SANTORINI
Suddenly we are in fabled Santorini. We went by taxi to the port of Piraeus at the edge of Athens on the sea. I had promised a huge ferry, remembering the Blue Star Ferry, with multiple restaurants and decks you could walk around and tables where you could sit outside. But the Blue Star Ferry I remembered would take 8 hours to get to Santorini. The much smaller ferry Caroline had booked us on got there in 4, packed us in as if we were on and airplane, most seats far from a window, didn’t allow us outside and had a small snack bar. We were flying.
I’d seen many fairytale photographs of Santorini, and it is beautiful, but very different from what I had imagined. I should have known, but when we sailed into the round harbor with a black island in the middle we were sailing into the center of a giant volcano, with the caldera filled with water and the rim of the volcano rising in steep cliffs above us with white villages, like snow on a mountaintop, around the rim. A driver picked us up and we zigzagged up a steep road with cutback after cutback until we reached the rim of the volcano and drove around the rim of the crater through Thira to the village of Finikia in Oia.
When I was in the Greece two years ago I was struck by the contrast between industrial Athens with undistinguished five story concrete apartment buildings and the bright white rounded house’s of Paros. Two very different forms of architecture, and Santorini is the same way, all white and blue in the bright sun.
We were met in a parking lot and walked through narrower and narrower lanes to our airbnb. The narrow winding lanes indicated the age of the village and so did the a rounded shape of our home for four days. But it is so modern inside with spaces in the rounded wall for the refrigerator and stove that it gives the impression of having been built last month in the traditional style of 1400. Look at the photos and decide for yourself.
But the cave like effect fits the name, Gemini Cave, and the rooms are marvelous and make us feel as if we have stepped into another world (with hot showers, Wifi, and every electric appliance we could want). We went first to a stylish restaurant close by where we had one more terrific Greek meal, and then I rested while Tom and Caroline explored Oia.
This is what happens, twice, when your bedroom door, lined with rough volcanic rock with great decorating good taste, is one inch shorter than you are.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 