Back in Thera, now the search is on for lunch. One of the restaurants we had picked out is closed (permanently or seasonally, we don’t know, but it is locked up tight), so we continue on.  We want to try to stay away from the more touristy part of town to the seaside of the bus station – which ends up working to our advantage.  We spy this great looking wine café down a side street, which once we look at the menu is a little too pricey and stuffy for us (even though the garden patio is gorgeous).  Which forces us to keep walking down the street and get called over to a little “traditional Greek café” by the hawker guy – who gives us a sample of the pork souvlaki they have….and well, we are sold. OMG, it was so good!

Thus, lunch at Stamna begins. The manager is a doll, and talking up a storm, kidding with everyone.   The waitress was so sweet.  The have a little outdoor terrace area, but its pretty darn cold, so we choose to stay inside, away from the one other table eating in the back and begin our gluttony!  I order the Souvlaki – of course!  And Ed orders his Octopus – of course!  The bread is wonderful – thick slices of wheat bread, nicely toasted with olive oil.  The octopus perfectly grilled.  The souvlaki?  It was the whole damn pig!  Honestly!  It comes out piled high with French fries (which I take off and put to the side), but underneath them?  It is still piled high with pork.  Oh my.  And it is such good pork! And Tzatziki sauce.  Yummo.  Ed and I manage to polish it off, but oh wow – I’m going to need to do a bunch of walking to counteract this pig out (pun intended – LOL).

Upon finishing this huge meal – guess what? They bring out a dessert of Greek Yogurt and some sort of sweet jam.  Ay yi yi.  But you can’t turn down nice gestures, so we manage to make a dent in it even though we are stuffed to the gills. And it is yogurt, so in a way it was good for us.  Rationalization works for me.

Finished with the gluttony, we retrace our steps to visit the Museum of Prehistoric Thera.  Figured might as well do something a little different this afternoon, huh? Visit a museum?  But actually, this one does have an interesting bent – all prehistoric artifacts from around the island.  Fabulous figurines, marble sculptures and pottery from 2700-2400 BC.  I mean, really.  It is amazing what they have found when excavating to build here.  And a lot of it is pretty much whole – which is totally different than the reconstructions you normally see.  I fall in love with the fire dogs – what a great idea for skewers over the fire. I can make those!  The decorations on the a lot of the pots are very simple – yet beautiful.  Theran potters used nature as their template and typically used only one or two colors, with a  striking result.

One of the more interesting finds was a gold ram figurine – found in 1999 inside a wooden box inside a clay chest!  Next to a large pile of pairs of goat horns.  Can you imagine finding that? Incredible. 

Done with prehistoric Thera, we go out into modern day Thera, dodging ship people and enjoying the cold bracing air and looking at all the pretty white washed buildings, churches and clock towers around.  Plus the awesome bar-terraces that line the main old city walk.  Now those would be fun at night – not for us, of course – at least not today, because never say never!

Winding our way through the souvenir shops and closed cafes and bars, we decide to get our exercise by walking down the stairway to the harbor – instead of dealing with the lines and hordes of ship people who will be taking the cable car back down. It’s cool enough that it makes the walk more enjoyable – and the donkey poop less offensive!  And boy do our memories serve us well – donkey poop definitely abounds.  It is almost hard to look around us as we descend because we are always looking down to avoid a) tripping and b) donkey poop!  We do manage to stop often for photos – and videos of the cable car going down to the harbor (sometimes it amazes me we actually got on that thing! It can be sort of scary when you think about it.)  And, fortunately it is late enough in the day that no one is actually riding the donkeys on the stairway – save one group we manage to pass toward the bottom – so we avoid the typically inevitable collision (you have to pick:  collide with the donkey, the stairway wall or the poop).

Successfully navigating the stairs makes us thirsty – did you expect anything different? – and we stop at the harbor for refreshments, watching the line at the tenders until it is small enough for us to go and get aboard without too much waiting…or crowding.

We are back aboard in no time, and able to take some great long shots of Thera as well as watch a lovely sunset. 

Then onto dinner and a show. Dinner was great – seafood for Thanksgiving – show, not so much, we ditched after about 5 minutes – but we’d already been to see the rock band before the show, so we were good with our entertainment and ready to turn in for the evening and prepare for Mykonos.