Short story of how I ended up going to Santorini
How did we even choose Santorini as our beach vacay spot? Well my friend and I looked into going to Santorini because of the Gossip Girl episode in season 2 where Chuck asks Serena "What happened... in Santorini??" when referring to the sketchiness that happened between her and Carter. If you are a Gossip Girl fan you will understand. We spent most of our free and non free time in college binge watching Gossip Girl and had been making fun of that line for ages so it seemed fitting. We made this trip with another one of our friends (Ashka and Sophie shoutout!) after I had studied abroad for a semester in Madrid and we were starting a two week long trip around Europe. I wanted our first stop after Madrid to be Santorini so I could have some downtime and lay around on a beach and relax. I definitely got what I wanted!
General Thoughts...
As a vacation spot
I can definitely see why Santorini is a sought after honeymoon spot and general getaway destination. The views are so breathtaking I felt like I was dreaming! One of my favorite travel moments today is still the sunset I saw in Oia and everyone clapping at the end. All the hotels in Santorini are pretty well priced (unless you trying to be deluxe AF obviously) and look really nice, even the smaller one I stayed in, and because their main business is tourism, there are plenty of tours, cruises, restaurants etc. for people to choose from. The only downside of this is because it is so touristy, I didn't always feel like I was getting an authentic experience. I would definitely like to return to Greece and go somewhere else less touristy and compare.
Transportation
So are no real taxi services, like all the taxis are just normal looking cars and some people just drive people around as taxi drivers. One of our taxi drivers told us he doesn't work about half the year but when he does work he drives around and saves up money. Like what? What a life. If we needed a taxi we would just ask someone like our hotel concierge, or someone working in a shop to call one for us. As I mentioned in another post, we also took a bus from Fira to Oia and that was a whole experience in itself. No seatbelts, standing, swaying around while your bus swerves around corners on the edge of a cliff. Quite a ride. Lastly, the airport was also quite interesting to me because it was soooooo small for such a touristy place. It probably is the smallest airport I have ever been to. You also can't fly to Santorini direct from most places you have to fly, or ferry, from Athens.
Prices
Generally Greece is not that expensive however because of the high tourism, the really popular areas, like right next to the beach, have way higher prices than more remote locations on the island. I would say food and museums/tours are probably where you'll see prices higher as opposed to accommodation and transportation.
and.... a weird story
I had an interesting encounter with the medical services here. I basically was having some stomach issues for a week before (not going to get into this but don't drink too much kids) and I wasn't sure what was going on and was in a ton of pain so I went to a medical center close by to us. This was a very run down building, it didn't look super clean and the guy who came to talk to me had his shirt mostly unbuttoned with a large cross necklace and there was a Jesus painting hanging on the wall. Then all he did was press on my stomach a little bit and not tell me what he thought and then gave me some pills and sent me away. Did not trust that at all. So we decided to try again. We went to another medical center that looked pretty legit and I saw a doctor pretty quickly. He seemed less sketch but he didn't ask me too many questions and then wrote me a prescription of pills to get. I got the pills from a pharmacy and started taking them. It was all in Greek so I really didn't know what I was getting myself into and me being not so experienced in traveling yet and being stupid, didn't try that hard to figure out what it was and just started taking them. Lets just say a day or two later I didn't feel any better, if not worse, to the point where I didn't even want to drink water because it hurt and I fainted on the plan to Berlin. Oops. Obviously this is nothing to say on all medical services in Greece this is just mine and I don't think I handled it the best I could but it was definitely an experience. Don't worry I got to Germany and a nice German doctor saved me and when he saw when pills I was taking he said those were outdated and wouldn't help at all and not to trust Greeks. Interesting dynamic.
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