Verbalized: Life + Food + Travel

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Travellers, categorized

There are two types of people who come to Santorini: The cruise ship set, and the jet set.

The former are a mass of functional shoes, money belts, floppy hats and drawling accents that rise above all the other sounds around them. They emerge from their tour busses in tight-knit groups, guidebooks clutched close, cameras held aloft as they snap photos of anything, everything. They are the ones who spend their time drifting from souvenir shop to souvenir shop; they’ll return home with several thousand nondescript photos of nothing in particular, and a baseball cap emblazoned with “Santorini” in embroidered Comic Sans. Their experience is tame, predictable, commercial.

The latter, the jet set, can be distinguished by large swaths of perfectly bronzed skin and the way they’re never, ever out of arms reach from their partner. The men wear white linen shirts – never wrinkled – and expertly cuffed khaki pants, and the women are draped in long, flowing strapless dresses – usually in silk, always in bright pops of orange, turquoise, green – that twist around their ankles and swirl out behind them in the breeze. Together, they look like they just stepped out of the pages of Vogue and into real life. They spend their time wandering slowly, hand-in-hand, never looking sweaty no matter how searing the afternoon heat might get, or sipping glasses of white wine from restaurant terraces, all the while conversing quietly in French, Italian, Spanish. They return home with an original oil painting (an abstract interpretation of the village at sunset) for their “collection” and a handful of magazine-worthy photos discreetly snapped at sunset. Their experience is exotic, glamourous, captivating.

And then there’s me. I didn’t arrive on a cruise ship, yet I’m also not in possession of a private jet and an impossibly perfect tan. I prefer to sit on the sidelines, observing, because for me, part of the fun in travelling isn’t just seeing the sights, it’s seeing the people as they see the sights.