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.