Greece

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I arrived in Greece on Saturday the 11th via a flight from Madrid to Athens. I parted ways with my friends Marc, CB, Jordan, and Jeff after traveling with them for over 3 weeks, but I met up with another friend from U of M who I'll be traveling with until I leave Croatia.

We arrived to our hostel in the evening, so we didn't have a whole lot of time to do site seeing around the city. We just walked to the Acropolis and had dinner. They light the Acropolis up at night, and it was really pretty. I had swordfish for dinner, and it was great.

The next day we headed to the Acropolis again to really get a better look at it. We hiked up to the Parthenon and had a great view of the city. It was so cool to stand by something that was built 2500 years ago. As we were on top of the Acropolis, a storm rolled in, so in order to avoid the rain we walked around a museum.

Walking back from the Acropolis, we had to go through Syntagma square, which is is front of the Presidential palace and was the place where riots would go on the next day. There is a lot of uproar in Greece right now because their economy is in a terrible situation and they hate their political leaders. I was happy to leave Athens unscathed.

The next day we woke up at 4:15 to walk to a port where we would catch a ferry to Santorini, which is an island in the Aegean Sea. The high speed ferry landed around noon, and we were settled in our hostel shortly thereafter. We loved Santorini. I know this is a bold statement, but it is the most beautiful place I've ever seen. It is an island that was created from a volcano that sort of exploded. One side of the island has steep rocky cliffs that are probably about 100 meters high, and the other side has some beaches. One of the beaches has black sand, and another has red sand. After we got to the hostel we rented ATV's to go around the island. It was SO much fun! We went to the highest point on the island that had a spectacular view, then we went through a traditional village that had the classic white and blue concrete buildings, and we later went to the red and black beaches. We watched the sunset at another point on the island during dinner. If we had more time we would have went snorkeling around the center of the volcano part of the island, but we had to leave the next day to get to Ios.

We then took another high speed ferry to Ios, where we would stay the next two nights. Ios is known for being the biggest party island in Greece, and it definitely lived up to its expectations. The entire island is filled with young travelers who are all there to just have a good time. Our hotel had a guide that took us out at night and lead us to different bars throughout the night. Some of the clubs that we went to didn't even open until 3:00 in the morning! We had such a good time there, and I would have loved to stay longer but we needed to move along on our trip.

After Ios we had to head back to Athens. The next leg of our trip would be a week long island-hopping cruise in Croatia that started in Dubrovnik. Getting to Dubrovnik is difficult and expensive, and the least expensive option for us was to fly from Athens to Rome, fly from Rome to Bari Italy, then take an overnight ferry from Bari to Dubrovnik. I normally don't like taking a whole day to just travel, but it wasn't that bad because we were so excited to start our cruise in Croatia.

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