Monday, July 19, 2010

Santorini-Expanded

Santorini, the well-known island, where Mamma Mia and parts of Sisterhood of the Traveling pants were filmed, was our destination for our last weekend in Greece. I had been looking forward to Santorini for a long time and was excited to see it as an optional trip on our syllabus. The majority of our class opted to take this trip. Jeren, our TA, arranged the hotel and ferry tickets for everyone. After staying at hostels during my trips, this hotel was a nice change. It had a shower with real water pressure and it wasn’t hand held like I had become accustomed to, good air conditioning and decent beds. We also had a large pool, with its own bridge, that overlooked the ocean.

The first thing our class did was take a quick swim in the pool. It was pretty cold, so we then hit the showers. The main event of the evening was to watch the legendary Santorini sunset. We walked up the hill to the town of Fira to observe it. The view was breathtaking and the sunset was indescribable. The viewing frame had a cliff cluttered with white buildings and a stark cliff on the right. In front of us were the caldera and other island formations. The sun disappeared into the ocean among the haze with brilliant shades of gold, pink and red. My camera couldn’t do it justice. Both nights we were there everyone clapped after the sunset.

The first night Jeren then took a group of us out to a restaurant, the Argos, he had ate at last year. They even offered us free wine. The ambiance of this restaurant rivaled the Glafkos taverna. The view overlooked the rest of the town and the dwindling show of the sunset. Everything was white and lit by candles. When it got too chilly, the waiter even offered warmed blankets to the girls. The white wine there was the best wine I had during my stay in Greece. The bread was soft and warm, spiced up with oregano and rosemary. There was a tomato paste you paired with olive oil to dip the bread in. I ordered lamb kleftiko, a dish cooked for two hours in butchers paper marinated in Greek yoghurt and served with potatoes and vegetables.

After dinner we did some touristy shopping. On the way back we stopped to ask for directions at a wine shop. They offered us a free tasting of a sweet dessert wine. When we said we hadn’t had absinthe before, they offered us some of that too! This was a start to a great Island nightlife. At one place, we also got a free watermelon slushie with ouzo. We were out late that night but woke up early to do a volcano and hot springs tour. The details about that are in the previous entries.

That night we also had an amazing dinner. And it goes without saying that the sunset was gorgeous that night. We watched it from our restaurant. The waiter was slightly annoying. "Do you want menu or do you want me?" He ended up knocking a plate on a customer because he was such a clown. The food was great though. I had seafood pasta. It was full of seafood with mussels, shrimp and octopus in a marina sauce. That night we went out again and had fun dancing the night away. We woke up to take a tour of the beaches and saw the black beach, the red beach and the white beach. We ended up swimming only on the black beach due to constraints of time. To get to the black beach we needed to take a boat there. More info on the beaches and Volcanoes in the previous posts :)

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