Woops! It seems that I am pretty much a month behind in this thing. Which is deplorable, and I apologize.

We’ve just been doing a lot of stuff, learning to knit, reading novels, visiting three world capitals in less than two weeks. That kinda stuff. BUT I am majorly behind so I’ll have to start with Santorini.

Oh! Also we went to see a soccer game, which was interesting in an insane sort of way. The Greeks get REALLY into soccer, to the point of giant cultlike chants and small explosives.
Also, my wallet was stolen on the supercrowded Metro. Awesome! Another girl in our group had her bag slashed open with a knife and didn’t even realize. Authentic Athens pickpocketers, everyone.

But anywho…

AWESOME TRIPS Part 1: Santorini!

We headed off to Santorini on a ferry roughly the size of a giant freaking hotel, where we sat in the lobby-type room and slept on couches because it was a nine-hour trip. It was an overnight ferry, so we arrived in the morning after leaving at midnight. It was pretty cool.

When we got there my roommate argued with some sketchy travel agents until we got a hotel room with a view out over the Cliffside for really cheap. I’d like to think this was because of expert bargaining skills, but it was also partially because we got there in the middle of winter when there were about twelve other tourists on the island. The room, though…was SO nice. And the view was incredible, right out over the sea with a view of the volcanic islands and the famous sunsets (though we missed that since it was so cloudy).

The first thing we did, naturally, was get in the Jacuzzi at 10 am because we were so excited that there was a Jacuzzi.

Then we went off in search of food and shops, and did a lot of touristy browsing and scoping out restaurants and also freezing our butts off. The islands are colder than the mainland, and MUCH windier (which becomes a lot more significant later).

We were wandering happily around, talking about how sad it was that we were missing Halloween, when we passed a doorway that was completely decked out in orange and black and went WAIT A MINUTE. Turns out it was a pretend Irish pub, which was celebrating Halloween by having a party, so we headed back there and won free shirts with witches on them and got free pointy hats from the bartenders who were all in costume. It reminded us all of home.
We ended the night in the Jacuzzi again with little glasses of wine, watching the sun go down over the water.

For day two my roommates, who are probably insane, had planned to jump off of some cliffs. But the wind had reached instant-pneumonia levels so instead we looked at art galleries and the place where Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was filmed.

We shopped and ate some more, and headed back to the rooms to pack, and THEN we learned that our hotel-sized ferry back was, in fact, in Crete indefinitely because of the high winds.
The hotel people had allowed us to keep our bags in one of the three rooms after checkout, so we headed back there to camp out for…a while. The ferry that was supposed to leave at 10pm ended up leaving at noon the next day.

This means that seven of us spent the night in a two-person hotel room. There was some pretty creative use of furniture as sleeping surfaces and a lot of spine problems in the morning (at least they gave us breakfast).

Coming soon…Berlin!