Sailing, Athens, & Mykonos

I’m writing this as the ship sails towards Olympia, Greece, and I can’t belive our trip is over half done! Nevertheless, a Greek Isles + Croatia cruise was maybe my best life decision so far this semester…it makes everything SO much easier. The ship feeds us 3 times a day, will bring us room service pretty much 24/7, and arranges all the shore excursions for us. I usually don’t mind working out train and bus schedules and finding hostels, but I had traveled 3 weekends in a row before this trip, so I was getting a little worn out. Plus, it’s pretty cool to be on a ship and to be able to sit on your balcony and watch the sun rise and set as you sail past Greece. It’s definitely strange, though, not to have all my housemates around—I miss them! The only real downside is that internet is SO expensive. We’re talking between 40 and 60 cents a minute here. So, I”ve become quite the speed email checker (surely a marketable skill, don’t you think?) and I write blog posts (for Dad’s class and just in general) and emails ahead of time and copy/paste them really quickly once I turn on my computer.

Anyways, it’s been such a whirlwind trip. We had a bit of an adventure getting to the ship. We took a bus from the airport to Piazzale Roma, then a vaporetto to the stop closest to Casa Artom. Mom and Dad helped me unload the food and clothes they brought over for me, then we went to Pizza al Volo, ordered a pepperoni pizza, and sat on a bench in Santa Margherita to eat it. After lunch, we went back to Casa Artom to check the news and emails, then we put on these circular little patches behind our ears to make sure we didn’t end up spending 7 days on a ship feeling like death because of motion sickness. Then we took the vaporeetto back to Piazzale Roma and decided to walk to the port…it was quite a hike and I felt bad because Dad got stuck pulling his bag and mine. The signs weren’t very clear, so we kind of wandered with a ton of luggage before we found our specific docking area. Once we got on the ship, we dropped off a few things in the room and went exploring to see what all was on the ship. Dinner was at 6:30 and we all barely made it through that…everyone was exhausted, so we went to bed really early.

We spent the second day sailing to Athens. Even though we were on the ship all day, the time passed really quickly. We ate a ton, we shopped, we read…sometimes doing nothing much at all is the best vacation. That night was “formal” dinner, so we got dressed up, which I always like to do. The next morning, we woke up and had breakfast, then tried to go up on the top deck to watch the ship approach Athens, but it was so windy that we had to come back in. We’re talking wind that literally almost picked me up off the ground. We had a quick lunch before we had to meet up with our tour group fpr our shore excursion of the day. Practically half the ship was on the same tour (ours was the only one that actually took you in to the Acropolis), so they split us up into smaller groups, put us on buses, and sent us on our way. Maria, our tour guide, was great…knew a lot about nearly everything in the city and so we got to see quite a few things in a short amount of time. We made it back in time to go to dinner and crash.

Yesterday we arrived in Mykonos around 7am and apparently there were too many ships in the harbor already, so we dropped anchor outside of the port and took tenders to the island. It was nice that we tendered because it the boat dropped us off right at the heart of town and ran really frequently. We got there early enough that shops were just starting to open up and the crowds hadn’t arrived yet. We tried to find this one particular church and the famous windmills, but the streets were so steep and winding and confusing that we gave up and walked back to the main road to do some shopping. We weren’t too successful…Dad and I didn’t find anything, but Mom bought a cool sweater and we just wandered, looking at the cute churches and stopping in a souvenir shop here or there. It’s amazing how white everything is. Literally not a single building was made of anything except white (with the exception of either blue or red trim). It was just a beautiful place and I took a ton of pictures! After being there for a few hours, we took a tender back and had lunch. After lunch, I sat in the library and read for hours…not because I didn’t like Mykonos or anything, but it’s so small that you can see the majority of it in a short amount of time. Plus, I Don’t read enough back at Casa Artom and I certainly won’t have much time for fun reading no matter what I do after Venice (real person job or law school). I read right up until dinner, so Mom and Dad came to collect me and we had a great dinner, followed by losing 20 Euro at the casino, and finally we saw a show in the ship’s theater. Even though we were all tired, we ended up staying up to watch a move that we’d seen various parts of throughout the day (they run one movie a day on a loop). Luckily we could sleep in today before going to Olympia because we don’t arrive until 12.