Whirled World, Part IV: Santorini

Breaking down, Jumping in, and Letting Go

(self-portrait in a hostel room)

(Part I, Part II, & Part III)

Two-Shots-Up and I left All-the-Way & Killer at an ungodly hour of the morning without saying a proper goodbye. And then we began a journey through foreign subway trains that led us to the dock with our waiting ferry. There were some initial complications aboard the ferry, but once I sorted them out, it was smooth sailing. (Hah! Didn't mean to make a pun there... enjoy it, I guess.)


(Helpful hint: If you ever take a ferry from Athens to one of the islands, it is TOTALLY WORTH IT to get an upgrade to something called "Air Type Seats". The website does NOT explain them. Basically, you get a reserved seat that's comfy like an airplane seat. If you do not get an "Air Type Seat", then you're left to scrounge for whatever random chairs are around the boat. They're not comfortable, and it isn't pretty.)

(View from our ferry window. I couldn't believe how gorgeous the water was.)

When we arrived in Santorini, we were overwhelmed by beauty. The bluest water I'd ever seen. Just amazing.

(My first picture on Santorini. That's the caldera.)

Santorini was created by volcanic activity, and has a caldera. Here's my simplistic (and probably not completely accurate) understanding of it... So imagine that an undersea volcano erupted and created a huge island. Now imagine that water seeped back into the middle of the island... So now, it's kind of like a ring of smaller islands with water in the middle, that are all secretly connected (deep) under that water. Now imagine that the volcano erupted again, so there was another island in the middle. So what you end up with looks like this. Yeah, that's Santorini. And it's super cool.

We spent our first evening hanging out on a black pebble beach. If you walked into the water, there was no sand. Instead, it was all one giant, slimy stone surface. The island was created from a volcano, so it's just... more of the island, but under water. Totally weird. Not long after we got to the beach, we found ourselves alone there. I covered my legs in the warm black pebbles and felt like I belonged to the beach.




Honestly, the days in Santorini don't seem like days in my memory at all. It seems like one big gob of time. Perhaps it was the only part of my trip that was truly a vacation.

It was also the only part of my trip in which I really didn't communicate with Phil at all. In order to get online, I had to walk a couple of blocks on the side of the road with Lady MacBook in tow, and then sit on a bench (also on the side of the road) to get the internet.

The second day we were in town, we rented a 4-wheel motorbike. Normally, this would've terrified me. But after hopping onto the back of a stranger's motorcycle in Athens, it no longer seemed dangerous. (If there's an antonym for "traffic", that would describe the roads of Santorini pretty well.)


Two-Shots-Up drove. We went to the red beach (so called because of the red cliffs around it, and the red pebbles mixed into the white chalky ones on the shore).




I blew a kiss to Phil from every beach, as I had promised I would. Two-Shots-Up joined me from time to time.


We went to Fira (the main city of the island), where we shopped around for a bit. We had hot cocoa in a little restaurant and admired the view.



And we decided to head up to Ia (pronounced EE-uh, not EYE-uh like my nickname Aiea) for the sunset.


But on our way, our motorbike broke down.
(We broke down at the edge of the road turning a bend, overlooking the village of Ia.)

We tried to restart it a couple of times to no avail. We tried to call our rental place, but after my phone refused to dial them, it decided to run out of battery. So I calmly flagged down the first passing car. The women inside were familiar with the island, called our rental place, and explained to them where we were on the island (in Greek, no less). So Two-Shots-Up and I waited on the side of a desolate road for over an hour until help arrived. By then, it was pitch black.

(Same view of Ia by the time we got picked up.)

The nice thing about it was that we remained calm. I'm usually pretty good in cases of emergency (as I mentioned in the last post), but I didn't know how Two-Shots-Up would be. She was great, and it worked out totally fine. It never really felt like we were lost, since we were together. She was the only person I knew on the island, and I was with her. Nothing about where we were in that hour was any more foreign than anywhere else we'd been. We were cool.

The people from the shop came. One of them was an attractive 20-year-old guy. I think Two-Shots-Up may have been flirting with him, but it's hard to tell. Like me, her normal behavior is often mistaken for flirtation, even when that's not what she's intending. It's one of many things we have in common. (But that's a story for Part V.)

We celebrated by getting really fantastic (non-alcoholic) drinks at a tiki bar where a reggae band was playing. Mine was a bunch of tart fruits blended together, and poured over vanilla ice cream (which was sweet enough to balance it out). It's one of the most delicious drinks I've ever had in my life. (It's up there with the entirely-too-small butterscotch Mini-Freeze from Minnie's in Chicago. Mmm.)

On our third day, we took a half-day trip to the volcano and hot springs. Walking on an active volcano was... actually not as exciting as I thought it would be. Nice views, but it was basically just a big pile of rocks.

(Yes, the water really was that color. I didn't edit this.)

But then we went to the hot springs.

I have a fear of drowning. And I don't generally swim. I technically know how to swim (and once won a 2nd-place ribbon in a backstroke competition when I was 7), but I'm easily fatigued and I'm out of practice. I remember being in a pool in May 1998, and then not again until April 2009. I hadn't owned a swimsuit for years until I got one for a homework assignment in my second month of graduate school.

So I was pretty nervous when the boat we were traveling on stopped far away from the shore, and we were suddenly informed that we were expected to JUMP OFF THE BOAT into deep blue water (where I could not see the bottom! AAAAAH!) and SWIM to the hot springs.

I do not remember the last time I swam in water where I could not see the bottom. I mean, I know that I must've done it as some point in my life, but I honestly have no recollection of it. If it has happened in the past, I must've been in elementary school. No, I'm not kidding.

So it was a bit scary for me.

But then I thought of all the fears I've overcome. I went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I rode on a motorcycle. I'm a WILD WOMAN! And I looked down at my swimsuit: a two-piece. It was, in fact, the first day in my entire life that I had ever donned a bikini. I have gotten over so many of my body image issues that I was wearing a bikini IN PUBLIC. Huge step for me.

(This is a view from where the boat stopped. See that little brown/red/hazy part? The darkest part of it? That's where I had to swim to. It was far. At least to me. To give you a little idea of scale, all 40+ people from our boat were hanging out in that red strip.)

So I jumped in. And I swam. And Two-Shots-Up gave me tons of verbal encouragement. I swam over to some big rocks to take a break half-way to the shallow springs. But I did eventually make it. The water was warm and brown. There was mud at the bottom that people were caking onto their bodies, claiming that it had exfoliating properties. I don't think my skin got any softer, but the white polka-dots on my black bikini are now stained light brown as a result.

At the end, I swam back to the boat. And I felt accomplished. I felt like I had somehow conquered something. And like maybe I'd found another piece of myself.

After the tour, a girl came up to me and said, "Excuse me, but are you from Michigan?" I said yes, looking at my clothing to see if I had any identifying writing on me. I did not. "Did you go to O***** High School?" I did, in fact. As it turns out, this girl was a freshman when I was a senior. She was in classes with my younger brother. She was in the band, and remembered that I was in the orchestra. The weird thing is, I didn't recognize her AT ALL. (I wonder if that's what fame feels like... You know: people knowing who you are without you having any clue who they are.) But we were on the same 40-person volcano tour on Santorini. And now she's my facebook friend. The world is small.

Two-Shots-Up and I ended up watching the sunset that night from our same little cocoa restaurant built high on the hill of Fira. I discovered a new love for sunsets (and for the "sunset" function on my camera that I didn't previously know existed). And I appreciated just sitting there in silence with a friend, feeling calm. There was nothing we needed to be doing, and no where we needed to be. We could just sit and feel the wonders of the world.







Of course, that calm disappeared the next day. The Greek ferries decided to all go on strike, on the very day that we needed one. Yes, they were striking for ONE DAY. What the hell kind of strike is that?

I texted both Phil and Blake. It was something along the lines of: "Our ferry is on strike, so we might miss get stuck in Santorini and miss our plane to Milan. Please pray for us."

Blake wrote back first, with a slightly confusing message:
"Its a tough life you lead"

It took me a few seconds before I realized that he didn't take my text seriously. He misunderstood it as, "Oh no, I might be stuck in a beautiful island paradise!" Just one more miscommunication I had with Blake. (Note: When I later thanked people for their prayers on Facebook, Blake apologized for the text and said that he had misunderstood. I absolved him, saying that I thought that might have been the case.)

Phil wrote back as well, which I wasn't expecting (as he had said he wanted to avoid texting, as it was an expensive form of communication).
"Oh no. I will pray for you. I hope you find solace in your philosophy. If it makes you feel better im watching BSG and i submitted my last draft 2 days early so that hopefully Ill be finished by the 29th. but I guess itll be what itll be baby. x"

This boy I'd left back in London, whom I hadn't communicated with (or even really spoken about) for three days, was still thinking about me. He was watching Battlestar Galactica at my recommendation. He was trying to beat a deadline with his writing to speed up the process so that he could spend more time with me when I returned to London. And that made me feel... incredible.

The philosophy he was referring to? Everything happens for a reason. Which, of course, it does. Two-Shots-Up and I ended up spending an extra 8 hours on Santorini, and getting on a faster ferry at 12:40am. We got in our "Air-Type Seats", and sailed into Athens. When we got there, we had plenty of time for Two-Shots-Up to mail some packages home (and I slept for 90 minutes in the post office while she dealt with the complications stemming from that fun little errand). We made it to the airport with plenty of time before our flight to Milan. And all was right with the world.


To be continued...

May you not be afraid of breaking down.

May you take the chance and jump in.

May you give yourself permission to let go.

~A~