Santorini Day 4

We spared a day in Santorini so today we headed back to Oia! We walked to Fira bus station where there were buses going to various points in the island. We bought the bus tickets to Oia around 2 euros each and waited for our bus. The buses were more like tour buses which were comfortable!

The bus ride from Fira to Oia was less than half an hour, I heard it was longer during tourist season due to traffic and there was only one road to Oia! On the way to Oia, we passed by other villages:

When we arrived in Oia, we know exactly where we wanted to go since we were here for our wedding photo shoot! Today was much better weather! The sky was clear and blue! Oia is very picturesque, no matter where you go, you can not get a bad photo! Words could not describe how beautiful the scene was and pictures could not fully captured the actual feeling to be there!

We would definitely come back to Santorini again in the future - perhaps our 10th anniversary!

Santorini Day 3

We spent our first day as husband and wife in one of the most beautiful places on earth - Santorini! The weather was good today so we went to explore the island as much as we could since this was our last day in Santorini!  First, we walked to Fira and headed toward the road down to the pier. The view was truly stunning!

The way down was very easy but watch out for donkeys! 

Imagine having lunch in this restaurant, over-looking the sea (too bad it was not opened when we were there).

We took the cable cars up (it would be a lot of work to walk all the way up!).

The view going up was amazing - looking over the white houses on the cliff!

We passed by the restaurant where we had our dinner the first night (my favorite seafood spaghetti) so I took a picture of the restaurant:

We spent our whole day wandering around this beautiful island! When we got back to our hotel for a break, our hotel notified us that there will be a strike in Athens tomorrow so our flight will be cancelled! Our hotel was very helpful to provide us with phone numbers to call the airline to reschedule our flight...we'll be flying out the following day instead! Don't know rather this was a good or bad news for us....at least we get to stay in Santorini for one extra day! There was nothing we could do about the strike so we didn't even worry about it and just enjoy our time in Santorini!

For dinner, we went to this restaurant on the road from Firostefani to Fira. We ordered the local dish called  tomato keftedes as appetizer. It was pretty good!

We also had grilled calamari which was excellent!

After dinner, we went back to our hotel and sat by the pool to enjoy the wonderful night view of Santorini.  The houses lighted up on the cliff was magnificent!

Our Santorini Wedding

Today was one of the most important days of my life - our wedding! I first saw Santorini in a drama and fell in love with it right away! If I can choose one place to have my dream wedding, it is definitely Santorini.  I have dreamed about having my wedding in Santorini and today it came true!

The night before was raining so I was very nervous that the weather will ruined my dream wedding! Luckily, when I woke up in the morning, the rain stopped but it was cloudy. We woke up early in the morning and had our breakfast. My make-up artist arrived at 10:30 am and did my hair and make-up. We got dressed and our wedding planner came to meet us at 12:30 pm. Nikos took some photos of us around our hotel before we headed to Saint Irni.

I chose Saint Irni because I love the its structure and location, it was facing the sea. We got to Saint Irni and our ceremony started. There was one camera man and two photographers (one is Nikos) recorded our whole ceremony. Saint Irni was very romantic, surrounded it was all white just like in dream land! I couldn't believe that were are getting married in Santorini, everything I have dreamed all came true! Even though it was just two of us, I felt this was the best moment in my life that I will never forget.

After our ceremony, we had our photo shoot in Saint Irni and then headed to the famous Oia for the picturesque blue-domed church. Nikos knew the best locations for photos, locations that I never seen online.  When we reached Oia, we couldn't believe our eyes - it was like heaven! Everywhere was whitewashed houses and blue-domed churches. The white and blue made us felt like we are dreaming.

We spent at least 2 hours in Oia, every single corner was just too beautiful!

After the photo shoot, Nikos drove us back to our hotel and our hotel gave us a bottle of champagne and congratulated us :) Today was the most memorable day in my life and my dream came true!

Santorini, Greece

We flew from Athens to Santorini; total flight time was only 50 minutes but got us to a totally different world! We landed on a very small airport and as we walked out the gates, we were greeted by Manos, who transferred us to the hotel. We picked Mill Houses which was located in Firostefani, very close to the main center, Fira because not much hotels are open in that early in the year (most hotels open in around May, beginning of the tourist season) and also we got a good deal - 80 euros for a studio per night including breakfast and airport transfer. The ride was comfortable, we were in a van with one other couples, and the ride was less than 20 minutes. We stopped at the parking lot across from the road and had to walk down to get to the hotel. As I walked down the stairs, I saw the view, it was breathtaking....I am really in Santorini! Am I dreaming?

It was a foggy day when we landed so the pictures didn't came out as pretty. Manos showed us our "studio" which was a traditional cave room; our room was spacious and very cute:

We went out to explore Santorini right away! We walked up the stairs to get back to the parking lot where the main road was to get to Fira. I lost count of the number of steps, it was good exercise, after all this is one of the uniqueness of Santorini! The walk to Fira was around 10 minutes and it was relatively quiet in the island since it was not the tourist season. We walked by many cute little white-washed cubic homes and blue-domed churches.

 We found a cute gyros restaurant in Fira (Obelix, their website: http://obelix.gr/wordpress/) and had our lunch there. The gyros was the best we ever had and it was very inexpensive around 2 euros!

After lunch, we went back to our hotel to meet with our wedding planner - Nikos. Nikos and his assistant came to our room and walked us through all the details of our wedding tomorrow :) Afterwards, we unpacked and walked back out to Fira for dinner. We had our dinner at Pelican Restaurant, which looked like a terrace, the food here was amazing!  I had the best seafood spaghetti I ever have in my life!

After dinner, we walked back to our hotel and tried to sleep early but was nervous about my big day tomorrow :)