Milos

Hello all!

We're back in Athens after a few nights in Milos. We'll stay in Athens until our flight back home (with layovers in London and Boston).

Anyway, Milos. What a change from Santorini and Mykonos! There were way less tourists here and subsequently way less to do. It's a fairly large island but the villages are small and scattered throughout. We stayed right in Adamas, the port town.

The first day we visited ancient Christian catacombs. We also saw an ancient theater. It was awesome, obviously, because it was a theater, but what was really cool was that archeologists were excavating the theater while we were there! We saw them digging up ruins and dusting surfaces. I've never seen an excavation in process, so it was really exciting for Mom and me. It's so incredible that so much of this country's ruins still lay beneath the surface! Who knows what they will find in the seats of this theater where ancient Greeks once watched great tragedies?

After that, we headed back to Adamas and hit the little beach right by our hotel. The water is so clear and warm here!

The next day, we signed up for a tour and got in this old sailboat and hit the water. It was so much fun! We went snorkeling and went on a little boat through these pirate caves. Milos is strategically located between Crete and the other larger islands of the Cyclades, so pirates essentially ruled parts of the island, able to easily capture the large, slower ships passing through their territory. They would hide in these cavernous spaces created thousands of years ago by volcanic eruptions. These tiny caves looked EXACTLY like the caves in Pirates of the Caribbean!!!! Then our captain told us that the famous pirate Barborussa (sp?) once ruled the entire island of Milos!!! It was so crazy and exciting to imagine actual Jack Sparrows running around the rocks we were sailing by.

It was really windy on the sail boat and we had to turn to a safer route! It was INSANE sitting on the deck of the ship with these huge waves crashing down on us, literally lifting our bodies in the air off of the ship! It reminded me of my front cabin on Semester at Sea....

Yesterday we sort of ran out of things to do... The main activities of the Greeks are eating, sitting, and smoking, and since we're kinda getting sick of the food, definitely sick of sitting around, and don't smoke, we got a little bit bored on Milos.

But now we're headed back to Athens where we'll hit the rest of the museums, do some day trips to nearby sites, then hop back on a plane for lots and lots of flying. Looking forward to being home, definitely looking forward to that Starbucks in Athens...