Paros to Naxos

Yesterday we packed up, said goodbye to the cats and went into town to catch our ferry to Naxos. We briefly checked out the “church with a hundred doors” but since people were actually using the church to pray, I felt uncomfortable gawking so we quickly left. (Topher somehow managed to surreptitiously snap a few pics, below.) It was a very, very old church, the main part of it was from the 6th century and parts of it even older.

The boys and I then bought some pastries for an early lunch while Topher returned the car. At some point on the way to the ferry, the boys lost screens for the rest of the day, as they were constantly picking at each other, with the result being that David actually pulled out his homework on the ferry without being asked and Hugh dove into reading Harry Potter.

We arrived in Naxos and walked to our Airbnb, which is just on the edge of the old part of the port town. Our host met us there and she very kindly had juice and cookies and toasted our arrival. She kept apologizing for her English, but it really was perfectly adequate and obviously much better than our Greek! The apartment is very nice and well kept, not a speck of dirt anywhere. She lives just upstairs.

The boys were not interested in exploring the old town so we left them reading and napping with no access to screens (taking the wifi password and the cord for the TV with us!). Topher and I had a nice afternoon, stopping first for a used book for David to read, then for a midday snack at a foodie-type restaurant run by a farmers’ cooperative that featured local produce, meat and cheese. We had some wine that was more like sherry and potatoes stuffed with cheese and deep-fried cheese croquettes. So delicious but my pants no longer fit! We then walked around the maze of old streets,

which were even more narrow and convoluted than Paros (photos below and on following pages). The old town is divided into two sections - the kastro at the top of the hill where the Roman Catholics lived from the 13th century onward, and the borgos around the bottom of the hill where the Greeks lived. In the kastro, a lot of houses were built right over the street and it was hard to maintain a sense of direction. At one point we came out of the maze exactly where we had started, and I thought we had been heading in the opposite direction! The museums we tried to go to were all closed for different reasons (one due to the “malicious actions of a family member”) but the town itself is an open-air museum so we had no trouble wiling away a few hours.

We came back to our apartment to find Hugh still deep into Harry Potter and David just waking up. We took a break from walking ourselves before going out at 6 to watch the sunset and find supper. We had planned to walk out to the uncompleted temple of Dionysus near the port, but the wind was pushing the waves up over the spit that would have taken us out to it, so we gave up and just watched the sun set over Paros in the distance.

On our way to find a restaurant we stopped at a couple of stores that sold local products (one pictured below) and bought some delcious-looking cheese and a few little souvenirs, including a little aluminium wine pitcher like the ones often used in restaurants.

We checked out a couple of restaurants that I had read about online but they were both closed so we ended up at one very close to our apartment. We hesitated to go in because there was no one else inside (but it was only 7 pm, so early by Greek standards), the name was in English (Elizabeth’s Garden), and there were pictures of the food outside (which is normally a major red flag for me), but the kids were getting cranky by this point and I had done enough walking myself. It ended up being one of our best meals so far. They had fresh calamari, which we haven’t yet been able to find. We had a big plate of grilled calamari, and sardines for Topher, eggplant with ground beef and feta for me, sausages and potatoes with cheese for David, and moussaka for Hugh (he’s been eating a bit of dairy on this trip as it is difficult to avoid and

he loves moussaka!). It was way too much food but we made a valiant effort to eat it all. We managed to get David to taste the calamari and he enjoyed it enough to have a second piece. The sausages were some of the best I’ve ever tasted. The house rose was homemade from their own grapes and also delicious. It was run by a husband and wife, with the wife doing all of the cooking and the husband waiting on us and stoking the very illegal looking wood stove. The stove pipe looked like a dryer vent! Though as Topher pointed out, there isn’t much that is flammable as everything is stone. I don’t know what kind of wood they burn here but it smells very good. We went home stuffed and went straight to bed, the kids anxious to continue reading their books.

We’re slow to get moving today so not sure we’ll have a chance to see much more of Naxos before we leave here for Mykonos, where we’ll stay just a few hours before we catch an overnight ferry to Chios.