Before I talk about Santorini, something fantastically random happened during our last morning in Ios I must share. At 7am I was roused from my slumber by some noise, turning to my roommate Arryn only to see a random young guy with his pants pulled down sitting on Arryn's bed. Arryn looked equally confused, so I asked him who he was. It took a while to get a proper answer out of him as he was drunk and/or foreign, and by that time the exchange was getting quite heated. Eventually he explained that he thought it was his room, number 16, and that he sleeps with another guy in a double bed and mistook Arryn for that guy. It took some effort, but I ushered him out and
I went back to sleep. The creepy part is that we checked with reception and there is no room 16.. Locking doors from now on! (Truth be told, I think he was legit, just drunk and confuse about his room number)
We arrived in Santorini from Ios via a nauseating 40 minute ferry ride on the speedy vessel the 'flying cat 3' (God knows what happened to the first two.. Bit too fast for their own good I suppose) which featured humorous "lifejacket donning instructions", as if anyone says "donn" these days anyway. On the subject of bad translations and typos, I've noticed that all throughout Greece the word 'lamb' is often written in menus as 'lamp', leading to various lamp-based dishes, including 'lamp in lemon sauce', 'mama's baked lamp', and the mysterious 'lamp kleftiko'?? I never ordered any because oven roasted electronics aren't in my backpacker's budget.
Another general Greece ramble, they don't have clean drinking water here, so one has to drink bottled water, and when you're drinking 3 big bottles a day it just feels like a waste of plastic which will one day pollute the breathtaking views and clean water which contributes to Greece's awesomeness.
Santorini is a cluster of islands surrounding a central area of water that was once the centre of one of the biggest volcanoes of all time (apparently that makes Santorini a 'caldera') before it collapsed on itself around 1500BC - yes, i'm making you learn things... As a result the beaches have volcanic ash for sand, so we visited both black and red beaches which was a cool experience. Another result of the islands being a caldera is awesome views. We took a trip one evening to a spot famous for it's view of the sunset. Tourists fight for the best vantage point from early in the afternoon, and for good reason. Seems like more of a thing to do with a girlfriend instead of a bunch of sweaty boys (one day Zara, one day..) but we enjoyed the fraternal romancing nonetheless.
We're all a bit under the weather from a combination of little sleep and the phenomenon 'Ios cough', so Santorini was a much needed detox (not to say we're any less sick for it) . Our hostel was beautiful, with great staff and a beautiful pool. All five of us staying together in one room for the first time made such a squalid pigsty that the cleaners came in every day, laughed, gave us fresh towels, left the old ones behind and left. We had quite a wet towel fort going on.
In other news Zac shaved his luxurious chest hair into a heart. Now we have a long commute ahead of us, an 8 hour ferry, 11 hour wait at the port of Athens without accommodation, and then a flight, but it'll all be very exciting because next stop; Paris