Husbear called me last night from work and asked me a difficult question.
"Do you realize that your first honeymoon post was published on August 4th of 2005?"
I can't say I'm entirely sure where he was going with that line of questioning. He was probably just drawing attention to how pleased he is with the quality of the honeymoon posts... right?
So, ten months later, let me present you with post #15, about our last day before leaving Santorini for Naxos.
Since our visit to the archaeological site of Akrotiri was less than successful, it was really important to both of us to visit Santorini's archaeological museum. The small museum was packed to the rafters with the usual suspects: Japanese tourists videotaping each display case, inch by inch; sunburned groups of Americans loudly asking each other, "Whatzat? Why would I want to look at a giant pot?"; harried museum guides clucking, tutting, and begging people not to use the flash on their camera.
All this aside, the museum did have some lovely artifacts on display.
There's apparently a theory that the inhabitants of Santorini had some level of warning that the volcano in the center of the island was going to erupt; the fact that this small gold antelope (?) is the most valuable item found so far by the archaeologists is one of the pieces of evidence used to support this theory.
I insisted we go back to Taverna Nikolas for one last Santorini lunch.
One whole grilled fish, a liter of house white wine, and a very happy girlie later, we headed back in the direction of our hotel.
The Hotel Loucas has a truly stunning pool; we spent a few hours there relaxing, using the water to avoid the heat of the day.
We worked on negating the farmer's-tan effect of the long walk to Ia two days prior, read books, swam... lovely.
For our last night on the island, we planned to go check out the resort town of Kamari and then catch a showing of the movie Troy (The Greek posters call Brad Pitt MPrant, due to the apparent Greek lack of the letter B) at an outdoor theater. Sounds fun, right?
First, our last Santorini sunset.
Kamari is on the side of the island opposite the caldera - see this map for reference. (Kamari is near the airport.) It attracts a completely different crowd than Fira, or Ia, or Firostephani - it's a bit more geared towards families and package tourists.
Kamari did have a nice beachfront, with many restaurants of the menu-in-six-languages variety; we read in Frommer's that a place called Camille Stephani had these places all beat, and was worth a trip to the town inand of itself.
After being served a wide variety of choices from their menu by a waiter who was 1. the only waiter working the entire restaurant and 2. obviously embarassed to be serving food with this complete lack of quality, I can't say I agreed with our trusty guidebook.
I'd say we sampled a pretty good tour of their menu; dolmas, tomato keftedes, many dips and veggies. Yeah, we were pretty fair... and Camille Stephani just wasn't very good.
Of course, the next table over was occupied by four very large, very drunk Germans who smoked and yelled at their enormous Labrador retreiver for the entire duration of our meal - so maybe our experience was influenced a little by that?
Anyway, a little disappointed - but full, at least, we headed back down the beach to walk to Cine Kamari, the outdoor theater we had heard about.
We passed a lovely church on the way.
I think our experience at Cine Kamari was probably the best introduction to the Greek culture that we could have had. The movie was scheduled to begin sometime around midnight, as I recall; this was a bit of a stretch for us, as we had an early morning ferry to Naxos to catch. However, you're only young once, right?
Anyway, we arrived at the theater proably a half-hour before the scheduled start of the movie. The ticket booth was empty, as was the area around the theater; we could see bits of the previous showing through the trees, so we knew we were in the right place. We set up camp near the ticket booth and waited.
The scheduled time for the movie came and went. Still nobody in the ticket booth. More and more people started showing up; nobody, however, got in line with us. Every few minutes, each clot of people would send a representative up to near where we were standing; he (always he) would stand in front of us, look at the ticket booth, look at us, read all the posters around the ticket booth, lean against the wall for a minute, and go back to his friends.
After another fifteen minutes of this, we decided to retreat a bit, figuring we could always get back in line if anyone ever showed up at the ticket booth. We moved back a little and watched the prospective patrons watching the front of the theater. Slowly, the group representatives started ambling over in the direction of the ticket window; again, they'd look at the ticket window (some would knock on it) read the posters, lean on the wall; they just projected this image of "Line? Who, me? Why would I be in line?" Soon, however, a proto-line began to form; people were getting in line in the middle, not the end, however. There were many clucks of disapproval from the unfortunate men who were maneuvered further back; after each cluck, they'd step out of the back of the line and get in the middle.
Fascinating as this was (and it really was - I'd never seen a line like it!) we eventually left, a full hour after the movie was scheduled to begin. We grabbed a taxi and headed back to our hotel.
I'm a little sad we didn't stay... but we did get entertainment, at least. And we rented Troy several months after we got home, and I can't really say we missed that much not seeing it in Greece.
Next: Naxos! Plus, Husbear is almost involved in a streetfight, through no fault of his own.
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