The salt doesn't wash off

That's the thing nobody tells you about Naxos. You leave with it in your hair, your lungs, the creases of your palms. The island has a way of getting inside you — through the fig trees that lean over crumbling walls, through the cold shock of the Aegean at 7am, through a glass of Kitron poured by someone who doesn't speak your language but refills it anyway. Naxos is not a postcard. It's a place that happens to you.