Santorini and the Sea

Kalimera! I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you, it's been a crazy week! I'm moved into Bologna, we've started classes, and I've met most of my roomies, but I want to rewind for a few posts to tell the story of Greece. As you may know last week five of my friends and I spent three days in Santorini, Greece during our mini-break from class.

On Friday the 30th we took the train up to Bari to catch our flight to Thira, Santorini. We were delayed and waited for five hours. After going stir crazy, eating three paninis and two espressos, and playing a few rounds of Never Have I Ever, we boarded, flew, and arrived around midnight. We stayed at the Kykladonisia Hostel in Thira- an amazing place I can't recommend enough. The girls split the six-person female dorm and poor Byron went to the male room alone. When we woke up this was our view from the breakfast patio.

Kykladonisia is a wonderful place. They have complimentary breakfast, the sweetest, most helpful staff (shout out to Pavlos!), nice rooms, a pool, wifi, and they're two blocks from the city center. If you're debating a quick pop over to Greece check them out, or at least bookmark their site because I can't imagine a better hostel experience. Ask any of my traveling companions, I wouldn't shut up about how much I loved this place.

After breakfast Evie and I headed into the city two explore. Our first find was a bead shop where you could make your own Greek jewelry! We were over the moon. Especially Evie, who proceeded to photograph her pride and joy all over the rest of the island like the Travelocity gnome. I liked it because it made the requisite evil-eye jewelry a little more special.

After fawning over our bracelets for a while we walked further into the town to see the ocean and shop around some of the stores. We made friends with a nice man standing outside his restaurant and made reservations for the eight of us for Monday night to eat a nice meal and watch the sun set. More on that later. Oh and yes there were eight of us- Samantha's two friends from Israel, Kfir and Nadav, met us there!

After browsing the goods and disappointing many persistent shopkeepers, we happened upon the donkeys. There was some discussion as Evie tried to convince us we should ride them but then we all realized no one actually needed convincing and we rushed to hand our money to the gruff old man we assumed was in charge. Another equally gruff old man led us through a crowd of donkeys and presumably told us not to slip on the piles of donkey poop, he spoke only Greek so I have no clue but I took his "advice" to heart.

Now riding a donkey is fun. It is also heart-stoppingly terrifying and you could not pay me to do it again ever ever in my life. I liked my sweet grey donkey but the walk down was steep and slippery and the day was hot. The donkeys kept slipping and stumbling and the man leading mine kept walking me into the wall. I heard from another lady that one poor donkey had explosive diarrhea all over her so I'll call my ride a success.

We got off at the bottom and walked out to the port, where we sat on the edge and watched the ships come in, trying to recover from the trauma we had just experienced. I'm 80% joking it was actually pretty fun and I'm glad I did it. My donkey was nice. In any case I decided to take the cable car back up. When we got back to town we decided to go to lunch- Greek salad and gyros. I was in heaven, and also completely mystified by the presence of french fries in my gyro.

I finished with a very strange piece of caramel-y, peanut butter and jelly baclava thing. I regretted it immediately but doesn't it look good?

After lunch we headed back to the hostel to rally. See next post for our