Greece Part I: Getting There

So as a lot of people know I had a week-long "winter break" this past week from school and I decided to use it to take a trip to Athens, Greece. It was a difficult decision to make. I looked at Dublin, London, Spain, Belgium, and other places. In the end, I wanted to go somewhere warm with good weather for the week. Also, I didn't think that I'd really have another opportunity to get to Greece this semester. So anyway here is the start of my adventure. I'm doing the posts in a couple parts.

On Tuesday afternoon I left for Geneva. I was to fly out early on Wednesday morning and because there was no train early enough that day, I came in on Tuesday and spent the night at the youth hostel there. It was my first European train experience and it was actually cool. The trains (or at least the one I was on) seemed quite fancy, even in second class. It had little tables for the seats with outlets to plug electronics in to. On the train, I met an asian boy from Montreal, Canada, who's name I think was Valentine but it was hard for me to understand his accent. Anyway, we figured out that we were headed to the same hostel for the night. He was on his way to Portugal but was spending a day in Geneva first. Since the Jet d'eau stops going at 4pm, we went there straight away to see it before heading to the hostel.

Geneva, during the day, doesn't really seem like a very interesting city, but its beautiful at night. After grabbing some dinner, Valentine and I walked around town just to see it. Everything there gets lit up at night and reflects in the water. I loved it.

Geneva during the day

Geneva all lit up at night

The hostel in Geneva was my first hostel experience and it was interesting. It was very impersonal and basically like staying in a dorm room. I went to bed very early and woke up very early so I didn't meet the two girls that were also staying in my room. It wasn't bad a bad experience, I was just kind of indifferent to it.

The next morning I woke up at 6 am and walked to the train station to go to the airport. I flew through Vienna which was a very easy layover. The flights actually had decent food on them too. I got in to Athens around 2:30 pm. When I had booked my hostel, they gave me directions to get there from the airport. I figured that, based on the directions, I could probably be there shortly after three. Wrong! The Athens airport is about an hour out of the city center by bus and then from there I had to find one of the many city trams which took another twenty minutes to get to my stop.

Riding the bus into and around town, I could really get a good feel for Athens. The day that I got there, it was about 70 degrees and sunny. The windows were open and there was the perfect amount of humidity in the air. Everything there seemed very relaxed and nobody really seemed too worried about anything. What did amuse me though was watching the Greek people walk down the street in this weather wearing down jackets and fur coats, thinking it was cold outside while I was stripping down to my t-shirt.

A lot of the buildings looked like this with plants growing off of them everywhere.

Everywhere in Athens, the streets were lined with orange trees.

One of the biggest challenges I faced in going to Greece was not only the language barrier, but the alphabet barrier. I am so grateful that I am in a sorority at ISU, because otherwise I would have never learned some of the Greek alphabet and been far worse off. All of the street signs there are translated into English, but the bus-stops aren't. In my directions to the hostel, it told me to get off at the stop called Filoloau. Every stop we came to, I looked at the sign to see if I could pick out a phi and some lambdas to at least give me a good guess of where I was. In the end I asked the bus drivers help (because most people there speak enough English to get by), but when I got there, I saw that, had I waited longer, the sign would have been exactly what I was looking for with those letters.

The entrance to the hostel

My hostel here was completely different from the one in Geneva. It was much more personal, run by one lady, and it just seemed more homey. My room had five beds in it, four of which were made into two bunk-beds. I chose the single bed. It had high ceilings and french doors that opened up onto a balcony.

My bed

The doors out to the balcony

The street view from my balcony

The first people I roomed with were two girls from Canada and one girl from Argentina. By the time I got all situated, it was about 4:30 and I didn't want to be out too late since I was by myself. I asked the lady who ran the hostel where the nearest cheap, good food was. She pointed me to a little gyro shop. I have actually never had a gyro before but I got a chicken one and it was so good!

My delicious gyro

Then I just wandered to kind of scope out the close part of town. I found out I was staying right near the olympic arena so I got a few pictures of that and I even got my first view of the Acropolis which sits above the city.

The Olympic Stadium with the olympic rings at the back.

My very first, distant, view of the acropolis

It started to get dark so I went back. When I got there, I met a group of 6 girls staying there on break from study abroad in France. Two of the girls went to UW Madison and one of them was friends with a girl I went to high school with. It really is a small world sometimes. Anyway, we just hung out and chatted for the rest of the night. They invited me to go to Delphi with them the next day and I had wanted to go there anyway so I decided that I would.

The End of Part I