Oh Heavenly Hydra

Hydra! Hydra! Hydra! The island where no cars are allowed and the only way to get around is by your own two feet and donkey rides! After staying in Athens the week before, 5 of my friends and I decided to head to an island for a little R&R! We left early on Friday morning around 8am since none of us have class that day and took a little speedy boat called ‘The Flying Dolphin.’ If only I could have gotten a video of what that ferry can do on the water…..It took us about 1 ½ hours to get there. Once we arrived, we knew we picked a pretty special place to visit! Our port was in Hydra Town and we stayed in a cute little hotel called Erofili. Hydra Town was the main tourist area and right as we got off the Flying Dolphin, we saw tourist shops, donkeys and restaurants. The place was gorgeous! You could see buildings all along the side of the mountain. We were greeted with a donkey ride yet we decided to pass since our hotel wasn’t far from the port. We wanted to wait for the donkey rides to maybe a near by beach.

We hung around our hotel for a little bit since one of our rooms was not ready yet. Once we got our second room, we got changed and wanted to hit up the beach right away. We asked the guy at the reception desk and he told us that one of the closest and nicest beaches was in Mandraki. We walked for about 20 minutes. We were worried that we might’ve passed it but we didn’t see any beaches along the way yet. We went around a bend and then we knew we had found it! It was a cute little beach with a small café on the side. We stayed for I believe a little more than 2 hours and then made the long trek back.

Mandraki Beach

This girl cracks me up!

She wasn't even trying to be funny.

She really needed the umbrella.

After Mandraki we went back to our hotel to get ready for dinner. In one of our tour books it mentioned a small restaurant that had good food for reasonable price. We asked the guy at reception again where to find it. This time, we searched all over for this place. We went to back alleys that we were told to walk through and didn’t see it. We went back and forth and around and we got nothing. Then we went back to the main tourist area where the port was and asked another person for directions. She told us the same thing that our reception guy told us. We walked that way again. Nothing. We tried another way and it had lots and lots of steps so we decided to stop and ask one more person. He was an older gentlemen working on some wood cutting at the time. His son I believe, was helping him and the man told his son to show us where to go. So we ended up having our own personal escort to the restaurant!

We finally reached it and sat down right a way to order (we never would have found it on our own by the way. We had headed in the right direction before but didn’t make the right turn). As we waited for our food, we noticed a whole bunch of kittens and cats around us. There was this one kitten that was very cute (at first). I should mention, any one planning to head to Greece and its islands, beware that there is an ungodly number of cats and dogs around! Once we got our food, a couple more cats seemed to appear around us. The cute little one became a little desperate and made her way between Jessie and Mary! She lunged at Jessie’s food and good thing she was small or else Jessie wouldn’t have been able to save her dinner! It was so scary!!! These cats were crazy! The same kitten clung on to Jessie’s leg afterwards and tried to grab her purse! It sure was an entertaining dinner!! This restaurant was very reasonable priced but the food was Etsi-k-ektsi (so-so). After dinner we walked around the tourist shops to find great souvenirs!

That concluded our 1st day in Hydra!

Day 2

The next day, we wanted to see another beach. We decided to walk the opposite side of the port and we discovered the cutest swimming area between to two big cliffs! There was no sand present, just a cement-like platform to lay down on (yea, it doesn’t sound very comfy, huh? Well, it wasn’t). We spent a few hours lounging around and swimming. Kate, Maura and Mary, the daring little devils, did a little cliff jumping. They didn’t jump from far, far up but they managed to find smaller cliffs along the rocky wall. Sitting around the water was so peaceful and beautiful. I felt like I was sitting in a scene from a movie. It was breathtaking.

When we left this beach, we quickly went back to our hotels to get dressed for dinner and see the sunset. Unfortunately, we missed the sunset but had a delicious dinner along the water. We found a restaurant that overlooks the port and Mediterranean. The food was absolutely delicious!! We once again found ourselves in the company of a few crazy felines! I will forever hate the sound of cats fighting. It’s like nails on a chalk board.




We had eaten early that night so we could head back to the port and do some more shopping! I was able to pick up a lovely hand-made ring for only a few euros. I wanted to find a shot glass for my brother and a scarf for my sister but no such luck. My only souvenirs I decided to get was the ring and a few postcards. My favorite souvenirs are always the pictures I take and the memories I’ll carry forever.

After shopping, we decided to head back to our hotel and relax for a little bit. Our plan was to rest for 2 hours and then head out to a bar. We had gotten 2 triple rooms and in my room, Maura, Jessie and I ended up all falling asleep. We were woken by Karynna and had a hard time getting up….We finally managed to escape our zombie like stage and check out a bar. We ended up having difficulties finding one that we wanted to sit in. One was all older people, one only had guys….where was the one that was just right?! We finally settled on a bar with a handful of older folks who were so cute because they looked like they were having a great time dancing the night away! After drinks, listening to the music and chit-chatting, we left that bar and Mary, Jessie and I decided to head back to our hotel. The other 3 visited another bar with all the lovely fellas.

And that concluded the 2nd day on Hydra!


Day 3

Departure time! Oh man was this a crazy travel day! We checked out half hour early and wanted to do last minute shopping. When we were checking out, one of the ladies that worked at the hotel said that our ferry might be canceled due to rough waters. We hurried over to the ferry office and lo and behold our ferry was canceled! Not that staying on a beautiful island another day was a bad thing but it looked like all the ferries after ours would be canceled as well! And staying another night on a beautiful island is not something I’d cry over BUT we had class the next day and it’s not something any of us could miss. We were lucky enough to switch our tickets and jump on the ferry that was actually on its way to Hydra. We waited at the port and nearly gotten blown a way!!!! And when I say it was windy I mean it was W-I-N-D-Y! The poor little kitty cats roaming around had to find shelter or risk being blown away! We waited longer than expected for this ferry and it made us a little on edge thinking that it had to turn around due to the extremely rough waves. I also get very very sea sick on pretty much any type of boat so I was feeling nervoussssss. I medicated myself real well so no worries there :).

Finally our Flying Dolphin showed up and was swaying all over the place! There was some difficulty getting on this moving ferry. Finally settled into our seats, we prayed that we’d make it back to Athens ok. Several times throughout the journey home, an announcement was made explaining pretty much that we would kind of coast along for a little bit because the waves were dangerous enough for us to possibly tip. But we made it back ok around 1pm and we had enough time for another exciting night in Athens!!! Another post coming up next about that little experience!!

-m

Another attempt at Alvin Ailey!

After Lycavittos Hill, the day wasn’t over. We still had our second chance of seeing Alvin Ailey. So once again, we headed to the bottom of the Acropolis and experience much better luck than the night before! We arrived early so we could stand at the front of the line to get great seats because there was no seating assignment for the tickets that we bought. We ended up almost at the very front and the weather was holding!! When it came time to be let in, we pretty much stormed the place to get the best seats (which we pretty much did!)

We got the bottom seats of the top section so we won’t have anyone in front of us to block our view. The show was amazing and the dancers did a great job. We didn’t know what was happening most of the time as the performance told a story and I don’t read dance but it was really good.

Towards the end of the middle of the show, we got a little bit of ran and oh was it a sight to see the whole crowd whip out their umbrellas!


We had a short delay because of it but the dancers were able to come back on stage and finish their performance. It was another fun night in Athens!

-m

Lycavittos Hill

Following the wet and cold night, the next day was beautiful and sunny which meant another opportunity to go sightseeing!

Lycavittos Hill is the tallest of the 7 hills found in Athens. It has a 360 view of the city with a cute little church and restaurant at the tippy top. The hill is climbable or you can supposedly take a funicular to the very top. This however, proved to be extremely difficult for us to find……Our plan was to walk to the bottom of the hill and then take the funicular up which I’ve read takes 2 minutes. We reached the bottom of Lycavittos successfully but then we didn’t know where the funicular was. It’s a huge hill so we didn’t know what part we should be heading towards. We walked one way and figured that there would be signs and we can just follow that. That proved to be a no! We found a trail but we thought that it was a trail that led you all the way to the top. We’ve walked so much around Athens since we’ve gotten here that we really didn’t want to continue doing that….There is also a theatre located on the hill and we did find signs for it so we headed in that direction hoping the funicular would be located some where around it. No such luck.
We ended up asking the police where to go and they told us that we would have to basically walk to the other side of the hill for the funicular. So we started in that direction and kept walking. We ran into another group on the hill and we asked them if they knew where the funicular was and they told us that we had to head back in the direction that we came and follow the road. So we did as we were told and headed towards the road. We followed the road and then got stuck at a split. We were able to flag a taxi down and ask them which way we needed to go. He pointed in the left direction and we were on our journey once again. We found signs again for the theatre which headed up stairs. We decided to take a look and we found ourselves at a parking lot. There were a handful of people here so we thought we were getting close. Not wanting to walk anymore on our own unless we were sure that we would find this damn funicular, my friend Mari and I spotted a group of police officers. We walked over, asked them our question and received interesting news……We had basically reached the top!!! He said that the only way to get to the top now was to walk up stairs. Tired and sweaty, we trekked our butts up those steps and got a view all worth walking for....

The view from above

The girls with Poseidon, the dog that followed us up the hill!

The Acropolis from Lycavittos

The city of Athens

A climb worth fighting for

And then it was time to say goodbye to our beloved puppy, Poseidon.

-m

The night Poseidon got very angry

After the day trip to the Temple of Poseidon in my last post, that night a group of us actually went to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus Theatre located at the bottom of the Acropolis. We went to see a modern dance show by Alvin Ailley. I believe he is doing his world tour right now and luckily, one of his stops was in Greece!

Perhaps during that day, we might have offended the all powerful god, Poseidon?? Just a theory as we got a downpour while waiting to head into the theatre. Announcements were made several times postponing the time to get let into the theatre due to the rain. We waited around for about 45 minutes after the doors were suppose to open but since it is an outdoor theatre, we would have gotten wet either way. After what seemed like forever, we finally got the news that the show was cancelled for the night. Fortunately we were able to change our tickets to the following nights show instead of getting a complete refund.

Here’s a few of pictures from the night Poseidon got very angry……

The girls and I with our Fonzworth (aka Ryan!) :)

Oh my little lamb and my buddy :D

Having some fun while waiting around in the rain

We're pretty happy people after hearing out show was canceled!

Since we got all dressed up and everything, why let a good outfit go to waste?! Which is why we headed to FLOCAFE!!!

-m

Temple of Poseidon

Friday, September 26th, Arcadia took anybody that was interested to see the Temple of Poseidon. Located in Sounion, about an hour away from Athens, we hopped on a bus and headed towards the coast. It was a really nice day so we didn’t need to worry about any grey skies dirtying up our pictures! Before we reached the temple, we actually were taken to a technological museum at Lavrio. I’m not going to say much or anything really about it because it was a total boreeee. I took one picture and that was it. Everyone just really wanted to see the Temple and go swimming afterwards!

After walking around the museum for about 30-45 minutes, we got back on the bus and headed over to the Temple of Poseidon! Its location, overlooking the water, is very significant and appropriate since Poseidon is the god of the sea and natural forces like earthquakes and tornadoes. It was constructed in 600 BC with white marble. A funny story that I read in my travel book talks about a legend that King Aegeus of Athens supposedly leapt to his death off the cliff where the temple sits when he spotted his sons ship with a black sail waving in the wind. A black sail represents the sign of death. Aegues’ son was actually alive and quite well as he was on board getting drunk and had forgotten to raise the victorious sail instead of the black one. Drinking kills people, drinking kills……

Stoa Gangstas

Arcadia girls at the Temple of Poseidon!

View of the Mediterranean from the Temple

Once we had seen the Temple of Poseidon, we were off to go swimming! We were dropped off at a beach about 10 minutes away from the Temple. We had a little beach lunch and some napped, looked for seashells or went exploring. I went exploring with the girls and got great pics.

Life is never dull with my Arcadia girls

We hung out on this rock for a little bit and then the girls decided to go swimming. I decided to take some pictures of them so I went back on land. Here are the girls swimming. You see those two little dots in the middle of the picture, yea that's them. :P

After getting back to my towel on the beach, I decided that I wanted to go swimming too. So I got my bathing suit out of my bag and headed towards the bathroom when I felt a pain from my toe everytime I walked. I brushed off the sand on my foot to see if I had cut myself when climbing on the rocks. Oh no, there was no cut.

There was this!

A stupid splinter!!!

I sat for a good 30-45 minutes trying to get the little sucker out! One of my professors was running all around the beach asking if anyone had tweezers. The cafe on the beach said to put olive oil on it......ok. So then I had olive oil on my toe, two of the Arcadia staff members had a go at the stupid thing. Nothing. Then we finally got tweezers but I still couldn't remove it! It was so small and just a little itty bitty portion of it was sticking out of the skin. Not only was I not able to remove the little nusiance, but I didn't get to go swimming :'( I was one with the splinter until I got back to my apartment that night :(

It really is true, you can't take me anywhere!

:P

-m

New Parthenon Pictures

Here are a few more Parthenon pictures!

New Schedule

Ok, due to a little inconvenience i.e. another transportation strike in Athens once again, I am able to update and add more pictures! I guess the day won’t be a complete loss!

I’m in my 2nd week of classes but I forgot to add my new schedule. The original one that I posted was altered when I arrived and now I have an even better schedule!

Here it is:

Monday
9:00 - 11:00 – GREA GMO 101: Modern Greek Beginning Level
w/ Ourania Sinopoulou

2:00 - 4:00 – GREA SOMO 360: Contemporary Greek Society
w/ Lois Woestman

6:30 – 8:30 – GREA EVST 380: Exploring Nature Conservation in Greece and the European Union
w/ Dimitrios Dimopoulos

Tuesday
9:00 – 11:00 – GREA HIAN 331: Ancient Greek Sancturaries
w/ Jennifer Lynne Palinkas

Wednesday
9:00 - 11:00 – GREA GMO 101: Modern Greek Beginning Level
w/ Ourania Sinopoulou

11:30 – 1:30 – GREA GRCU 111: The Greek Key Seminar

2:00 - 4:00 – GREA SOMO 360: Contemporary Greek Society
w/ Lois Woestman

6:30 – 8:30 – GREA EVST 380: Exploring Nature Conservation in Greece and the European Union

Thursday
9:00 – 11:00 – GREA HIAN 331: Ancient Greek Sancturaries
w/ Jennifer Lynne Palinkas

Friday
NO CLASSES!

If you really look at it, I guess you can say that I have 4 day weekends!

-m

P-A-R-T-H-E-N-O-N

While so many decided to get a head start on island hopping to Santorini or Mykonos, I opted to stay on the mainland and see the sites around Athens this weekend. All the girls that I hangout with stayed in Athens as well so we decided to jump at the chance to be tourists with all the other crazy Americans in Greece! Parthenon, here we come!

We heard about a tour bus called ‘Athens Sightseeing Bus Tour,’ and decided to check it out. The bus would take us all around Athens to see the touristy places like: the Parthenon, Plaka, Syntagma – Parliament, Omonia Square, The University of Athens, Monastiraki, Psiri and many more. We caught the bus in front of the Panathenaian Stadium (1896 Olympic Stadium). It was the first time anyone of us was riding one of these sightseeing tour buses so we weren’t sure how it exactly worked. There’s a button in the bus that you push if you want to stop at one of the attractions. Being it our first time, we ended up passing two of the interest sites because we weren’t sure what to do. We finally figured it out in time to stop off at the University of Athens.

The University was very pretty. It had columns on some of the buildings and a statue of Athena on another. There were several buildings belonging to the school that were all clustered together. We walked around it for a bit and took pictures with the statues of course. I really wanted to see what the classrooms looked like but I couldn’t seem to find any for some reason. One building we weren’t allowed in and another just had offices.

We were planning on catching the tour bus again when we heard shouting down the street. Being the Curious George that we are, we started walking towards the noise. We soon realized that a protest was only a few blocks away in the middle of the street. We didn’t know what the people were protesting but they were yelling something of course in Greek that we didn’t understand. They were also carrying big signs. Then the rioters started running our direction! There were police around but they didn’t really do anything. It looked like a peaceful protest so we weren’t scared. We soon learned that the protest was for Olympic airlines.

After we learned what was going on and the protesters moved on to another street, we decided to head back to wait for the bus. The bus is supposed to come around every half hour but of course, Greece doesn’t quite follow any of the rules or schedules……We waited for the 30 minutes. Then 45 and finally 1 hour. Our main goal of the day was to see the Parthenon which the bus would take us too. Not wanting to wait any longer, we decided to head to the metro to get to the Acropolis. Our tickets for the tour bus cost us 5 euros and they were good for 24 hours and for any other type of transportation: bus, metro, tram, trolley. So we used it for the metro and in no time at all, we were standing at the entrance to walk around the Acropolis!

We got in free of charge surprisingly because we are students in Greece. I showed the guy my ISIC card and my Greek student ID card. He was questioning me at first what school I belonged too and I said Arcadia. He then asked where that was and I said here in Greece. He didn’t seem to believe me which I guess is understandable since the Arcadia University isn’t a major school here in Greece. He kept looking at my Greek school ID card like I made it myself and then he asked someone else in the office. Finally he then said that it was free! I’ll be visiting the Parthenon for class a couple times but now that I know I get in for free, I’ll definitely be going on my own as well!

Once you enter the area, you still have to walk up to get to see the actual Parthenon. Down below it, there are a lot of stone pieces that once stood upon the Acropolis but it looks like architects took the pieces and grouped some together for visitors. There are also two theatres one being the Theatre of Dionysus. The other one is called ‘Odeon of Herodes Atticus.’ Here is the Theatre of Dionysus.


And here is a picture of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus theatre which as you can see, is still used. I like how Greece still uses old buildings but it kind of urks me that the buildings on the Acropolis are being used. I watched as some of the crew moved a sound board around the rows of seats and it made me cringe. The thought of people all over the Theatre makes me so nervous that they will destroy it. I think it should only be a tourist attraction and not a venue.

Here is a building next to the Parthenon called ‘Erechtheion (Caryatids).’ The women statues at the corner of the building are the Caryatids and they are very rare. You will only find a handful of buildings with statues like that on it.

Then finally……

The Parthenon.

The buildings on the Acropolis were created under Pericles. Three legendary artists also helped with the designs; Iktinos, Kallikrates and Phidias. The completed Parthenon was unveiled in 447 BC after 10 years of construction. The Parthenon has 8 columns in the back and the front instead of the regular 6 that you might see. An interesting fact about this building is that the columns are not actually straight. There is a slight curvature in them which Iktinos created so to make an optical illusion of perfect symmetry. As you can see, the Parthenon is no longer whole due to a 1687 Venetian siege where the attackers accidentally blew up a Turkish supply of gunpowder stored under the Parthenon’s roof. Then, in the 19th century, British Lord Elgin starting removing pieces of the Parthenon and sending them to London. Of course this is the Elgin Marble controversy which I had never actually known before but I know some of you have heard about it before. For those who don’t know about the controversy, Lord Elgin got the O.K. from Turkish lords to cart away marble pieces of the Parthenon. Those pieces are still in London today and Greece wants them back but London won’t give it back of course. London feels that Greece is not capable of housing the pieces safely. So Greece has almost completed a museum that can be used to house those pieces. Whether or not London will actually give back those pieces when the museum is completed is still up in the air. It’s a very interesting story that I believe I will be discussing more about in class hopefully soon!

Maura, the human sacrifice

Kate, Mary and Karynna

Me, with the city of Athens

Theatre of Dionysus and the new Acropolis Museum in front of it

Back of the Parthenon

Today, there is a major restoration project going on. You can see the cranes and metal supports all around it which unfortunately disrupts the beauty of the building. There are quite a few more buildings and statues around the Acropolis but I wasn’t able to visit them on Friday but I will definitely get to them another time!

-m