Dog days
Santorini,
Greece
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Last full day in Fira. I spend a few hours visiting the Archaeological Museum -- not as detailed a presentation as the Prehistoric Museum yesterday, but an interesting hodgepodge of artifacts unearthed in the graveyards of ancient Thira, spanning the era of the 7th century BC to the 2nd c. AD. Then a visit to a 17th c. family mansion that's been turned into a cultural center by the Catholic diocese, with old maps and engravings from the 16th to 18th centuries and photos of Fira before the 1956 quake. Also a few spooky photos of the aftermath. If all goes well, I will escape the next catastrophe. I wonder would it be better to be on the top of the caldera wall when the earth moves, or on the bottom.
Dinner for the third time at The Flame of the Volcano turns out to be a lavish farewell. I order stuffed eggplant and chicken and am comp-ed a tzasziki and tomato salad and a generous pour of ouzo after the meal (which was too large to finish). Then, the owner brought a bottle of red wine out for me in a plastic bag to take with me. He brought his young son, who wants to be an astronaut, out to shake my hand goodbye.
Outside of the restaurant, I find a big, yellow dog waiting for me, with a matted coat and soulful brown eyes. It adopts me and escorts me up and down the path along the top of then crater, walking just ahead of me and stopping to wait at each turn. It gets a little uncanny -- I strike off at one point up the wrong way and it follows me tentatively until I retrace my steps. Near the turnoff to my hotel, I try to stop in a small market to find it something to eat, but it seems to want me to keep moving, waiting further up from the entrance. When I get to the steps down to the hotel (over 100 of them, by the way), the dog looks at me as I turn and then vanishes off down the path.
Time is running out here in the crater. A noon flight tomorrow will land me back at the airport in Athens for the 8th time this month to catch a 3 pm flight to Chania, Crete. It's the largest of the areas I'll be exploring and will entail more rental car adventures if I'm to get any sort of glimpse of it in the next week. Heather, a friend of my friend Vidya's, arrived with another friend in Chania today and we're going to try to meet up somewhere in the Old Harbor for dinner tomorrow.
On the hotel terrace, with a glass of wine and the lights of the island stretched out like diamonds agains the velvet night.
