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Issy‘s cold is an absolute doozy and she wakes up feeling only very marginally better. We wander along the path towards Fira in search of nourishment. I launch into a concoction known as the ”Greek Breakfast“, which seems to just consist of three eggs. The name would seem to imply that a significant proportion of the local population munches its way through this every morning, which leaves us wondering where they get the eggs from. We haven't seen any chickens here yet. I hope the eggs come from chickens. I have coffee that the spoon stands up in, and I think that I'll probably now be awake for several days. We wander into and out of shops and then into the town’s spectacularly ceilinged main church. Unlike yesterday's monastery chapel it also seems to have some room for a congregation.
We have lunch with Maddie Johansen, whose parents are very old friends of ours. She's at the tail end of several weeks travelling through Europe. She tells us that she had 50 Euro in her pocket on Sunday when the Greek Government announced that it was closing all the banks for a week. All the ATMs were out of cash,
so she snuck out in her pyjamas at 3am and managed to find one in a back alley that had just been refilled. I hope her parents aren’t reading this.
Issy’s cold has worsened again so she heads back to the hotel to rest up. I head off around the rim of the caldera to Skaros Rock, which is a large outcrop jutting out from the cliff face. Access is via several hundred steps down to its base, then up several hundred more steps to a ledge near the top. I try to find a way up to the very top but this looks like a job for people with ropes and crampons. Others are also looking for the way up, and they ask me if I can help them find it. I‘m not sure why they think I’ll know. One young man does find a route, but it seems that it involves hanging upside down while supporting yourself by your fingernails. I think Issy would probably kill me if I fell off and died so early in our trip, so I decide to leave this one to the professionals. There's evidence of a settlement here at some stage,
and I remember Kostas telling us that the people who lived here left in the mid 1850s because of constant earthquakes. This isn’t all that surprising; I can't imagine too many worse places to be if the ground started to shake. Apparently the rock has a Maltese connection; someone bought an icon of the Virgin Mary here from my beloved’s tiny island homeland at some stage. I hope it liked earthquakes.
I pass a professional photo shoot involving an attractive young lady doing weird yoga poses on the roof of a church. I take a picture of her. I'm not sure I'm supposed to take photos of professional models for free, so I run away quickly before anyone notices what I’m doing.
Issy‘s getting worse instead of better. She launches into antibiotics while I‘m dispatched to collect a takeaway meal of gyros and Greek bread.
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