Sorry Akrotiri and fish spas

Today I feel a bit mean about what I said yesterday concerning the ruins of Akrotiri and that’s because we went to the museum in Thera town where all the things the archeaologists found are kept.   Akrotiri must have been an amazing place before all the people ran away.  There are wall paintings of exquisite flowers and cheeky little jugs like birds with their spouts thrown back in song and funny nipples on their breasts.  A big comfy bath and and an oven.  There are a couple of plaster casts of beds presumably retrieved by filling the space left in the ash with plaster as with the bodies in Pompeii.  They look a like torture beds now but I suppose they’ve been through a lot. I’m sorry Akrotirians, wherever you are now, to have dissed your town.

This morning I’m indulging myself.  Grant isn’t coming because he doesn’t fancy it.  I’m going on a boat to visit a volcano and swim in a hot spring.  The volcano is still active and was quite spectacular forty years ago with both black and white steam pouring from fissures.  It’s in a gentler mood at the moment but more later when I’ve seen it.

Speaking of indulging oneself there is a curious fashion here for “foot spas” with little Singaporean fish in them that nibble the dead skin off your feet.  “It’s lovely. It’s like a massage” says the spa proprietor persuasively. “Only ten Euros for fifteen minutes”  Maybe - but the price I’d pay in nightmares would be far higher than that.

Which brings me to the concept of “sophistication” a word used in tourist brochures about Santorini.  What exactly is it?  Fish spas? Lovely jewellery shops? Fair enough there are plenty of them.  Cosmopolitan? Certainly the island has lots of multinational tourists. But I don’t quite get what they mean.  Perhaps that quality is concentrated in the nightclubs which our demographic and indeed inclination preclude us from frequenting.  Tonight, however we are going to a concert to celebrate the opening of an arts festival.  Maybe there I will encounter the elusive sophistication of Santorini.  Anyway I’m off to my volcano now and they never disappoint me.