Guess which one you are.
Today was our first and only full day in Santorini. We started out by heading to the Thira Prehistoric Museum. Santorini was actually formed by a giant volcano, and in 1600 BC the volcano exploded, collapsing in on itself forming the shape of the island that we see today. At the museum they had drawings of what the island looked like before and after that time, and it's kind of astounding the difference. I can't imagine being here when it collapsed in on itself; you either plunged into the ocean or were covered with about 20 to 50 feet of ash. It wasn't surprising that everybody died. The caldera (the ring of the volcano) is the main island of Santorini with two small volcano-ash islands in the center that used to be the hotspots for the volcano. It is still active, and as Barnes put it, "We could die any second." The museum had artifacts that were found from Akrotiri (the Grecian version of Pompeii) that were left behind by the people who fled or died during the eruption. Then we headed out to the actual excavation site of Akrotiri. First though, we stopped at the Mountain of Prophet Elijah to take some pictures. From the top you could see the whole island basically, and it was stunning. I can't believe how small Santorini really is. The site of Akrotiri has been covered by a building (thank God we could get out of the sun for awhile) and was really cool to see. Vaggelis said that the area is only about 5% excavated, so there are probably a lot more things to find that just haven't been dug up yet. These houses and buildings were rather nice for the time, but were abandoned when something preceding the big volcano scared people away. The site was unbelievable to see in person, but also haunting to know that those people died in that way and we just came along thousands of years later and picked up the pieces. Crazy. After Akrotiri, we headed out to our THIRD winery of the trip. Yes, the third. We tried raisin wine at this one; that's definitely a first! It actually wasn't horrible. It was really sweet and you couldn't really taste the alcohol in it, but it has the highest alcohol percentage of all the wines we tested. That could be trouble. Apparently it is super rare because of the type of grapes used and the amount of labor that goes into creating it. That means that although a bottle of it was only 20 Euros at the tasting, if we kept that wine for 20 years, it would be worth 300 Euros! I almost bought some just for that sake, but knowing me it won't make it out alive after that long. After the winery, we headed out to the black sand beaches. We were there most of the afternoon, and then we headed back to our hotel. I have been out in the hot sun so much on this trip that my eyebrows are beginning to turn blonde. With my sad eyes (three DIFFERENT Greeks have told me that I have sad eyes) and my blonde eyebrows, I am turning into a freak of nature. After we got ready, we headed out to a small restaurant in Thira so that we watch the sunset as we ate. Beautiful as usual. Dinner was really good, and afterwards we headed out for ice cream. I had been talking about this certain ice cream bar from the little kiosks for days, so Vaggelis said he would buy one for me. It is a cookies and cream ice cream bar with white chocolate on the outside, and is basically crack for a fat kid like me. Well when we got there, I saw a different ice cream bar that I thought looked good so I got that one instead. Vaggelis was beyond pissed at me...it was great! He kept yelling in Greek how crazy I was for getting a different ice cream than the one I had been talking about all this time. Soooo funny. After that we headed to a bar where Vaggelis was supposed to join us, but he apparently had an allergic reaction to something, lost his voice, and had to go get a cortisone shot to get it back. I love him, but him losing his voice for a couple hours would have been nice to experience hahaha. We didn't stay at the bar long because everything in Santorini is so dang expensive, so we headed back to our hotel and were out for the count...as usual.
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