My Greek & Turkish Adventure – A High School Student’s Travel Journal: Day 2

By: Aditya D., Grade 9

What xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxlag? 

Even though there’s a 10 hour difference between Athens and Palo Alto, I slept through the whole night in the cozy bed of the Athenian hotel without getting up a single time during the night! (Fair warning to myself - tomorrow night will be a different story! Tonight we all were so tired after the long flight from San Francisco to Athens with a stop-over in Istanbul that I crashed as soon as I jumped into the bed!)

After having a delightful breakfast in the hotel, we head out to the Athens airport to take our flight to Santorini. All of us were excited! Boarding started on time. It was a small flight and the flight was full. It was only a 45 minutes flight from Athens to Santorini. The flight took off and when it showed green signs of unbuckling our seatbelts, the air hostesses treated us with some refreshments like blue candies and sodas. We were all dreaming about the white houses with deep blue painted doors on the volcanic island of Santorini. I have seen so many of those pictures on the instagram pages of some of my friends who had already visited Santorini.

After some time the pilot announced about the landing preparations. Some passengers started to look outside through the small windows to get a birds-eye-view of the beautiful landscape of Santorini. 

We landed on a beautiful day in Santorini. The temperature was a warm 29 degree celsius and there was a nice breeze blowing!

Outside of the airport, our shuttle driver was waiting for us to pick us up. He was holding a placard with my dad’s name on it. We quickly spotted him. He had a big van. We all settled down. The driver started driving along the shorelines to Oia village. We were all looking outside of the van windows to soak in the beautiful landscape. None of us wanted to miss any spots of those picturesque sights! Suddenly my dad shouted - ‘Howdy -  let’s take our first selfie here in the van‘. We all posed and his camera went CLICK.

Boom!

Our first memory of Santorini was captured! 

We arrived at our destination village. Our villa host was waiting for us to welcome his guests. After we released our shuttle driver, our host helped us with our luggage to reach our villa. As soon as we started our walk through the up and down steps through the tiny alleys of the hill, we were all awestruck by the breathtaking views of the white and blue painted small houses and the color of the deep blue ocean!!! As if we were walking through some calendar image!!! We reached our cute two bedroom villa. It had two patios - one in front and one on the roof. We made plans for the perfect sunset views from the roof patio the next evening!!! 

Both my sister and I thanked our parents and felt humbled to be able to experience such a beautiful landscape with ocean and hills. 

After resting for a little bit we were all hungry. We knew there were many good restaurants in Oia. However, we hadn’t made any reservations. We thought we would walk around the village and find a good restaurant ourselves. 

We stumbled upon a restaurant called Kastro and what a lucky find it was! Despite it being peak sunset hour, the restaurant staff managed to get a table for our family. We learned later on that people who sat in one of the coveted sunset-view tables, had booked well ahead of time.

The food and service were both excellent. We started with the burrata and Greek salad as appetizers. But the real highlight was the main course. Ever since my dad tried sea bream at a Parisian bistro a few years ago, he has been telling us this flavorful, meaty Mediterranean fish. The grilled sea bream was yummy and so was the seafood linguine I ordered just for myself.

And then that famous Oia sunset: the view from Kastro was simply beautiful! People booking ahead had a seat at a prime spot with a great angle of the sun dipping below the horizon. We noticed that there was  a public walkway in front of the restaurant.  People often paused to snap photos. We didn’t mind sharing the moment with fellow sunset chasers. Overall, a memorable dining experience with great food, warm service, and a postcard-worthy sunset!

Good thing about summer time is that the days are longer. The sunset was around 8:30 pm and we finished our dinner by 9pm. Before hitting the sack, we wanted to explore the village a little bit. Tomorrow we will spend a lot of time on the island including a bus ride to Fira. Tonight, however, we wanted to walk around a bit without having any particular spot in mind. We wanted to buy water bottles for the night. The waiter at Kastro told us about a little Mini-mart a few hundred yards away. 

While walking on the narrow alleys to our pleasant surprise we started to see a cute cat walk past us. I couldn’t stop myself from taking some photos of the cat. I texted my friends the cute cat picture as my postcard from Santorini. 

After a few steps we noticed one more cat, and then another one! This one was munching some cat food from a bowl. We realized that the island residents are very good about taking care of these stray cats.