Sunday 26 February 2017

Santorini 1991 - You never forget your first time!

When there are no concerts to report from, I like to post reports from my travels, as I did last month with Antiparos. Of course usually my travels coincide with my concerts, but I intend to keep the travel posts separate from the concert ones. Anyway, before I discovered Antiparos I used to go to Santorini every summer. I went there every summer for 14 years, from 1991 to 2004, sometimes going twice a year. In the very last year I even found a job there and stayed for the winter.
In 1997 I got my first internet subscription. One of the first things I did was to create my own webpage. My site has not progressed much since then as I tend to post on this very blog instead, but one of its first features was a page dedicated to Santorini. I used the map you can see at the top of this post as background image (which I had scanned from a tourist guide book) and this still captured (using my TV & Video capture card - a very advanced gadget for computers back then!) from a VHS tape which was released back in the 90's.
The rest of the page was filled with my own photos taken using my film camera during my first few summers there from 1991 to 1996,  which were then scanned using a hand-held scanner. On top of that, the sizes of the photos were small in order to comply with the strict bandwidth requirements of that era where the fastest connections were those of 33.6kbps dial-up modems. As a result, don't expect them to be of good quality!

Santorini is at the south of the Cyclades group of islands in the Aegean sea in Greece. Its spreading is 76 sq.km and has a population of 7000. One of its attractions is the volcano, situated opposite the west side of the island.

Fira
Sunset at Ia

Perissa beach

Red Beach

White Beach
Vlyhada beach

The volcano
The volcano's crater

Excavations at Akrotiri
Nightlife at Enigma Club
I hope that soon I will be able to add pictures from later years, properly scanned of course. Meanwhile you can still see the original page here, while we're still waiting for the summer...