Amerisus Hotel

Our hotel in on Santorini is a small hotel with 14 rooms built on a hairpin turn in the road from the airport. The entrance is on the ground level, with three floors above and a parking garage in the basement. Our room is on the second level which is really the third floor and is accessed via steps from the lobby, or you can walk up the road as it curves around the hotel and enter our room from the road level. Walking from one side of our room to the other is pretty much the width of the hotel if you consider the exterior balcony/courtyard outside the room. So it is easy to see the road as it comes up from below by looking over the balcony, then walk to the other side of the room, open a window and see the street as it winds up the hill. It is actually a very nice hotel, our suite is large and spacious, with a very high barrel ceiling that is common here, outside our room is the pool area and a nice view of the island and surrounding islands. Directly across the street from our room is a series of private dwellings and above are more hotels.

With all this in mind, yesterday as we left our room to walk to the main square, we noticed one of the neighbor women with a length of stiff wire apparently trying to unclog the drain system in front of her house. Everything considered it did not appear to be a pleasant experience. Upon our return later in the day, she was still working on the drain as two men watched, I believe she was uttering some type of expletives, and it appeared a solution to the drain problem had not been found. We wasted no time entering our room.

About 6:00 PM one or two plumbers appeared and tried to unclog everything with industrial type rooters. I think that failed because at 8:00 PM, in the dark, they brought out the jackhammers which continued until 1:30 AM. Keeping in mind the hairpin curve, the proximity to the street and the jackhammering, it was a bit difficult to sleep. The windows in the newer hotels are very nice, they have the ability to open as a normal door or window, open from the top for air like a casement, and each is fitted with an internal hard shutter which helps reduce the sound, but, alas they do not keep out the sounds of a jackhammer at 1:30AM.

Sometime about 2:30 AM amidst loud conversations the drone of a portable generator and shovels, everything was quiet and the street was empty. This morning the street is clean, a hole about two feet in diameter covered with gravel is all that remains of the night's activities. I have to applaud the hard work of these Greek people to take care of this problem in a relatively short time frame, I can't complain because this was obviously a situation that needed quick attention, and was not an international conspiracy to keep me awake.

Back to Lesvos this morning where we have a day to rest before the next adventure in Turkey.