait, other way around.  Despite the ever imminent threat of donkey flu, the donkey ride was really entertaining, mostly because Matt acted like a kid on Christmas and couldn’t stop laughing the whole time, which in turn caused the rest of us to giggle the entire way up the caldera.  We got to the top with a couple hours to spare until the sunset, so we walked around a little and took in the town before staking out a place to sit and wait.  And wait we did (as you might be able to tell by how many pictures I took in the same location).  When the sun finally did creep out from behind the last couple clouds, it was gorgeous.  The light and shadows reflecting off the buildings was surreal, which made it pretty easy to feel like an expert photographer.  Though the sun was blocked by more clouds before actually reaching the water, it still was definitely worth seeing.

Tired and fulfilled, we headed back to our hostel and promptly collapsed in our respective beds.  We woke up early once again on Sunday morning to catch our ferry home, but not before we got a beautiful view of the sunrise on our hostel’s side of the island.  We all slept the whole ride home (with the occasional waking up to work out neck cramps), and used the rest of the day to catch up on internet, news, and sports (yea, we watched the Vikings…go Brett Favre and AD!).  I am now neglecting homework and instead finishing this up for all of you “readers” at 1 AM my time, so I hope it was enjoyable.

In other news, we officially have become “locals” in our little neighborhood of Pagrati.  The last time I stopped in the gyro shop, the woman at the counter smiled and rallied off my order to me before I could even talk.  I didn’t even have to say “the usual.”

So, that’s the Santorini blog, “readers.”  Until next time, kalinihxta (that's good night) from my home in Athens.

Of course, here's all the pictures from the trip to Santorini.  Just click this link and enjoy!

Special Shout-out of the Day: Ben Rietz.  Ben joined Charles Moore as another contender for biggest contributor to the blog by taking the official new Scott on the Rocks picture.  Steph could’ve also joined this high-class group if she was creative, but alas…

Second Special Shout-out of the Day: Taylor Swift.  I know this is like cheating, but this needs to be done.  I'm not sure how many of you tuned into the MTV Video Music Awards last night, but if you didn't, you missed one of the most insulting displays in music history by Kanye West.  Here's the story: my girl Taylor Swift had just won the award for Best Female Video when Kanye West decided to storm the stage during her acceptance speech, steal the mike from her, and tell her that Beyonce deserved to win the award.  What a jerk! That's the last time I download any of his music.  Here's the story with a link to the video so you can all see how stupid Kanye is.

European Insult Tally

Bill: 1

Scott: 3 - I managed another point this week by insulting the one Greek that I probably should have tried to not insult…my Greek language teacher.  Class was apparently scheduled at too early of a time for me on Thursday (10 AM), and I responded to this outrageous starting time by falling asleep in class (I tried my best to stay awake, but the back of my eyelids are so convincing).  I woke up to her staring at me and asking me to stop snoring and quickly tried to play it off as if I’d been awake the whole time, which I’ll of course defend to the death.

Matt: 1

Ryan: 1

Ya digg?

Your friend or family member (or random acquaintance)

Scott Twelves