Part 2: Greece!

My return flight landed at the Seattle airport at 9:30am on Monday morning. My Greece departure left at 6:30am on Tuesday morning. I was not home for very much time. Needless to say, I didn't sleep at all; I spent all night packing. I also made a midnight run to Walgreens to get passport photos, which is conveniently 24/7. (I hadn't know that Issaquah has TWO places that are open past 10pm!)

In Ecuador, my clothing collection was incredibly small so I wanted to bring more clothes with me to Greece. At 10 pm I had a HUGE mountain of clothes on my bed and a significantly smaller suitcase, but I left the "maybes" and rolled tightly. My suitcase only weighed 48 lbs when I was done, too.

I printed out my boarding pass online and had the fastest check-in of my life, which involved a 30-second interaction with the Delta lady who checked my bag (for free!). I also had the best security experience ever; the line was sort of long, but once I passed the passport-verification man, there was absolutely nobody and I had lots of table space to spread out my stuff before putting it through the x-ray. It was very pleasant.

I slept the entire flight to New York; I don't even remember the take-off haha. In JFK I had a short layover and then a 10.5 hour flight to Athens. I would like to comment that boarding by zones is DUMB. All it does is ensure that everyone in the front of the plane and those people in the aisles get on first. I fail to see why anyone would choose that as a boarding system.

On the plane, we had personal touch-screen TVs for free with lots of movies, tv shoes, music, games and the nice map showing our location. I slept for a while, watched "It's Complicated" (which was really good, despite the reviews; I laughed quite hard), read my phrase book (I'm up to three words!) and practiced reading, since the alphabet is different, and read my camera manual, which is poorly organized but interesting.

This was possibly the emptiest flight I've ever been on; it was a 2-3-2 seat arrangement in each row and I felt like every three rows had an empty seat somewhere. A lot of the people were Greek and all the announcements were in Greek and English. I miss Spanish. I could actually understand things.

In the Athens airport, I showed my passport to a security man in a booth. He typed in my name, stamped it, and we exchanged a grand total of zero words. That was the extent of my customs experience. Taso, my professor, picked me up and took me to the hotel (thank god). We rode a bus and the subway, called the Metro. Both were pretty spacious and pretty clean, which is a nice change.

At the hotel, I met another girl from my program, so we were able to get a room together, which is cheaper. It's still wayyy more than Ecuador though. The hotel is near the Acropolis, which is where the Parthenon is. We had lunch and bought cell phones (apparently they're now required on UW study abroads) and then we had delicious gelato. Eshaustion hit at that point, so I took a half an hour nap and then the whole group went to the Acropolis Museum, which is a huge building filled with statues and stone carvings (remnants of these things, anyway. Everything was damaged and aged for a variety of reasons, such as Catholics and rich dumb lords tearing down much of the building. We couldn't take pictures inside, which was a bummer. The building is built over a lot of ruins, which are visible through a glass floor, which is so cool and also outdoors, so I do have pictures of those. We didn't go to the actual Acropolis since it closed at 3pm, but I plan to go later.

We had two hours to explore the museum, but as pretty as it is, it does not take two hours. We enjoyed sitting in the cafe and talking and soaking up sun, since it was not particularly warm. We then met our professor again and went to dinner. It was delicious but we had a family-style meal and literally had twice as much food as we could eat. Next time we're going to order instead of Taso haha.

It has been a very long day and I'm finally off to bed... until 6:45 tomorrow morning, since we're meeting at 7:30am to go to Ioannina. But, that journey includes a 6 hour bus ride so hopefully I can get some sleep there.

Love Alex