Greece!

So I definitely cried. When I had to leave Madrid it became real that I was leaving Europe for real this time. And then I had to say goodbye to my last friend still there with me and I lost it haha. I hope you made it home safely Em, and everyone was surprised!

Anyways... GREECE!

Em and I successfully got ourselves to Athens, and we were quite proud. However, upon walking off of the plane, we realized Greek is impossible to read or understand. How they make words out of all those symbols is still a mystery to me. Plus the whole language just sounds like a baby babbling. So good for them for being able to decipher the code and understand each other haha. On the bright side, nearly everyone in Greece speaks really good English. It is required in the schools there, and they must make people take English classes for many years, cause I was amazed at how well most of the Greeks could speak to us. I wanted to see the Acropolis, even though we only had a night in Athens. We bought metro tickets quickly, expertly asked a guy which one to take, then got off at the Acropolis exactly 30 minutes before it closed. The lady asked for our student IDs and we both gave her our Uni Ovi ones, and since it said we were students from Spain she let us in free; A lot of the museums in Europe give free or reduced admission to citizens of the EU. So we kinda manipulated the system, but oh well. We quickly took pics and climbed to the top, where there was an awesome view of Athens! Afterwards, we were super sweaty and gross, so we went to the hostel and showered. For dinner we went to a restaurant across the street that was good. Food in Greece is a lot cheaper than in Spain, so that was a definitely plus. Also, water is rarely more than like 50 cents, which was awesome! The weather was so nice, hot during the days and just cool enough to wear a dress at night. Such a nice change from Oviedo! The next day we took a ferry to Mykonos (6 hours) and then checked in and tanned on our hotel balcony. We went into town and had a traditional Greek dinner, then passed out from pure exhaustion! The rest of Mykonos mostly consisted of laying on the beach, drinking on our balcony, dinners out, and avoiding our stalkers. We also managed to teach ourselves how to open beer bottles with just about zero resources haha. We went swimming both days at the beach and it was absolutely gorgeous! The water is so clear and turquoise that even when you are 20 feet deep you can still see the pebbles perfectly on the bottom. It was absolutely unreal! On the way back we ran into a girl from Portland, and she even happened to be a Chi O at Oregon. She was a bit older and had graduated and had a steady job, and had just been with friends traveling Europe. We hung out with her on the ferry, then parted ways and Em and I got more Gyros for dinner (soo good!). We had all night to kill since we were planning on spending the night at the airport, so we took our time getting on the metro. We eventually got on, missed our stop, so rode it all the way to the end of the line, through all of Athens, only to find out that it wouldn't be going back (the man told us it was "going to sleep" haha) and we had to switch trains. It was around 11 and we were the only people there, so that was a bit scary. But it all turned out fine, we ended up burning up about 2.5 hours, and eventually made it to the airport. Sleeping in the airport was a terrible experience, in fact, I didn't sleep at all. It mostly consisted of me sitting there VERY bored and VERY tired. Eventually we got on the plane and everything was fine!