Greece, Athens

Welcome fall semester! I just got back from Greece late Saturday night and started my first class of fall semester this morning. Greece was absolutely amazing, and impossible to explain in one blog, so I am going to split up my adventures into three for ya.

Being students, we used the 'travel by budget' technique to get us to and from Greece. Needless to say it was not the most direct or convenient way to travel, but it didn’t put too big of a whole in our pockets. We left on last Friday after class to head to Rome, which was where our flight departed from. We took a four hour train ride and stayed in a hotel (meant for two people, there were four of us) for the night. Our flight to Athens took off early in the morning, and we arrived in the afternoon in Athens. We stayed at the "Easy Access" hostel in the city, which was a decent hostel, but the location also gave us "easy access" to heroin addicts and prostitutes…yikes.
We grabbed a yummy Gyro for dinner, complete with a private show from a Greek duet, and headed back to the Hostel for some much needed sleep. We woke up early the next morning to get a head start on our sightseeing. We started at the Sunday open air market and ended at the Acropolis.
The streets of Athens are bustling and busy like New York, but once you make it to the top of the Acropolis, the view is breathtaking. Being an Art Historian, seeing the Parthenon and the Temple of Athena is humbling. After years of studying about these ancient structures and seeing the images in books makes me feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to see it in real life. The size and volume of these structures cannot be captured in the photographs.
Because our ferry didn't leave until midnight, we spent the majority of our last day in Athens burning time at the Starbucks near the port. We got some American style coffee, played cards, and met a Greek man who said "give me a word, any word, and I will tell you how its root word is Greek". (Not a joke)