Why I love ATVs

So, it has been a whirlwind this past week, wow! Last Wednesday night, before leaving for Greece, I went out to dinner with my parents, my cousin Anna, and her mom. It was so nice to see my cousin, she is abroad in Spain and came to Israel to visit her twin brother who lives in an orthodox yeshiva somewhere. Then after dinner, I went home to get to bed early because I was leaving for Greece at 3 am. So then we took a sherut to the airport and got on out flight to Athens, Greece. We spent our first day in Athens at the Archaeological Museum and then did dinner with some other Hebrew U friends of that were also in Athens. We stayed at Hostel Aphrodite, which had a room of 4 bunk bed so we had two cute Australian girls as our roommates. The next morning we got up early to catch a 7 hour ferry to the island of Santorini (where Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was filmed) there was a totally obnoxious group of Greek teenagers on our boat. They had whistles and bullhorns - they were so loud and made so much noise at 7 am, but after a while it became hilarious to watch their crazy antics, like when they played truth or dare with the old people sitting on our deck. The only reason we got stuck sitting on the deck with these high schoolers was because both Ilana and I had trouble getting all 3 of our ferry tickets, for both of us they could only find two. (we both actually didn't even end up getting our third tickets until we got to the other islands we were traveling to.) So the boat ride was very long and tiring, but had amazing views of all the Greek islands and we eventually made it to our first island adventure, Santorini!
Santorini - so we got picked up at the port by our hostel people, and got driven to the cutest hostel, it had a nice little pool and the owner, her name was Poppy, was so cute and funny. They gave us a yummy glass of wine and lots of advice about what to do in Santorini. That evening (we arrived in late afternoon) we met up with one of the girl's I was traveling with friend from home who was studying abroad in Spain and we headed up to the town of Oia/Ia. Ia is where they actually filmed the movie, when you think of Santorini in general, this is what they pictures are of. It is all the white houses with blue roofs and many different colored little houses all down the side of the cliffs. You can ride through it on a donkey if you want, we didnt have the time/want/money to do that tho. We took so many gorgeous photos and we tried to watch the sunset but it was very overcast out, then we sat down to another traditional Greek dinner. The next morning we got up and rented ATV's, which is a huge thing in the tourist industry of Greece. And because Santorini is such a small island, you can ride around the whole thing in back and froth a few times in one day. We rode out to the black beach, Santorini is located next to a volcano so it has all these different colored lava beaches. We had another traditional Greek lunch and then laid out for a while on the beach. Interesting fact - similarly to Israel, Greece has a huge popular of loose animals roaming around but instead of cats, in Greece its dogs! So as we were sleeping on the beach this huge dog came up to me and starting licking my feet, I freaked out and jumped up and my bathing suit almost fell down it was so gross and unexpected! Then we rode around the island some more and ran into some of Becky's friends from camp who were also spring breaking it in Greece, they are studying in Tel Aviv this semester. Then we headed back to the hostel to change for dinner. We went into town to turn our ATVs back in and then we met 4 more of our friends from Hebrew U for dinner overlooking the volcano with a great view! We also had amazing desert at this cute little cafe. Then we went back the hostel because we had to be at 6 am to catch our next ferry to Naxos. However, in the morning we woke up at 6:09 and had to be ready to go at 6:15, it was a huge crazy mess but we made it on time and everything was O.K.

To continue hearing about my Greek adventures see the next post!
Adra