Oia (EE-ah) is at the northernmost tip of the island of Thira. It's considerably smaller than Fira and there is only one road large enough for cars to travel on which ends in a little plaza above the town. From there you have the option of walking. When we visited, Oia was fairly heavily damaged from recent heavy rains. Many of the 'streets' were washed out in places or in the process of being reconstructed. The town mostly survives on tourists who come for a few hours each evening in the summer to see the sunset. As a result there are a number of outdoor cafes and restaurants, a handful of shops and a couple small hotels. Otherwise it's residential with fishing from a couple harbors below the town as the primary employment.

This is known to us as the 'cat picture'. The reason for this is probably apparent to you. There were a lot of cats in Oia and most of them were not willing to be anywhere near us. Probably we'd spent too much time hanging out with Pano and Kato. The cats would lounge about in those sorts of unbelieveable places that only cats can lounge about in, then right as we were about to take their picture, they'd run off. This is not a very unbelieveable place, it's just another wall on the edge of a cliff but it will have to do.

Here we have a special feature: The Making of the Cat Picture. (Now you see why it needed a name.) Here you see the cat and here you see David taking the picture which would come to be known as the cat picture. Looking at both pictures you should be able to deduce the following things: 1 - We didn't want the telephone pole in the picture. 2 - We weren't lying about the 'streets'. 3 - These people have a really great view from their balcony.

In Fira and Oia all of the restaurants must somehow obtain their endless supplies of nescafe and bad Greek wine. (Not to say that there isn't good Greek wine because there is, but its hard to find amongst all the bad Greek wine.) We saw some people actually lugging boxes up and down the stairs but most people rely on mule delivery. These mules were delivering supplies to a restaurant and they were really happy about it. Maybe. It's sort of hard to tell with a mule.