Santorini Sunshine :)

The rest of my Easter break was spent on the gorgeous island Santorini! Kathryn and I took a 7  hour tippy ferry from the port at Athens. We stayed at the best villa, it had a kitchenette, a beautiful view and the owner cooked us a couple delicious meals free of charge! It all reminded me so much of Hawaii, since we mostly just relaxed on the beach and explored different towns right on the water. The weather started out cloudy and windy every single morning, but luckily we braved it out, would head to the beach and then the sun would come out just for us :) We hung out at Mamari and Perissa beaches which are both black sand because the island, including the surrounding islands make up one volcano. It was the best to just relax on the beach in the beautiful Greek sun.

 Our most exciting day included a boat excursion to the active volcanic islands from the port in Fira. We sailed to the larger of the volcanic islands and hiked up to an area that has an active crater. There were amazing views of the main island from the top of the volcano. Then we headed to the smaller of the volcanic islands where I dove off of the boat into the Mediterranean Sea and swam into the island’s hot  spring. The ‘hot’ spring wasn’t all that hot because it opened up directly into the sea, which was also pretty cold, but the swim was so exhilarating and such an amazing memory! Once we got back to the main port, we had to make it back up the crazy switchback stairs to the town, which had taken half an hour to walk down. So I rented a donkey for the ride up! There weren’t any reigns so I couldn’t really steer him at all, which meant I would sometimes almost trample tourists walking down the steps. My donkey was pretty spunky because when the other donkeys would just stop randomly in the middle of the steps, we booked it up the stairs and passed about ten other donkeys! Then we went to the town Oia, which is where part of Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants was filmed. It was fun to see places that I had seen in the movie and the town was so beautiful! All of the buildings in the entire town were all white with blue trim and roofs, just like in all the pictures. It was sad to pack up and head back to reality and school, but it was such an adventure that I’m especially never going to forget and that’s within my once in a lifetime experience of studying abroad.

My Easter with Athena :)

For Easter break, I bussed down to Athens on April 20^th to meet up with my friend Kathryn, who has been studying abroad in Dijon, France. We stayed in Athens for four days including Easter weekend. In the Greek Orthodox Church, Easter is the most important, biggest holiday of the year, more so than Christmas. They have mass almost every day of holy week and then the real celebrations begin Saturday night at midnight. We visited the most famous sites in Athens, including the Acropolis, National Gardens, Manastiraki Square, Parliament building, and the Olympic Stadium. Sites had shorter hours because of the holiday, but entrance into the Acropolis was free since it was Good Friday :) It was amazing to finally see the Parthenon in person since it’s such a universal symbol of Greece and ancient civilization. One of the coolest things was that we then visited the New Acropolis Museum, which has a full size model of the Parthenon with pieces of its statues that had been taken down. Then I was able to imagine what this grand temple of Athena actually looked like when it was built thousands of years ago. We also walked up Mars Hill, sat in the Theatre of Dionysus, and shopped in the famous tourist districts Manastiraki and Plaka.

 It was awesome to walk around the Panathenaic or Olympic Stadium and imagine all of the  ancient athletes and gladiators that competed in the first Olympic Games. Later we went to Syntagma Square with the Parliament building and watched the changing of the guards. They wear traditional Greek clothes and march with a super weird high step :) We attended an outdoor  midnight candle light mass on Easter Saturday at ‘The Cathedral’, the head church for the Greek Orthodox Church. The priests started chanting, led a processional out into the square and began lighting the candles of the crowd. The original flame comes from a church in Bethlehem and is flown to Greece and then spread to all of the churches in the entire country, so it was a pretty interesting tradition to take part. Our breakfast was Easter bread, kind of floral tasting bread baked into a circle with a red Easter egg in the middle. They do paint Easter eggs here, but only red to represent Christ’s blood and they also don’t have the Easter bunny. For dinner we accidentally went to ‘God’s Restaurant’ :) They were roasting lamb on the spit out on the street, which I got a chance to turn for a while. We ate a traditional Greek meal of a Greek salad, lamb, potatoes, baklava and ouzo, but didn’t try the Easter soup which is made from lamb intestines. The waiters were very entertained by my attempts at speaking Greek and that Kathryn didn’t speak any at all, so it was a fun meal. My Easter this year was a bit different than it would have been at home, but it was really interesting to experience another culture’s way of celebrating the holiday. Also it was great to have an extra break from school for a week and half, just because Easter is a national holiday ;)

Alexander the Great's Dad's Tomb :)

On April 15^th (I’m obviously trying to catch up on blogging at this point) we bussed to the Archeological  Museum in the city of Verginia on the site of 3rd century BC Macedonian kings. One of the tombs has been determined to be King Phillip II, father of Alexander the Great. You could tell that the site was interesting because there were a ton of Greek people there too, not just tourists :) We couldn’t actually take pictures inside the museum, which was a bummer because the tombs were really impressive. Archeologists found the burial site in a hillside and they just built the museum into the hill. Several of the front tombs had been sacked, but the most important ones, including Phillip II and possibly Alexander IV, son of Alexander the Great were left undisturbed upon their discovery. You would walk into a separate room and down a set of stairs to the entrance door, with the tomb towering overhead. All of the artifacts that were found in those tombs are displayed in the museum; mostly weapons, coins and armor, that would be buried with the kings. It still amazes me to see things that were made 1000's of years ago, coming from such a rich history that I haven’t really been exposed to before this trip.

Then we went to Thessaloniki, the second biggest city in Greece and an extremely important port in the region. I always like it when we do visit larger cities since Ioannina is so small - it’s about a quarter of the size of Seattle. We mostly just walked around the waterfront and checked out the ‘White Tower of Thessaloniki’.  Built by the Ottomans, it was originally named the ‘Red Tower’ or ‘Tower of Blood’ because of a massacre from when it was used as a prison. When Greece regained the city they renamed it the more pleasant present day ‘White Tower’.  I’m really glad that these excursions are included in my program because Thessaloniki was a 4 hour drive away from Ioannina, so I probably wouldn’t have been able travel there on my own :)