Summer 2022 Continued....in Greece

After my rest in Geneva via the not-so-shiny Stansted Airport, I flew to Thessaloniki to join a 13ish day tour of Greece.

Back during the 2020-2021 school year, I took the first level of Hebrew at Citizen Cafe Tel Aviv (which I highly recommend). It was on Zoom and everyone except 2 of us was in America. One of these was a lovely woman in California named Debbie. She visited Israel later that year and we got together. As it turns out, she organizes tours of the Holy Land. This summer her tour was going to Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Greece and she invited to me join any combination of the four. I chose Greece because it fit into my summer and because I wanted to go to some of the Christian sites on the tour: Corinth (where Paul was), Ephesus (we took a cruise that visited the port there) and Patmos (where John wrote the book of revelation) among others.

Debbie and Joy

It was a wonderful trip! I made 18 new friends and got to experience full-on-tourist travel again!  I even got to practice Hebrew! I heard a woman at the front desk at one of our hotels say "ani po", which means "I am here". I asked her in Hebrew if she was speaking Hebrew and she answered me in Hebrew. Then, of course, I had to switch back to English but it was super fun anyways.

The last thing I want to say is that I went to Greece on my honeymoon in October of 1998. We went mainly to islands and then to Athens to see the Acropolis. One of those islands was Santorini. I was slightly nervous about the emotions that visiting this place 25 years later might bring up.  While I certainly was emotional about being in Greece, I am happy to report that Santorini is not at all like I remember it. First of all, Joe and I took the ferry from another island and arrived at a different port--the one with the donkey trail to climb! We walked up (I'm like 97% sure we did) to Fira after engaging one of the lodging proprietors who was yelling out nightly prices for a room. We accepted an offer for something like the equivalent of 20 USD for a night (this is before Greece was part of the EU and they were still using drachmas). 

Back then, Santorini was still white and blue like this:

but not anymore :(

Now it looks like this:

I know it is still beautiful, but it was not the same!

To me it felt more like Dubai. What I remember is restaurants with long tables full of old men solving the problems of the world late into the evening interspersed with homes. To be fair, it was late in the season and lots of things were closed, but I still think there is no comparison.  This town had shiny, expensive stores that felt like museums. And there was one blue roof in the entire skyline!  

In the end, there was no comparing the two Santorini's--a fact that, in the end, caused me no conflict at all between the present and the past. 

The trip was amazing and I got to visit some New Testament sights I will likely not visit again. I made some new friends and got to be a tourist again, like we did before the pandemic.

If you are interested in more of my pictures from Greece, click on the picture below.