Day Twelve: Saturday

21Jun11

We woke up Saturday morning and got ready to tour and see the Black & Red beaches. We had to get into Fira to catch the buses to either place. As we pulled up, the red beach bus was pulling away so we went to Kamari to see the Black Beach.
It was interesting. Instead of sand it was black rock. We relaxed and worked on our tans and took our tourist pictures up on the large black rocks. Because of the volcanoes, a lot of the jewelry shops sell volcanic rock jewelry (Can I note that the volcanic rock at the Paros jewelers feels completely legit while these shops seem to carry manufactured volcanic rock replicas?). I found what may or may not be some volcanic rock. We’ll see eventually.
We were hungry and this really Jersey Shore looking guy talked part of our little group into the restaurant. (Anyone sense a theme? This doesn’t happen on Paros.) The food was okay. This was also the first time we were charged for the bread brought to our table. 5 Euro. I was kind of pissed off about it, but it’s not like we can do anything about it. There should’ve been a bus from Kamari to Akrotiri, but it never showed and a bus driver told us we need to go back to Fira. Fantastic.
Back in Fira, we found our bus to Akrotiri and when we were dropped off, I was super disappointed. There was no red beach. It looked like the black beach from before but super dirty and there wasn’t even much to look at. One man saw how confused we were and told us we could either take the boat to the beach or walk across this path and get there. I opted for the path. I thought it was on the other side of this restaurant and up the stairs. Well, no go, so we kept walking. We saw signs at these little shops that said “Last refreshment stand before the beach” and still had no idea what was going on. We basically climbed up the side of this rocky hill that was pale red. So close.
Once at the top of the hill, I was in awe. RED. Favorite color. A literally red beach. Heaven! Thanks, I’ll stay here, come get me in 90 years. A picture doesn’t do it justice. But that’s all I can show you. It was worth the climb up the hill. We had to climb back down the other side to get to the actual beach. It was a combination of the black and red rock. I’ll just move my bed to this beach. It’ll fit right in. This beach had a lot more of what seemed volcanic rock and even better that it was red.
We all started to feel a little burned out, figuratively and literally. We made our climb back towards the bus stop and waited for about an hour before getting on a bus back to Fira. Remember last night and the guy I was trying not to drool over? He was on the bus. Needless to say, I wasn’t staring out the window on the way home. Heather was a happy tourist.
It felt like we had been on buses all day once we got back into Oia. All miserable. We showered and felt better and headed into Oia to find a place to eat and watch the sun set again. A newlywed couple at our hotel told us Oia was expensive as far as food so to be careful of which place we picked. One restaurant we had found had good prices outside. We walked upstairs and it felt weird. The hostess asked if we had reservations and we said no, then were told they could find us a table. After sitting down and opening the menus, the prices were different. Sneaky. I got a really weird vibe from the place and none of us were willing to spend that amount of money on food so we headed out. After walking a while, we settled on a restaurant (basically because we were over looking for other places and it was the closest one) called Neptune.
It’s weird how I don’t speak or understand Greek. I know enough Greek phrases now to get by and be polite. When we’re out in Paros there’s a lot of people speaking Greek and not English. You kind of tone it out? I guess. Since Santorini has more tourists, there are more English speaking people. At dinner, we talked about this and how it’s kind of relaxing and nice not to hear and understand people and it was kind of annoying to be able to understand the conversation. (We also hoped we didn’t annoy people like this table was.) Dinner was awesome. I ordered moussaka and expected some odd side of a vegetable or fruit but got french fries? So random.
The sun had set again and it was almost as good as the night before. There was a church blocking the actual sun in our view from the restaurant. Kelly and I sprinted back to the edge of Oia to a ledge where we took pictures with the sunset. A man helped us with the settings on Kelly’s camera and a picture of the both of us with the sunset. Score. We walked back to find Cathleen, Cris and Christin and walked through the Oia shops and then walked back to our hotel.
Funny tidbit: while we were walking through the shops, there were two guys standing at the edge of some restaurant who said to us “Goodnight ladies.” Then after pausing and letting us all walk past them said, “Good next morning.”

(Pictures later.)

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Tags: akrotiri, black beach, fira, greece, greek language, kamari, oia, red beach, santorini, sunset