Day 1 (Monday, July 13th)- Athens
It was a very weird feeling waking up this morning. Coming back from Croatia, staying up most of the night doing art drawings, skipping a couple of classes because of it, then Sea Olympics the next day just didn’t give any time for rest. I, like a handful of other people, woke up feeling exhausted, unprepared, didn’t have a plan at all for the day, and almost wasn’t even excited!
Jon & I had decided the night before though that we didn’t want to travel with a large group because everyone always has their own plans, but then the few people we wanted to go with had a few others and it ended up being a group of 9 by the time we left. It was okay and I tried to get myself excited for the day, but getting off ship into Piraeus was almost like Naples. It was overcrowded, dirty, old, a typical large city. My knee was bugging the crap outta me within the first 15 minutes even after I had taken my 2 ibuprofen at breakfast, so I had to take another 2 before I was somewhat relieved. I feel like an old man… not cool! We managed to find the metro and rode it to Athens. (after the machine ripped me off 2 Euro) Once on the metro, we saw on the map that it stopped at the Olympic Stadium/village so we all decided to go there..
The old Olympic site was nothing spectacular by any means. The buildings were pretty cool, but could only be viewed from the outside. It was like walking through a ghost town, nothing was open, nobody was around, and only a few of us actually got to see the track after asking the right person at the door. (not me I asked the wrong one apparently!) So that was a complete bust except for a couple decent photos.
Back to downtown Athens, we needed food badly! We wandered around looking for a place with gyros for about a half an hour because the metro station let us off at a bad spot apparently! We find this market that was absolutely disgusting… It was a covered market about 2 blocks long and every single stall was a different butcher! There were carcasses hanging everywhere, about 200 butchers all standing in their blood-covered smock sometimes even chopping the meat right on the path. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life but we walked through it anyways because it was part of the experience..
On that note, we found some gyros a few minutes later. I ordered the gyro plate for 8,50 Euro and it turns out the 2 Euro gyro pita was what I really wanted- mine wasn’t even good, just a pile of chunky meat, just what I wanted after walking through that market!
To continue the bad day, we headed up to the acropolis, which turns out to be under construction. We still got to see it and the view was amazing, but it sure takes away from it when it’s completely covered in scaffolding! At this point we were all hot, tired, and a little cranky and heading back one of the twins had a migraine so there was a little scuffle and tears and it was just ugly. Haha We headed back, defeated by Athens!
I went out that night with Kate (the happiest person I have ever met in my life) and Elena and one of their friends because they hadn’t eaten yet and I needed something fun to happen in that day! Everything was closed and we had to ask a local where to get good food at that time of night and he points us in the right direction. Well, apparently Piraeus is sketchier than we thought, because I’ve never seen a fire on a street corner before until that walk. Just some random thing on fire on a dark road with no one around, but the locals were just chillin at the bar less than a block away like it’s no big deal!
We did find food though, and DELICIOUS ice cream that I ended up buying twice, so it made the day worth it after all. Haha First impressions of Greece though- not so pretty, not so nice, what is everyone talking about!?
Day 2 (Tuesday, July 14)- Delphi
Today we had a bright and early trip to Delphi, the ancient site of an oracle/where people went to seek advice. The story has something to do with this is the point where the two doves met when the god released them, I think they said it was thought to be the center of the world back then.
Well the trip description turned out to be way wrong because the 2-hour drive took 4. We finally got there and had to go to the museum (I hate museums!) for over an hour! Finally, we get to explore the ruins, but because it took so long, we only got 30 min. of free time. It was beautiful in the mountains and all, but we only had enough time to climb to the top, snap pics, and hustle back- no time to fully enjoy anything! I was with Jon and Hillary (lives two rooms down) so we still tried to have fun on the bus ride.
It was 2pm before we got lunch and that was well worth it. The food was awesome… bread and olive oil, fried cheese, zucchini balls, stuffed grape leaves, baklava, I forget the rest but it was all really, really good. The last stop was monastery in the mountains, which was also extremely pretty. So overall it was pretty and delicious, but the 8 hours of driving in one day was not cool and we got back late, so some people had to run to their ferries/flights leaving that night and I’m sure some people missed theirs!
Day 3 (Wednesday, July 15) – SANTORINI!
Boy, it was tough to get up when the alarm went off at 2am, but it was necessary to catch our 6am flight from Athens. We rolled out of the ship at 2:30, and walked for about a half an hour to the bus station we had scoped out the night before. We got to the station at exactly 3, hopped on the bus just in time, only to find out the one next to us was the right one and ours was the 3:30 bus. Ugh. We did make it to the airport in time though, figured out the check-in and made it.
The group was my roommates Jon and Tim, Hillary, the twins, and a friend, Jenna. Tim decided to not sleep the night before since we got up at 2, so it was pretty comical watching him pass out at every two minutes chance. We took off right at sunrise and landed safely on the island around 7am.
So it turns out that the island is about 10 times bigger than we had expected. It is about 15 miles from one tip to the other tip, there is no bus or train system from the airport, and the airport is in the middle of nowhere! We kinda walked out and were like um, now what do we do? I guess none of us thought that there would be multiple cities on the island, but we had to pull out all of the paperwork to even figure out which town our hotel was in! We figured finding the hotel would be a good place to start. So we took the only method of transportation besides rental car- taxi. With seven of us we had to take two, and it was roughly 25 bucks per taxi after conversion… We cruise on over to the hotel and now we are REALLY in the middle of nowhere! There is a small mountain, scattered buildings along the base of it, and mainly dry fields, almost like a desert. The hotel is just a little building, which isn’t good because we have to somehow sneak 7 people into a 4 person room and we find out when we try to check in or drop our bags for the morning (which wasn’t successful and we had to walk around all day with them) that it is completely full so we can’t get another room if we get caught…
Well here is where people were getting pretty testy. I’m pretty sure I was the only one to not be in a pissy mood that morning. The island just wasn’t what we expected, our hotel wasn’t by any of the happenings, and everyone was tired. I wasn’t letting it get to me, but some were! We didn’t know what to do, so we hit up the ATM and found the bus station that takes you to Fira/Thira- the main city. I also popped into a small bakery that was delicious and they were extremely friendly.. the pastry was kind of apple-y and full of powdered sugar, yum. We paid a couple more Euros but finally made it to the place when all the postcards come from. Once we had a plan, everyone was in much better spirits.
Thira is an extremely tourist-town, so most of the signs, all of the people and even most of the music was in English, which was a strange, but nice sort of getaway. They had a ridiculous number of shops and the best value postcards I’ve seen on this trip, so I’ll be sending out seven from Greece!
Okay, so some brief history: Santorini was originally a massive volcano. Way back when in ancient times it catastrophically erupted to the point that it sent out tsunamis and is even thought of the reason why the Minoan civilization came to an end. (We learned about this in Global Studies class) The land sunk in forming what looks like a massive crater and the ridge is called a caldera. Well Thira is situated up on this ridge so the view is breathtaking, especially with all the white-washed buildings teetering on the Cliffside. It took about 25 min. to walk down this cliff on the switchbacks, and we picked up our pirate-ship tour-boat to take us to the island in the center of the massive crater, which is now the dormant volcano, which last erupted 50 years ago. We hiked up to the top of that and even got to feel a steam vent (hot enough to burn your hand) before getting back on the boat and going to the volcanic hot springs. This would never fly in America, but they park it about 200 yards off shore and say, “okay it is too shallow to anchor near the hot springs, so if you are a good swimmer you can jump off into the cold, deep water and swim to the warm, shallow water.” Haha and they don’t provide life jackets! Of course we all jumped in and checked it out. The water was like bath water, but it was all red from the minerals and it ended up staining my suit :(
Upon returning to the main island, we got to ride donkeys up all the switchbacks for 5 Euro, quite the experience! It was about a 20 minute ride and my donkey was tied to the two in front of it in a train for some reason with the crazy one-eyed donkey dude leading whipping the one carrying Jenna. They were pretty pushy and were the only people on that island that spoke no English and I felt guilty riding the donkey because of how they were treated, but it was definitely fun and something that should be done!
We then hit up the gyros stand to redeem Greece from my 8,50 disaster in Athens. For 6 Euro I got 2 DELICIOUS gyros and a soda so it definitely worked :) At this point we needed to figure out how to see the rest of the island without spending 2 Euro per busride. Well, we decided to break SAS policy and rent scooters. It turns out you need a motorcycle license to rent one of those, but the ATVs you don’t! Jon and I were the only two with our driver’s licenses on us, so we could only rent two, but oh man, did they come in handy! We cruised around that entire island, saw plenty of beaches and whatnot that we probably wouldn’t have been able to, and they were only 15 Euro for 24 hours! Definitely worth it..
After swimming at the black sand beach (they also have a white and red one), we got ready and headed back to Thira (saw the sunset over the volcano) for a nice dinner. I got Moussaka (eggplant, sausage, I don’t remember but it was very good), fried saganaki (cheese), and some wine :)
Day 4 (Thursday, July 16)- Streaks in the Shorts Day
Hillary, Jon, and I all decided to get up for the sunrise over the black-sand beach today. We got up at 4, rode our ATVs over to the beach, and sat on the “sand” (more like little pebbles). It was realllly pretty, but the sun ended up rising around the point and we couldn’t see the actually sun. In the process of taking a really cool picture I was watching my camera for 2 seconds rather than the waves and it ended up getting about ¼ of the way wet. I whipped out the batteries and memory card and dried everything off before continuing (writing this way later… it has water spots on the inner lens now but they only show up in one of the modes that I usually never use but still I’m pissed at myself). Dead tired, we went back to crash on the over-populated beds- two twins pushed together held the four girls sideways and two uneven cots held the three guys..
Everyone woke up for breakfast, but since we only had “four people” in our room we had to smuggle as much as we could to the rest which ended up only being hard boiled eggs and a couple of ham sandwiches, but it worked! With no plans and no aspirations since we saw everything the day before, we decided to just head to Thira so that it would be cheaper to taxi from there and we can shop until it was really time to go. Well the four who rode the ATVs got to the meeting point at 9:30ish and the ones who rode the bus weren’t there yet… our flight left at 12:15 so we were planning on leaving for the airport at 10:15 and we still had to fuel up the ATVs and return them before that happened. So Jon and I headed to the gas station (it only cost us about 8 dollars in gas!) and went back the only way we knew to the rental place. Turns out the police decided to direct traffic AWAY from our one-way street for some reason and we had to find a different route. Traffic was terrible, we had no idea where to go then. It was about 10 before we started to panic. All the roads were one- way, none of them went where we wanted to except the closed one, and we were running really low on time. The only way to get there ended up being to ride in the wrong direction for about 10 minutes and back tracking, so when we finally found it it was like a mirage! Exit stressful situation number one, enter number two.
We meet the rest of the group it’s now 10:30. No problem… Except.. there are NO TAXIS! Because the airport is so small and there isn’t a bus from the airport, ALL of the taxis flock to the airport when a plane comes in and one had just come in. We looked all over, there were lines of people trying to flag ones down and not a single on would stop! It was 10:50 before we were like “holy crap we’re not gonna make our flight.” Jon went to start asking shop owners to call a cab for us to see if that would work. He ended up talking to the ATV people who he finally persuaded to call their “secret source”. We ended up getting a rental car company to drive a shuttle van from the airport to pick us up! We got on that about 1 hour 5 min. before our flight left, and checked in and sat down about 5 min. before we boarded… ouch. Had we not made buddies with the ATVers, we might still be in Santorini. Needless to say everyone was sort of stressed/tired/on edge, a kinda “welcome back to the real world” slap in the face after the perfect day yesterday!
Getting back to the ship, I had 30 drawings to do for art plus the 8 required in every port. I didn’t actually get to go to sleep until 4am, so Kate (who always works with me) and I are definitely planning on changing our strategy for Turkey so we can sleep on the one night we should be sleeping!
Closing thoughts:
Greece is only as pretty as they say in parts, which I’m sure is the case with most places!
I’m getting very tired of seeing old stuff, for the most part ruins because they all start looking the same and most of the them are restored or being restored so its not even the original, and I just feel like it’s a tourist icon now. However, it is amazing that some of this stuff is over 3000 years old. That’s a difficult concept to grasp.
COMMENTS??? click here |
