well i’m on my way…

After three very overwhelming, eye-opening (more on this later), short days at home, I was more than ready to leave again, this time for Europe.  I traveled for 28 hours to get to Athens airports, changing planes twice in the States before I headed off over the Atlantic Ocean.

I arrived in Athens a few hours before my sister was due to arrive.  As my backpack came towards me on the luggage carousel, I noticed it looked wet.  I grabbed it and opened it quickly to discover my sister’s shampoo sticking out of the plastic bag the rest of her toiletries were stored in.  The bottle was open, and had emptied its entire contents onto the top of my bag, and everything else inside it.  I quickly found a ‘WC’ and got myself busy, cleaning off things.  Not once did I curse her (except to wonder why she brought hairspray) because I knew the explosion was mostly my fault.  When I told her to put her toiletries in a plastic bag, I really meant a gallon ziplock bag.  And I didn’t say anything about it, or do anything to change it.  Hell, it gave me something to do to kill the time.

After I got my bag as clean and dry as it could, I walked around the airport, making plans for once Meghan arrived.  I began to feel happy once I realized that I was back in Europe (6th time) by noticing things around me, like signs in many languages, hearing many languages, European toilets, the ancientness of everything, the smell of it, including the fact that people are still smoking everywhere here…I love Europe.

We took a direct bus to Pireaus and booked a ferry to Santorini, one of the islands.  Neither of us had really slept on our flights, so we dozed in and out of sleep on the ferry.  We arrived in Santorini after midnight.  We had a booking at a hotel/hostel, but no one representing the hostel was in the crowd of people holding signs that greeted the ferry.  We somehow got a guy from another hostel to drop us off at ours, where the owner was waiting for us to show us to our room.  The guy who had taken our booking made a mistake-the dorm was full so we got a room to ourselves at the dorm price!

The next day we rented an ATV and headed to the Red Beach.  The cliffs overlooking the beach were red, but to me, the sand (or tiny rocks) were black.  We hung out there until we couldn’t take the sun anymore and headed back to the hostel.  

One of the main things to do in Santorini is to watch the sun set from Oia (say E-Ah) so we spent the rest of the day taking our time getting there.  We’d drive on the main road a bit, then head off a gravel road to see the real island.  We passed heaps of churches, fields of grapes and olive trees, the occasional donkeys and goats, saw cats and dogs everywhere, and people-locals and tourists on ATVs and vespas.  We waved to the locals and most of the time got great responses from them.  We got to Oia a bit late for the sunset, but realized that we wouldn’t have seen the sun set into the water; the sun sets into a band of visible pollution that seperates the sea from the sky.

The next day we were ready to leave for Mykonos via boat, but learned right before we were to leave for the port that it was cancelled due to the wind.  We quickly checked back in and put our suits on and walked to the beach.  The sun was hot but the wind wasn’t, so after a few hours our sunburns wouldnl’t let us sit in the chilly wind anymore, so we headed back. 

After we ate dinner at an excellent local restaurant recommended by the hotel ownder called God’s Garden, we decided to rent another ATV to see the sunset again.  We actually saw it this time!  Meg was pretty impressed by the turnout; there were tourists pretty much everywhere the sunset was visible from.  We headed back to Perissa, where our hotel was, on the other side of the island before the sun set, as it was pretty chilly and checked out the local bar scene.  It was pretty nonexistant, so we went to bed.

Our last full day in Santorini we took the ATV to Fira to check out the capital of the island.  We discovered that it’s mostly full of shops selling postcards, jewellry, and other Santorini souvenirs, so we drove around the island instead.  We’re hoping that tomorrow the weather is cooperative and we can go to Mykonos.  I’m not hating Santorini, but it’s time to move on.   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 7:13 am and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.