Greece Part I

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I have been trying to figure out the best way to tackle sharing my Greece trip, so I figure I will just break it up by days/places that I went. Here goes...

We left Barcelona on Friday afternoon and arrived in Athens very late that night. Holly and I flew together and Rose and John left on a flight a little later. Swiss Air is definitely a nice airline. They give you Swiss chocolate, which I will confirm is the best there is. We also got to fly over the Swiss Alps, which looked like they were some kind of fairyland. As soon as we stepped off the plane we realized that not only does Greek not sound anything like English or Spanish, it looks nothing like it either. I mean... S's look like E's and "Neh" is "Yes." After figuring out which bus to take into the city, we hopped on and made our way to the plaza near our hostel. Upon arriving a cab driver asked if we wanted a ride. After runing him down, he gave us directions on how to walk there. He said it was a 35 minute walk and it was 10. We ran into another guy who asked us where we were going and gave us directions... to make a long story short we made it there. Thank God it was nicer than our Paris hostel. About an hour after getting to the hostel, John and Rose arrived. We were all so exhausted that we crashed immediately. Our room had four beds and a little bathroom to share. The best part was when I looked out the window, we were right under the Acropolis!
The next morning we got up and had breakfast in the little patio downstairs then got ready to go see the ruins. It is amazing how old they are and how they are right in the middle of this bustling city... and dirty city. Unfortunately Athens is really dirty and to make it even worse, the trash collectors were on strike and there were piles of trash 10 feet high.
We turned in pretty early that night because our ferry left for Santorini the next morning at 7am. Although it was an 8 hour ferry ride, it was well worth the trip.

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Photos

Alps
Here is a view of the Swiss Alps on our way from Barcelona to Geneva on our first leg of the journey

Breakfast
Breakfast at the hostel was really cheap but very good. John and I had the traditional yogurt with muesli and honey.

Chess
Greek men playing chess in a park

Kojak
So there are tons of stray dogs in Athens.. well in Greece in general. They are all very nice and get fed well, but for some reason this one kept following me around. The night we got to Greece he followed us around and then the next day we found him with us again!

looking over Athens at the Acropolis
Rose, Holly, Me, John