{"id":1648,"date":"2008-07-22T14:34:08","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T14:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=1648"},"modified":"2008-07-22T14:34:08","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T14:34:08","slug":"greece-2008-part-i-to-santorini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1648","title":{"rendered":"Greece 2008 Part I: To Santorini."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on this month&#8217;s trip to Greece for weeks now, but things immediately became so hectic upon my return that it&#8217;s kept slip-sliding down the to-do list.  (Case in point: I&#8217;m writing this over my lunch hour, which is falling at 2:30.)  Things are good, mind you &#150; just <i>busy.<\/i><br \/>\nI&#8217;m also having difficulty summing up the entirety of such an amazing experience in only a few paragraphs.  Where to begin?  What to leave out?  How much time to spend on what?  Even the flight there was remarkable due to a layover in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691562546\/\">Dublin airport<\/a>, with its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690744943\/\">Celtic glasswork<\/a>, its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690755321\/\">library-themed bar<\/a> and its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691574692\/\">enormous glass Oscar Wilde<\/a>.  After arriving in Athens, we spent the night at a really nice little hotel just off the Placa, which is the main boulevard in Athens with all the shopping and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691598176\/\">puppet-wielding street performers<\/a> that entails.  The next morning we took a big, BIG high-speed boat (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690796301\/\">this one<\/a> but not) to the beautiful slumbering volcano of Santorini.<br \/>\nAh, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690842959\/\">Santorini<\/a>.<br \/>\nSeriously, I&#8217;m sort of at a loss to describe Santorini. Our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690839381\/\">hotel<\/a> was on the inside slope of the caldera of the volcano, the center of which was a vast stretch of ocean dotted with other islands.  Our villa was amazing, with doors that opened out onto the views and a quiet that&#8217;s unlike anything I&#8217;d ever heard before.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691805654\/\">food<\/a> was incredible (I <i>have<\/i> to find a recipe for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690994139\/\">grilled feta<\/a> now), the weather was amazing, but the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691685450\/\">views<\/a>!  Good Lord in heaven, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691679628\/\">views<\/a>!  The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690919027\/\">views<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2692490985\/\">views<\/a>!  It wasn&#8217;t just the sunsets and ocean vistas, either &#150; even the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2690973445\/\">little things<\/a> were <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2691779722\/\">absolutely exquisite<\/a> &#150; and we even found one of my new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/geoffreylong\/2692496443\/\">favorite bookstores on the planet<\/a>.<br \/>\nGo, check out the pictures on Flickr.  Leave your questions and comments there, and I&#8217;ll respond as quickly as I can.  I know I&#8217;m meant to be a writer, but sometimes pictures really are worth a thousand words.  In Part II I&#8217;ll fill you all in on the ITRA conference in Nafplio, and in Part III I&#8217;ll tell you about our adventures in Athens on the way home.  And yes, pictures of the Acropolis will be included.  Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on this month&#8217;s trip to Greece for weeks now, but things immediately became so hectic upon my return that it&#8217;s kept slip-sliding down the to-do list. (Case in point: I&#8217;m writing this over my lunch hour, which is falling at 2:30.) Things are good, mind you &#150; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-qA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}