Eurotrip II – Greece Part II

Alright I’m going to continue with my adventures on the Greek Islands!  I spent 2 days on Syros, 2 days on Naxos, and 3 days on Santorini before taking a 9 hour ferry back to Athens.

Syros by the water

ΣΥΡΟΣ (Syros)

Syros (is the name of the island) is beautiful!!!  It’s one of the smaller islands and it’s really quiet but it was really beautiful!  Maybe it was just the first impression of being on a Greek island, but it…was….beautiful!!  The first thing I remember seeing when coming off the ferry onto the island was the beautiful blue water; it was the kind of blue you see only in pictures and never in Vancouver!!  I love blue so you can imagine my excitement.  Actually there was a walkway separating the bay where the ferries docked and the sea and you can see the difference in the water.  The sea was rougher with a darker blue and the bay was really calm with a lighter blue.  Totally amazing.  By the way, through out this post you’ll hear a lot about water because I absolutely love looking at it.  You’ll find out why later.

Up the hill

Not only was the water amazing but the city itself was “cute” as well.  I guess because it is a smaller island, the city is mostly residential so it’s quieter.  Actually I remember after dropping off our luggage at our hostel we went back outside to take a walk, and almost everything was closed!  This was 3:00 in the afternoon!!  Turns out that Greeks like their afternoon breaks/naps and stores open up again later at night.  I think it’s an awesome way of life!  Anyways, the streets were half cement and half stones, streets were more narrow, and the houses were in a old, Greek style (look at pics). The city has two hills which make great vantage points so for the two days we were there, we decided to walk up both of them.  It was A LOT of stairs but the view was worth it =).  Actually, at the top of the second hill it was SO windy that even I had trouble walking forward.  Loved it though!

Naxos

ΝΑΞΟΣ (Naxos)

Naxos was the most fun – in terms of things to do – for me.  My friend went to Greece earlier in the year rented an ATV to ride around the island, and she said that because Naxos was the biggest island and had the most hills, it was extremely fun.  Naturally, I wanted to try as well!  So that’s what we did.  It was amazing!  Hands down my most favourite part of the trip – the combination of driving on the roads up the hills, the amazing views of the inland and the coast, seeing the countryside, and a pretty girl wrapped around my waist.  So we kind of went 2/3 way down the island, cut across west to east, and then drove along the coast up to Apollonas for dinner and back down the west coast to Naxos city.  Funny story about that: we decided to go from East to West so we could catch the sunset as we drove home.  Lucky for us we caught it and it was beautiful.  Unlucky for us, we forgot to figure out how to work the headlights of the ATV.  So for about half an hour I was driving in the dark without headlights on winding roads back to the city.  We finally passed by another city and asked some guy to help us figure it out.  It took the effort of 3 guys to figure out how to turn the lights on!  And so, we made it back safe and sound.

Thira

ΣΑΝΤΟΡΙΝΗ (Santorini)

We visited 2 main cities on Santorini: Thira and Oia.  Thira is the main city (because it’s the port) and it really is hanging on the side of the cliff. Pretty cool. Oia is very pretty because the entire city is pretty much white.  Even the streets are some kind of white stone. In Thira, A. and I had a pretty baller dinner: seafood platter for 60EUR but it was totally worth it because it was good and the view at the restaurant was amazing.  On Oia we went to see the sunset (along with a whole bunch of other people) which was also an experience.  Everybody pretty much found somewhere to sit/stand on the west side of the city to watch the sun set.  The other days on the island, we rented an ATV again to go to some of the beaches around the island.  The one we stayed longest at was in Akrotiri and was a red-sand beach.  It was interesting because all the stones and sand was really red!  We also had lunch there: grilled octopus and kalamarakia.  SOO good =).  Santorini was pretty chill because we just wanted to enjoy the sun and the water before we had to head back to the mainland.

The Greek islands was my favourite destination of my entire trip and I hope you got to see why. I would definitely go again, hopefully every other year, or even just buy a house there! HAHA (maybe in the distant future).

Eurotrip II – Greece Part I

Onto the second leg of my trip: Greece!!  Greece is my favourite place of all the places I’ve been to and you’ll quickly find out why!  Also, Athens was another experience for me, different from Italy.  Why?  Because I picked up a travel buddy: my beloved A. =)!!  Just an FYI, as cool as it is traveling by myself, I think having a buddy is more fun.

Because I have a lot to say about Greece, I’m going to separate it into two posts.  Part I will be about all the experiences on the mainland of Greece, and Part II will be about my adventures on the Greek Islands.  The journey starts in the country’s capital: Athens

Athens

ΑΘΗΝΑ (Athens)

So I was back and forth to Athens 3 times during my stay in Greece: once arriving there, once between my island expedition and Peloponnese expedition, and once after the Peloponnese.  I’m just going to lump my entire Athens experience here.

What can I say about Athens?  Well, Athens is famous for the Acropolis and the Parthenon so I guess I’ll start there.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with history, “acropolis” is actually the hill at the center of the city and Athens is not the only city with an acropolis; the Parthenon is the temple of Athena at the top of the acropolis in Athens.  Anywho…it was a really cool feeling just being there by the acropolis.  It really was like, “Oh man…some thousands of years ago, the height of Greek civilization was developed…where I was standing!!!“  How crazy is that?  So of course A. and I bought a package ticket that allowed us to go see all the ancient sites around Athens, among them the Parthenon, the Ancient Agora, and the Temple of Zeus.  And although it was totally worth it (only 12 EUR), I was disappointed that you could only go up to the Parthenon once with the ticket, and that the acropolis closed at 7:30PM.  I was REALLY looking forward to watching the sunset from up there!  But in hindsight I guess that’s how they prevent highschool hooligans from destroying such an important ancient site.  You know what else was cool?  On the “back” side of the Acropolis, you can walk through these TINY streets (when we were walking through we were wondering if we were trespassing on peoples’ properties) and the houses there exactly those you see in pictures: white walls, bright blue and red doors etc.

Plaka

We also spent a lot of time on food!  I’m pretty sure we went through at least half the restaurants in Plaka.  BTW Plaka is like a big marketplace filled with shops and restaurants, and I’m pretty sure the whole area was for tourists.  An especially memorable food item was this ham and cheese croissant from a pastry shop called Everest outside Akropoli station.  I had one almost every morning for breakfast…it was thaaat good!

The 2nd time we were back in Athens was only for less than 10 hours but it was already eventful!  We just got off the ferry back to Piraeus and caught a taxi from the port back to our hostel (oh yea…taxis are double the price after a certain time).  It was the scariest ride of my life!  In between asking us where we were from and what we thought of Athens, the taxi driver was yelling at other drivers, talking to himself, and driving erratically!  There were a couple times where there were 2 cars in 2 lanes and he drove IN BETWEEN them.  Then, 5 hours later, A. and I had to walk through the baddest part of time (a.k.a. Omonia station) in order to catch a bus to the bus terminal to the Peloponnese.  If you ever need heroine, apparently that’s the place to go.

The 3rd time we were back in Athens was pretty quiet because we were already pretty traveled out.  We visited another museum, which was pretty interesting though (to me); they had arrowheads from the Battle of Thermopylae (from the movie 300).  Other than that we just had quiet walks and dinners around the Plaka area because we were just too tired to really do anything else.

Olympia

ΟΛΥΜΠΙΑ (Olympia)

The hometown of the first Olympics. So after our island adventures, we took a 5 hour bus ride out to the Peloponnese to Olympia.  Olympia was very small.  We had a map of the city so we could get from where the bus dropped us off to our hotel and I thought “OK it’ll take about 15 minutes.”  It only took 3.  Turns out the city is VERY small…you can get from one side to the other within 10 minutes!  It was SO quiet that it was kind of eerie…. What else was weird was that no one was out during the afternoon, but there were kids playing outside at 11:00 PM.  Overall though, the small town feel was cool.  So, we hit up the main museum and the site where the Olympics were held in Ancient times and just chilled because by that time we were pretty tired.  Everything was cool but the story of the trip was this: We met these two British guys who happened to stay at the same place as us and took the same bus as us to and from Olympia.  A. and my original plans were to take a quick stop at Sparti (A.K.A. Sparta) on the way back and those guys were heading there too.  So we took the bus together to Tripoli to transfer to Sparti.  When we got to Tripoli, the guys there told us that the bus terminal to go to Sparti was “1 KM that way”.  So we decided to walk it.  1 KM later, we couldn’t find it and asked around again and nobody seemed to know.  Finally this one dude said “oh yea..it’s 1 KM that way (further in the same direction”.  A. and I decided that we didn’t want to go another 1 KM and find out that it may or may not be there, so we wanted to go back to the original terminal to catch a bus back to Athens.  The British guys, however, had already booked their hostel so they decided to go ahead and that’s where we parted ways.  You might think, “hey this isn’t very interesting” but what I wanted to point out was this:

I still think to myself that I’ll NEVER know if those 2 made it.  It’s a weird feeling.

Delphi

ΔΕΛΦΟΙ (Delphi)

Our last excursion was a day trip to Delphi which is north of Athens and also home of the Ancient Oracle of Delphi.  The story is Zeus sent out 2 eagles to fly in opposite directions into the universe and they met up at Delphi, so he decided that Delphi was the “Centre of the Universer”.  In my opinion though, if two eagles can fly off into different directions and meet each other again, it means the universe is in some way cyclical (or at least can be cut up into 2D shapes).  This means that the eagles should’ve met at where Zeus let them go if they were flying off at the same speed.  And if they weren’t flying at the same speed, Delphi wouldn’t be the centre.  But I guess we can stick with the story .  Delphi was really cool too because it was pretty much a temple on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.  It was the same kind of deal: museum and ancient site. I liked this site more than Olympia though because there were more things that were preserved so the structures were still standing.  A couple notable things: No.1 – there’s this “egg” that represents the “Navel of the Universe” and apparently if you touch it you get weird dreams.  A. and I dared to touch…but I haven’t been having really weird dreams (or maybe my previous dreams were already weird haha).   No. 2 we got ripped off there because there was only one store selling drinks and they charged 3.50EUR (roughly $5CAD) for a 250mL bottle of Iced Tea…way to do business!!

So that’s Greece on the mainland.  Lots and lots and lots of ruins and history.  Stay tuned for Part II of Greece (my favourite part of my entire 5 months away!!).

Soundtrack of Italy – Wild Horses

So I heard this song again the other day and it reminded me of how this song reminds me of Italy.  Throughout my trip, I didn’t really pay attention to music much – it was more of a background filler – but this song was the one song that stuck.

Listen to it with out watching the video.  Press play and then read the rest of this blog.

This song says: “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away”.

So because Italy was my first destination away from Canada, away from home, and away from anybody I knew, I was pretty lonely.  I was ACTUALLY alone.  I knew nobody on the continent (isn’t that crazy?).  And it made me pretty homesick for a while.  The lyrics, although I know most of it is meant in a relationship kind of way, just made me think how even though I’m so far away, Vancouver is my home.  That’s where my family is.  That’s where my friends are.  That’s where home is.  And even though I was about to experience so many new things on my journey, nothing can take that away from me.

The music as well was really fitting for Italy.  On my 4 hour train ride from Milan to Pisa I had this song on repeat for a huge portion of the trip. Imagine yourself sitting at a window seat, head pressed against it.  Outside, the sky is nothing but blue and the sun’s rays are beating down on the land before you.  There wasn’t a lot of green; it was mostly a yellow colour like that of sunburned grass.  Picture small rolling hills filled with the farmlands of Tuscany and tiny houses every once in a while.

While I was listening to this song, I could picture horses running along side the train in the fields.  Wild horses…like the ones you see in movies.  It was a pretty cool feeling.

That’s what it was like looking outside the train.  I loved Italy the most as an on-land country.  I can’t really describe it.  But that’s why every time I hear this song, the memory of Italy comes back immediately into my head.

Listen to the song and see if you can picture what I saw.  If your imagination’s not that good, look up “Tuscany” on google images and it’ll give you a better idea =)

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Ladies and Gentlemen: Alicia Keys feat. Adam Levine – Wild Horses…my soundtrack choice for Italy