Just the way you pictured Greece!

May 7, Thursday morning




Santorini- Great pictures to come!

This morning was an EARLY one. We were to catch the motorboats to the island of Santorini by 7:45 am, so breakfast was earlier than usual. The boats loaded quickly and we were instructed to look for bus 44 and climb on. Our tour of the island had a couple of stops, and this is the place that looks most GREEK to me. Maybe it is the movies I’ve seen, but the whitewashed houses against the cliffs with accents here and there of royal blue gave it the look of a Hollywood set.




We, of course, heard history, particularly about the volcano that erupted and sank into the ocean leaving a caldera/ caldron or crater on one side of the island. The caldera is 60 square miles across creating a harbor. [Interesting note: We passed a Mexican restaurant named Senor Zorba—now that’s cross-cultural]

Cave houses are normal on the island. The rock is pumice and houses are dug out of the mountains where natural caves are and fronted with a normal looking Greek house facade. Interesting—and I’ll bet very energy efficient.

Again, pictures tell the story. This place is picturesque and serene (where the tourists haven’t invaded). White, white, white houses with rounded edges, little terraces with small gardens, bright blue dome on some of the houses, all this is the picture of Santorini.

We visited two towns, but the one with the most picturesque views is named Oia (say ee-uh.) Many shops had elegant gold and silver jewelry for sale. I looked in one place where I did find turquoise in a gold setting. I am not sure it was turquoise, but that was the color of the stone. Many embroidered items were shown as well as beautiful blue and green glass and native pottery. One clever shop handed out samples of their pistachio nuts and peanuts covered with a candy coating as we first disembarked from the smaller boats—then at the end of our trek, they had a shop selling just those items.

Santorini (especially OIA has been invaded by tourists by the thousands). I believe three cruise ships were in the harbor today, some staying, the Costa Fortuna (our ship) leaving at 1 to go to Mykonos.

Each person in our tour group had the choice of taking the gondola/ cable car down the mountain or riding donkeys. We rode the cable car and stood in line approx 45 min to get on.


The ride going down was fast and uneventful (thank goodness) Sharing our car was a young Greek soldier with his little puppy named Mikey, who kept biting N's hand and ankle. At the bottom was another long line to get on board the smaller boats to go back to the cruise ship. One challenge was to be sure you got back to the correct ship, since there were several in the port. These folks are particularly adept at getting folks on and off their small boats. A time or two I thought I was being placed onboard, rather than them allowing me to walk there under my own steam.

The process to come and go from the ship is to scan the door key card/ credit card for the ship in to a device. This records who has left. Then when a person returns, the card must again be swiped and each passport shown to be allowed to re-enter the cruise ship. Since the Fortuna was leaving Santorini at 1 or so, all passengers were ready for lunch at the same time and that was a crowd. I suppose we could have waited til things thinned out, but we didn’t. We were able to find a table quickly and were very popular with others who wanted to join us at our table.

Time for naps before our next briefing--- about Mykonos and a Collette group cocktail party.

Our plans for this afternoon/evening are to disembark onto Mykonos with our tour guide, Daniel who will show us around. He will show us to an Internet CafÈ where I can finally download the last 5 sections to this blog, that I have been preparing each day, but can’t send on the ship. Another part of the plan is to sample REAL Greek food, since the food onboard ship hasn’t been particularly Greek. I plan to do an entire posting about food, later, but let me tell you now about an aperitif we had yesterday evening. When we sat down, we each had a small glass of green liquid with black dots in it and a swirl of white. We finally asked what it was and were told green peas, caviar and cream. Yes, I tasted it and it was clumpy and icky. At our table of 6 --one person ate it.

Another teaser—N says he wants to dictate a section about Italian and Greek bathrooms. That should be something to look forward to.
Later……..