At the beginning of my visit here I stayed with Ines, a friend of the girls who hosted me in Athens. She had just recently moved to the island from Athens to live with her boyfriend and had a spare loft bed. The day I arrived in Oia I had quite a bit of waiting to do before I met Ines, so I wandered on down to one of the small ports in the town. I relaxed near the water, had some coffee with old greek men who owned the fish taverna and proceeded to get throughly sunburned. Later that evening, looking tomato red I'm sure, I met Ines and Vlad and we all had a wonderful evening together. Later that night I met the random jumble of young ex-pats and travellers who made Oia their home. There were a handful of Americans, Ukrainians, Latvians, and a dutch girl. To make a longish story short, I struck up a lovely friendship with Danielle (an American who has spent the last fourish years in the UK), Johanna (the dutch girl from Amsterdam) and Craig (an American who co-owns a bookstore in Oia). All of them work at Atlantis Bookstore, the only bookstore in Oia and a little slice of heaven. Seriously - the bookstore is amazing.
After staying my alotted time with Ines, (her landlord a very snoopy elderly greek woman was starting to get fussy) I spent a night in the bookstore. That night turned into being somewhat gainfully employed for this past week and living in Atlantis Books. A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. I sleep in a little loft above all the books and I love it.
The bookstore has no exact hours, so we open about 10:30 - 11:00am and stay open until midnight most of the time. We have books in english (yayyyy!), italian, french, german, greek and spanish primarily but have some sprinkles of russian and dutch. In case anyone is interested here's the write up the times did a few years back. We are based in a classic white and blue building and we even have a three month old puppy named Penelope. Johanna and I are basically the same people just based on different continents. We've become fast friends and yesterday we went down to the port and went cliff jumping! Crazy amounts of fun, I'll never forget hurling myself into the Mediterranean. Danielle is a ton of fun too, and we've bonded over our insane love of Anthro dresses and London. Craig is a character out of a novel. He plays chess biweekly at 3am with the local greek men. Hysterical and awesome. I am going to seriously miss this bookstore, the people I've met and this town. Sadly I'm heading back to Athens in two days, but after that I'm headed to Brindisi and then onto Denmark for ROSKILDE!!! Speaking of, I am quite sad about the loss of the Danish World Cup team to Holland. I had bet a beer on it and did quite a lot of trash talking with Tahra. I believe my exact words were, "Forbered jer på at drukne jeres sorger i heineken mens jeg fejrer sejren med en carlsberg!". However, as Tahra predicted, "Geen huilen morgen, Claire!" For translation purposes the first part is in Danish and the second in Dutch. We're both quite excited about the US draw with England though. Anyway, here's a picture of me in my new bed at the bookstore. Hope everyone's having as great a summer as I am!
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