As I travel I occasionally see characters that are worth photographing and writing about. In most of these cases, the subjects were photographed without their knowledge. That is why the night shots are often blurred where there is motion: I force the flash off on my digital camera to keep from drawing attention to myself. I'm getting pretty good at taking pictures while holding the camera at my hip, as if I was just holding the camera.
These guys were sitting at the back of our favorite restaurant one afternoon. We don't know how long they had been there, but it was long enough to drink nearly a gallon each of "Mythos" beer. You've probably never heard of Mythos beer, and there's a good reason: it's horrible.
This man and his dog were the funniest thing to watch. The dog absolutely adores this guy, who we assumed was his owner. It seemed at first like the guy was abusing the dog he was so rough with it, but it was obvious after a while that the dog loved it.

Every so often the dog would get so exhausted it would lie in the store entry like this for a while to recuperate.

The dog would climb up on the bench, and then fall off he was so excited.

This little girl is having a tea party while waiting for the ferry.

Some of the best characters I have seen have been too fleeting to capture with my camera, so I will try and describe them in words.

One day I was hiking up the volcano at the center of Santorini. For me it wasn't too big of a hike, but for a lot of people it would be, probably 1000 feet elevation and 2 miles. On the way down, I took a double-take: an old woman, probably close to 80, wearing traditional clothes for the region, was hiking in a very determined way up the steep lava trail. On her wrinkled face was the most wonderful devilish grin I have ever seen. While this was still sinking in, I passed a group of women in their fifties. They were panting and sweating with agonized looks on their faces, and had stripped to their bras by that point. As I looked back again in amazement at the old woman scooting up the hill, they started laughing hysterically. Even though we had no language in common, it was immediately obvious that the old woman was their mother, and that they had started out at the base of the mountain together.