Wooden balconies are part of the architecture on the islands. Often bougainvillea flows off of the balconies and clay pots with herbs or flowers brighten the street. The streets often incline steeply up the mountain, but it's so dry that slipping isn't usually a danger. Or, like this street, it's so steep that it's simply a staircase.

The typical city street in the Northern Sporades is paved with stone. They are so narrow that they look like pedestrian walkways, but most aren't, and cars travel both directions on streets only as wide as one of the small cars they drive here. On the real pedestrian shopping streets, only the motorcycles travel at speed; the cars drive more carefully than that.

It's common to find both a harbor town and a hillside town (called a chora) on islands in Greece. People worked in the harbor town, but they lived far above to find sanctuary from pirates and invaders. This hillside town on Alonnisos was ruined in 1965 by an earthquake, and all the town's inhabitants resettled around the harbor (by then, the only invaders around were European tourists pelting them with drachmas for plastic replicas of goddesses.)

Some of these tourists began to buy up the demolished hillside residences and restore them as holiday homes. Now, Old Alonnisos is a charming resort town, with streets made of steps, cafés perched over cliffs, fish-scale roofs on the surviving buildings, and balconies overflowing with vines.

There was a dance performance right in the port of Alonnisos Island while we visited. Young men and women dressed in traditional costumes and performed regional dances. Some of the dances had stories. In one, two young men were competing for the attentions of a maid. The competition escalated, and soon they were fighting with knives. So intent were they on their own victory, neither noticed that the young maiden walked off with a different young suitor, probably a pacifist.

In this dance, so-called friends have attached a burning roll of newspapers to the back of this young man's pants. He dances around blithely, occasionally doing a somersault, which puts out the flame – but only momentarily. He did about three somersaults during the course of the dance, and finally took the roll out of his waistband and stomped it out.

.

Honey is an important part of Greek cuisine, and Greek honey is prominently displayed in every souvenir stand in the country. We'd seen these roadside boxes several times, in a field near Loutraki harbor on Skopelos, but could never figure out what they were. One day, as we walked along the road, we saw a slender opening in the bottom of each, and bees crawling around, going in and out. That's how we discovered one way that honey is produced in Greece.

The island of Skopelos is also known for its plums and prunes. Stone farmhouses called kalyvia with open prune ovens are still used year-round, or only for certain celebrations.