Athens, Rodos, Kos, and Thira

Hello to Everyone! Happy Halloween!! I hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween full of candy and costumes. This past week has been my fall break, so I will start from the beginning and try not to make it too winded.

On Saturday 24th October I made it to Athens safe and sound with all of my luggage. We had a bus arranged to take us to CYA (College Year in Athens). It is located next to Panathinalkon Stadium which I believe is the old Olympic Stadium for the Olympics. CYA is an amazing school that has a lounge, computer lab, library, cafe, laundry facilities, etc. It reminds me a lot of home at CSB/SJU but the view is stupendous! You can look out of the lounge balcony or front door and see the stadium and then the Acropolis. It is great. So once we got settled in our apartments for a few days five of us decided to go island hopping. (Just for name sake it was Carissa, Ali, Ellen, Paul, and me).


On Monday we caught a 5:30pm ferry from Pireas to Rodos (Rhodes). It was a 13 hour ride which wasn't that bad, except we slept on hard wood floors. When we landed, it was a perfect day. We found our hostel and set out to venture in old town, which was like the Old Market with shops and restaurants. It was fun to look. We tried to find Kolassus which his feet were left, but when we asked people told us that the statue can't be found anymore. So we just laughed and ventured to a castle/fortification. Then we found the light house/ Fort of Nicholas which is the picture above. You can see that a storm is coming in too with those awesome looking clouds. The ocean view was spectacular! We then bought tickets for our next adventure, got some dinner, and called it a night.


Wednesday we went to Kos. (Wednesday was a Greek holiday of when they said 'No' to someone a long time ago...shows how much I'm getting to know the culture hehe). They had some music performances and the army marched/paraded down the street. Kos was beautiful!! I loved it better than Rhodes. The ocean was a green-blue and the part of town we wandered around was so cute. We first saw the tree of Hippocrates which was odd! The tree was bent in a weird way and still living! We also saw some of the ruins, the Insulae (apartments), fortification, and the temple to Aphrodite. The picture above is of some of the ruins we saw, plus the greenery which was so nice to see from being cooped up in a city for two months. Just to burn time we sat on the dock of the port and looked out at the ocean and Turkey across the way. It was sooo serene. We then walked through a fortification wall which was really neat, I think Alan you would have thought it was pretty cool. Again the clouds rolled in so we decided to seek shelter for dinner. We waited around until 8:30pm when our next ferry took off.


We made it to Thira(Santorini) by 2am on Thursday. We stayed in Fira, and the hostel picked us up from the port and we were able to get in to our rooms and sleep comfortably. Mostly all of Thursday we spent at the hostel sleeping and waiting for the other group to meet us. On Friday we rented ATV s(Four-wheelers) and went around the island. We went to the Perissa beach which was a black sand beach. It was very cool but very cold because we were at the end of the season. The guys went for a swim but I couldn't even take off my sweater. We then drove to Oia to watch the sunset, which is supposedly the place to watch the sunset. And it is very true. Above is one of the pictures I took of the sunset. But Oia itself is beautiful, it is built in the side of the cliff and looks fabulous. After the sunset we drove back to Thira, ate, and went out to the bars. I had a lot of fun, but stayed out way too late. Let's just say 5 hours of sleep was not enough.

The next day, Saturday Halloween, was supposed to be another amazing day in Santorini, but it was very cloudy, windy, and looked stormy. We found out that the ports were going to be closed on Sunday and that we wouldn't have our 7:00am ferry. So we scrambled to get packed, tickets for a 3:30pm ferry, returned the ATVs, and got down to port. It was a lot more crazy than it sounds because some of the group was hungover and wanted to stay and deliberately miss the ferry and miss class on Monday. Finally we convinced everyone and made back to Athens on a very rocky and stormy boat ride. Mom you would have hated it sooooo much!! We made it back to Athens by 1am and hit the hay.

Sunday the 1st of November is a nice relaxing/laundry day since nothing is really open except for CYA. I am slowly getting ready for our first week of classes. Iam excited, but not looking forward to the studying part of it. However, CYA offers a lot of extra activities and they have fencing!! ;) I would love to do that however it is a bit expensive, but there is always paintball as an alternative, since I have lost my touch with shooting. hehe I hope you all had a wonderful Halloween and October. I miss you all so much, eat extra butterfingers and swedish fish for me! Love you all and keep in touch!!