Lost, Santorini style

Lets talk a little bit about the power of this island. I have known many people who have shown up to this island and had their entire worlds rocked. Yeah, well, what exactly does that MEAN? Alright, let’s quantify it. ‘Bout five years ago I came here for a grad school course run by the College Year in Athens program. It was a three week course with mixed undergrads and grads. There were 12 of us, methinks. All of us had just planned on coming for our three weeks and then leaving. By the end of those three weeks, four of the twelve decided to forgo any plans they had the rest of the summer and FIND A WAY to stay here and also visit other islands as part of the package. At least two of those four quit jobs to do so. I would have been number five of that crew, was certainly willing to give up my originally planned summer job, but had a girlfriend at the time and thought it especially insane making THAT phone call, explaining why I was going to spend the next two months getting paid expenses to throw foreigners off their banana boats with the Aussies on Mylopotas Beach. I tried to convince her to come on over but…..yeah you gotta be here to experience that kind of insanity.

So, besides the four peeps who give it all up to stay here longer, get ready to have your head spun by a wild stat: I know three people who have landed on this island and at some point during their stay (usually early-on) realized that their current relationship is not what they hoped to be experiencing in life. This phenomenon is NOT, in my opinion, due to the fact that the tropical-infused atmosphere and inhibition-disregarding attractive summer inhabitants combine to make this a temptation island of sorts. I believe it is due to the concept that intense vacations often serve as self-examinations of your normal reality. Here, your reality is so altered that you cannot help but – in times of retrospection – examine your own day-to-day normal existence and measure whether or not it meets what you wanted to establish for yourself. Ok, so we’re entering mystical waters here but it is kind of like an out-of-body experience where you can kind of observe/evaluate how you’ve lived recently. ‘Minimizing the useless chatter of life’ is one of those frequently-quoted phrases cited when bringing up the advantages of intense travel, and I say for good reason. Intense doesn’t have to be 16 hours of plane rides away from home like this one, but it does have to minimize your normal attention-grabbing devices which dominate your usual reality. There is no email at this ‘hotel’, nor could I just walk down the street to reach one. It is a 12 euro cab ride or a 30 minute bus ride to find an internet café. However, you CAN walk down the street around midnight, pass by all three restaurants (all open-air) in this town and hear the entirely happy folks contently conversing in many languages accentuated by zero TVs or computers. When you can sit here on the rooftop of Pansion Carlos, looking up at 1,000 more stars that used to be obscured by the effects of Los Angeles by-products, rock out on whatever music allows for heightened awareness, AND because of your vantage point look out upon nearly the entire island and point out the other scattered towns, You’d be surprised at what epitomes surface. I told you this blog would have some ‘Lost’ references, eh? An island with magical powers. Don’t think I don’t recognize the irony involved in the fact that I had to find an internet café to post this…