And Now, For A Trip to Athens

Ok I do realize that I completely fail at life. BUT, I was on spring break for the past two weeks, so that explains a bit.

So here's what went down. We were SUPPOSED to be in Athens on the first Sunday of break, but thank you Icelandic volcano for exploding all over Europe and delaying our flight 3 separate times until Wednesday.

And when we FINALLY got a flight out, we were just about the only people in CDG. Eery but only took us a few minutes to get through security.

So, with Paris behind us, we headed off to Athens, for what should have been 4 days, but turned into 2 and a half.

So of course, upon arriving to our hostel at about 2 am, they didnt have any reservation under our name, but thank you cute Australian working at the desk at that hour for putting us into a private hostel for the night. I owe that cutie Chase my life... well maybe not that much.

So we got some shut eye and did some sight seeing the next morning. Pretty sweet, we got into Agora, which is the small "city" that the Acropolis is in, for free with our student ID cards. Thank you La Sorbonne!

So here are some pics of Agora:

Atop a large rock, overlooking Athens and then some

PARTHENON. Hello you beautiful beast.

Although, everything on our Eurotrip was either under construction, on strike, or both. 

Some pretty sweet sculptures.

We noticed that in Athens, there were puppies EVERYWHERE. They were treated better than the beggars on the streets even. Everywhere we went there were lil bebes sleeping and/or eating food put out by each shop keeper. 

After sightseeing, which took about 3 hours, we had a nice long greek lunch, and went to this wine/liqueur shop called Brettos. Its pretty famous, as I'm sure you can see why. We may have spent a little too long wine tasting, but it was just all so good, and the owners were so nice!

Our hostel. Perfectly safe and clean, no worries moms. 

After this, we ended up hanging out with some people we met whom had been stuck in Athens for quite some time, due to the volcano, and ended up having a really fun time at the rooftop bar of our hostel, which had an awesome view of the Acropolis. 

The next day is where it gets a bit interesting. It was our last day in Athens, and seeing as we had seen what we wanted to see and Athens is quite small, we decided to take a quick ferry to the island of Aegina. Bikinis on, magazines in our bags, and an hour and a half metro ride to the port later, we find out there is a strike, one day only, of all boats in and out of Greece. Lovely. Seeing as we were in the dirtiest place probably in all of Greece, we spent another hour and a half to get back to Athens, walked for about 45 minutes to the biggest park in Greece, to, surprise surprise, find out it is closed for renovations. So another hour walk later, trying to get to the hill of Nympheas (all we wanted to do was lay out in the sun and relax), we decided to get a taxi and sit at a restaurant that the guide book recommended. The waiter was so nice and told us of a beach just a quick metro ride away. A delicious meal and three hours later (apparently in Athens they put the bill under the table cloth? What in the? How where we supposed to find that?!) we ended up at the ocean! 19h30 and determined to say that we laid out...  (^ fake smile)

 (^ another fake smile)

 I know it may sound a bit like complaining and you say "Well Caitlin, you are in Greece, go with the flow" but i'm sure that 4 days of cancelled flights, no refunds, travel companies who don't speak english or french, creepy greek men, dogs with fleas, and sand that has more rocks than actual sand, you would complain a bit too. 

BUT! The next day we ate these v which made life a little better. We also visited the Temple of the Olympian Zeus which was really friggen rad, and yet again free!

  ^ Fallen pillar.

So Athens was quick. The good was mixed with the bad, but we made it work people, as my mom and Tim Gunn would say. Off to Rome for a quick 20 hours next! See you there!

xo