March 17, 2014

Spring Break:Greece (Day 1)

We took off for our spring break adventure last Friday at the wonderful hour of 6:30 am. Me and 3 of my friends (Meagan, Kelsey and Ruth) dragged our luggage thru the streets of London surely waking every tired and hungover soul in the city. We made our way to our to a location for our busy to pick us up and take us to the airport. The ride was a little less than amazing, mostly because how poorly the driver handled the road. I mean I nearly lost my cookies. When we arrived at the airport, checked our luggage and bought breakfast the next thing to do was obviously to spend too much money on snacks in the lovely overpriced convenience stores. We needed snacks for our trip though so cha-ching.
When we boarded the plane for our flight out of London I could not be more excited. Greece is somewhere I have always wanted to go to since I was an awkward brace-face bootless teen and the fact that I was finally going to have this opportunity to visit there, well smiles (sans braces) all around :D
I had bought myself a sandwich for the flight since it was supposed to be 3 hours long and you do not want to see me unfed. Hangry girl. I had planned on saving the sandwich for 2 hours into the flight but 30 min had passed and sandwich was being eaten. An hour later the flight attendants came around and were serving us DINNER. Say whatttt! One thing to know about me is that flight food is one of my favorite things about flying, weird I know but it's true. It was also pasta that they were serving so that was extra lovely.
Finished eating, I looked out the window of the plane and saw THE ALPS. WOAH. Those are jaw-dropping gorgeous mountains and I have a multitude of photos to prove it.
Voila, we landed in Greece. We soon realized that we were going to have a slight struggle with the language because every sign we saw made us say to one another "Well, it's greek to me." So yay. Luckily 95% of grecians speak excellent english. Wooooo! We had to take the bus to reach our hostel in Athens, it was to be about an hour on the bus and then a 5 minute walk. But, woah that bus ride. I don't know if it was because I was so tired from traveling but I think I laughed for a majority of the ride. It was also because we had to stratal our luggage while standing up otherwise it would roll down the isle of the bus. Also, since we couldn't read the bus stops I ended up just matching letters or symbols to find the one we needed. Less than an hour on the bus and all a sudden the bus driver stopped and ordered everyone off the bus. Cool. We were no where near where we needed to be and not to mention our directions to our hostel were in english and the street signs were in greek. It was also dark. The sun went a bye-bye. The roads were also blocked off because there was a demonstration going on, so that wasn't scary at all. We wandered around trying to figure out where we should go, I spotted a hotel up the hill and suggested we ask the front desk how to find our hostel. Luckily it was a Hilton and a very friendly door-man knew exactly how to get to where we needed to go. We were 1km from our hostel which meant absolutely nothing to us, all we saw was that we were going to be walking for a while, but it looked doable. We passed an American restaurant on our way to our hostel and laughed at how silly it was to see that restaurant in Athens. We kept walking until suddenly I heard some yelling and shouting....the demonstration was heading towards us. At that same moment I noted how many police men were surrounding the area we were in, all with shields in tow. Uhmmmmm. Okay then. My friends and I came to the quick decision that the American restaurant was an excellent idea. We were able to be safe, eat food and figure out from the lovely world of the interwebs and FREE WIFI where to go. With food in us, directions found and feeling refreshed, we headed back out and found our hostel....2.5 hours after our scheduled check-in time.

Once we checked-in and dropped our bags, we walked around the cute area by us since it was already 9 o'clock at night. The alley our hostel was located on was adorably and romantically lit up with tree lights, hanging ivy, olive trees, restaurants, music and there straight ahead lit up like a candle was the Acropolis. WOW. I couldn't believe we were finally here.



It was lights out back in our hostel before you could say OOopah!

1 comment:

Rebecca Maria said...

Ooh my that is a pretty view from the plane! :) x

Rebecca
http://rebeccamariaphotographyy.blogspot.co.uk/