Damn those 8am ferries! It was torture to get up and pack up all our crap to head to the port. But we made it out, took a cab, and ended up at the port with time to spare. My plan was to sleep on the boat, since I can get a little seasick, but it would have been fine except for these two screaming, laughing, playing siblings (a boy and a girl) whose father was asleep. It sucked so much! All I wanted to do was go back to sleep and instead I took these little mini naps, like four of them, and it was completely unsatisfying.
All this paing was made up for though when I got my first glimpse of Santorini. It is a beautiful island with all these cliffs and mountains rising in the distance. The three of us all gathered on the deck to take dorky pictures and watch this wonder come closer and closer. When we docked though, it was hard to imagine what we would see later that day. The port town of Santorini was teeny tiny and had like nothing there except some rental car places. Whatever, all was good and the Villa Manos guy came and got us and drove reassuringly confident up a twisty, turny, mountain road that eventually lead to the main road and village. And you know who we saw playing in the pool at Villa Manos? The Korean family! It was ridiculous! Here we were just checking in from the ferry and there they were playing in the pool. The mom was really nice and waved at us, even though Lian had kind of freaked them out when we saw them yesterday by offering them our leftover cheese.
And at the Villa Manos we met Poppy the proprieter and all around cool woman. She spoke good English, gave us free orange juice, and told us all about the village and what we could do with our time. Taking her advice, we all changed into bathing suits and headed off the Kamari, one of the beaches to the south that had black sand. It was really cool to look at, but you want to know why the beache had black sand? I'll tell you! It was because the sand was really lots of eroded rock from the mountains on the island. Meaning that it go super hot in the sun and was terrible uncomfortable to stand on. Not only that, nobody mentioned that while it wasn't a nude beach, there would be lots of woman sunbathing topless - with only a few of them having the body to be doing so proudly. Whatever, Laura and I went in the water and I was able to marvel at it's clearness, temperature and complete lack of waves! I was able to bob here and there, but there were no crashing waves - it as almost unnatural compared to the variableness of the NC coast.
But not only that - Santorini is the only place so far that really matched totally the idea I had in my head of white, boxy houses stacked on top of each other leading into blue, blue ocean. It amazed me how perfect it was. After spending some more time at the beach we all head to Ia, a more well known town that is also famous for the spectacular sunset visitors can view there. And who did we see eating dinner at a restaurant in the town? The Korean family! Yes for the fourth time we now we met up with family, this time taking pictures of the two little girls. Eventually though we continued on to find the "sunset beach" viewing area, which was really just a place closer to the coast that gave people a wonderous view of the sun setting down into the ocean behind beautiful houses. It was after watching the sunset that I had a new and somewhat nerve wracking experience. You see, the entire time Lian and I were watching the sunset there was this group of three people next too us speaking in Japanese - an older woman, a young man, and a young white woman. Finally after the sun had set I decided that through much soul searching I would try and offer to take a picture of the three of them. With Lian egging me on I used some halting, Japanese and struck up a conversation, taking their pictures and finding out that the white woman was the guy's wife and she was learning Japanese at college in Germany. Go figure. But since I hadn't spoken any Japanese in a year, it wasn't pretty- as much as the mother seemed impressed with my making myself understood at all.
Finally though we headed back to Manos - twice more meeting up with the Korean family, finally getting the mother's address so we could email her the pictures we had of and with her children. It was really funny and I was glad that she wasn't freaked out by us (mainly Lian and I) being so amused. Back at the hotel we just did the usual getting ready for bed routine, this time with added benefit of knowing that we didn't have to get up until 10 the next morning. Yay!
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