I'll get the chronology out of the way first… feel free to skip it, or come back to it later to make sense of the photos and/or the commentary later on:

Saturday 13 September: Flew from Edinburgh to Amsterdam to Athens. Arrived around 1am…

Sunday: stayed at the airport till 4:30am then caught the bus to Piraeus and boarded the 6am Ferry to Naxos. Arrived in Naxos township on Naxos Island around lunchtime. Slept. Went to the beach. Slept.

Monday: caught the bus inland to check out the largest island in the cyclades. Got off at Apiranthos.

Tuesday: caught 12:30pm ferry to Santorini. Arrived around 3pm. Bus to township of Fira (the biggest on Santorini), where our accommodation was.

Wednesday: Hung out with Claudio and Patricia, Marisa's Aunty and Uncle, who had a 10am-4:30pm stop on Santorini as part of Mediterranian Cruise. Caught bus to Oia.

Thursday: Went to Kamari Beach on the windward side of the island. Went back to Oia for Dinner.

Friday: caught 3:30pm ferry to Athens. Arrived after midnight.

Saturday: Explored Athens in the rain.

Sunday: Climbed Lycabettus Hill for a last look of Athens before catching a 5pm flight back to Amsterdam and then Edinburgh. In bed by midnight.

Okay, with that out of the way, here's the highlights.

Food: I don't care if every restaurant and café offers Greek salads on the menu because it's what they think tourists want (or expect), because they're gooood. I think it's the big slab of feta (closer in size to a jandel than a playing card) they put on top. And the tomatoes taste like tomatoes rather than water. A bit stingy on the olives, though. Other traditional fare sampled: lamb in lemon sauce, deep fried sardines and too many other seafoods to list, kefalotyri cheese, mousakka, pastitsio, Naxian sausage and, of course, gyros. The highlight of highlights was probably the meze platter at Rafifi on our last evening in Athens. For €3.80, we got anchovies, crushed bread, tomatoes, olives, kefalotyri cheese, something else, and fava! This was the third time we'd had fava in four days. It's basically mushed up yellow split peas, cooked with lots of garlic and salt and served (hot or cold) with capers and olive oil. We couldn't get enough of the stuff.

On the cost side, the €3.80 was an insane bargain. Generally we were spending €5-10 for a decent main. Still cheaper than the U.K., but it would have been so much cheaper a year or two ago when the pound was stronger, dammit.

Expect speedy service when you arrive at a restaurant (like, mains within ten minutes of sitting down), and then to be forgotten about. Which is fine once you've settled into the holiday mode, so long as you don't have a ferry or plane to catch.

Naxos: "The Greenest of the Cycladean Islands" is not that green. The beaches are nice and there's plenty of places to eat and rent quad bikes around. Inland, it's a lot less touristy, a bit more quaint, and definitely more subdued. A good intro to the Aegean.

Santorini: Stunning scenery. I had to seriously cull my photos for the album for this trip. Every sunset we perched in a different spot and I snapped away.

Everyone on Santorini, especially in Fira (or Thira, Greek-English transliterations are notoriously unstable) looks like it's their first day. This is partly because it is most people's first day, with 5+ cruise ships unloading their passengers every day, but even after three days I found myself walking around with my mouth slightly agape, the camera dangling from my wrist.

Oia is smaller, and not as high above the water, but I'd say it's more beautiful than Fira. Don't try to walk towards the windmills just after sunset though: you'll be met with a stream of tourists keen to get back to Fira.

If you're after beaches, Santorini isn't the ideal destination. There is apparently one sandy beach, but there's no road to it so you need to pay for a boat tour… The rest of the beaches are all stony. The day we went to Kamari, the stones weren't too hot to lay a towel over (though they weren't very comfortable to lie on), but the sea was too rough to negotiate the slippery layer of volcanic rock just below the surface to get out into a swimable depth.

If you want to save money, staying on the wrong side of Fira is a good idea. The 'wrong side' is the one that is not on the rim of the caldera. Our hotel was so cheap, when we asked the proprietor if we got towels, she said, "For your price, no towels."

We didn't bother asking about the air-con.

Which brings us to Weather: Man, it was nice to walk right into summer in September, especially after the poor excuse for a summer Scotland threw up. But when we woke on Saturday back on the mainland: rain. And not tropical squalls. It's was chilly and drizzly (occasionally more persistent). In the scheme of things it didn't really matter: we were looking at ancient monuments, not sun bathing. And it helped ease us back into the Scottish autumn that loomed.

Athens: Like the Edinburgh Castle, the Acropolis doesn't exactly loom over Athens, but it pops into view from almost anywhere. We bought a kind of multi-ticket which gave us entry into the Agora (the heart of Ancient Athens), the Roman Agora (there's quite a lot of Roman ruins in Athens, since they came by later), the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Hadrian's Library and of course the Acropolis. Walking up the final steps was quite an impressive experience, and the Parthenon is awesome, but there was so much restoration work going on (two of the other temples were in states of disassmblage/reassemblage). It'll really be something when they finish!

One other must do: climb Lycabettus Hill. Great panoramic views of the (somewhat shabby) capital and the coast.

One thing you can avoid: the changing of the guard outside of the Greek parliament. The guidebook said the guards changed every hour and we were walking past at ten to five, so we decided to stick around. There were already a few other tourists milling around, watching the two guards (evzones) in their mildly humorous uniform standing stock still, and waiting for the change to happen. By five o'clock, a minivan had unloaded a bunch more tourist and we were all standing there with our umbrellas up (it was raining, remember). Ten past came, the same guards were standing there. Someone asked the man in the Greek army uniform what the deal was. He assured them the change was coming. And it did, at twenty passed. It was over at twenty passed and thirty seconds. Two more guards were dropped off by a small jeep, saluted the old guards, who got in the jeep, and the new guards stood stock still and the jeep drove off. End of ceremony. The Ancient Greeks had a word for such moments: bathos.

The language: I really enjoyed tackling the different alphabet. By midweek, I was comfortable with the upper case, then all of a sudden everything was in lower case and I had to learn that. Of course, most signs and almost every menu was also in English/or used our alphabet. And then, there's a lot of overlap between the two alphabets. It's the false friends (the P's which are actually R's and the v's which are n's…) that are trickiest.

We weren't really required to speak much Greek, but a Parakalo there and an Efharisto/Efcharisto there seemed to be appreciated.

The religion: Those Greek Orthodox churches certainly are photogenic (not all of them fit the whitewashed, blue domed mold), but they are kind of weird on the inside. So small. Universally gloomy, some down right dark. A far cry from the massive cathedrals and mosques we've seen elsewhere. Not worse. Just different. And I dig those Greek Orthodox priests with their wiry beards, wee ponytails and black cassocks. They look like they come from a different planet to all of us sunglass-wearing, text-messaging, sunbakers, but there were two priest on our flight back to Amsterdam and I can proudly report that they read novels and listen to iPods and are just as interested in the stamps in their passports as you and me!