Athens

People told me I wouldn't like Athens. "Go in, spend a day seeing the sights, leave." They said it was dirty and sketchy and not worth any more time.

I think that living in San Francisco has raised (lowered?) my standards for "dirty" and "sketchy" because people keep telling me this about various European cities and frankly none of them have fit that description yet. Sure, they're not all as pristine as, say, Bordeaux but I wouldn't call any of them dirty and sketchy (particularly after visiting a few Egyptian cities, but more on that later).

I actually loved Athens. I visited the National Archaeological museum, which had a fascinating collection of Minoan information and artifacts among many other interesting aspects. I met up with Vijay P for this part of the trip and we went to the new Acropolis museum on the first day it was open to the public - only 1 Euro for tickets, tiny line, and a great museum in an excellent setting. We went on a walking tour, which included the Acropolis (and the Parthenon of course), visited the old forums (fora?), wandered around the nightlife streets, watched a traditional Greek dance show, and rented a car and went on a day trip to visit the temple of Greece and the beach at Sounion. I don't think I needed to spend much *more* time - I think we pretty much exhausted most of the sightseeing options - but I definitely enjoyed our full three days there.

Thus ends the self-guided portion of my trip. I've been on a tour in Egypt, and will update about it at some point soon.

See my Athens pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Athens
See Vijay's vastly superior Athens pictures here: http://vijayp.zenfolio.com/p50013295

Crete

Crete is a bit out of the way for island hopping, but after I read about the Samaria Gorge, I really wanted to go. The trip from Santorini was only about two hours to Heraklion.

Heraklion is a real city. After touristy Santorini, it was a bit of a wake-up. It was fascinating to see all of the Venetian architecture there - I had never realized that Venice was an empire and ruled over Greek islands. I visited Knossos, which was pretty cool, even if Arthur Evans is supposedly a bit dodgy with some of his reconstructions. Frankly, though, after visiting Pompeii, Knossos seems a bit small in comparison. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had been on a guided tour but I waited around for an hour and they couldn't recruit anybody else for the group so I was out of luck.

The archaeological museum was a bit better - it had all sorts of neat original frescoes and art forms and lots of good explanation about Minoan civilization that was absolutely fascinating. Definitely worth reading up on if you're into that sort of thing.

Afterwards, I took the bus to Chania, which I used as a base for my trip to the Samaria Gorge. The hike was amazin - it is all downhill but it's pretty rough on your ankles because the ground is so unstable and the hike is about 16 km. At the end you wind up at this small village by the Libyan Sea where you can relax and go swimming. I opted to stay the night there and relax, figuring I could make my way back to Chania and the overnight ferry ride to Piraes the next day.

Apparently that wasn't going to be so easy, though. It was easy enough to get a boat to the next town, but the bus wouldn't leave until too late for my ferry. The only way for me to get there on time was a taxi, which woudl be around 70 Euro. Ow!

Luckily I met a Norweigan man on the boat who had already booked a taxi to the Chania airport at about the same time I needed to get back, so we wound up splitting the fare - he paid 60 Euro and I paid 30. I'm not sure how fair that split was but he insisted, so I managed to skirt the full cost of the stupid tax.

Full set of pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Crete

Santorini

Santorini looks exactly the way I always pictured Greek islands would look, only more beautiful. The volcanic cliffs are steep and dramatic, the buildings are whitewashed, the church domes are blue, and the overall effect is mesmerizing. Even the hordes of cruise ship tourists that periodcally sweep through Fira (the capital) and render me unable to move without getting caught up in their tidal wave couldn't make me hate the place.

In my two days there, I went on an excursion to the volcano (the rock formations there are only about 400 years old!), swam in the hot springs, visited a quiet part of the island complex, went out on the town with people from the hostel, rode an ATV (it's addicting!) all over the island to check out the beaches and ancient ruins, ate gyros, and overall had a grand old time. It is incredibly touristy but if you can get over that, I think it's well worth seeing. The volcano there actually has had quite an impact on the history of the area (as I would find out in Crete and again in Athens) so it was nice to be able to read about "Thira" and be able to say: "Oh! I've been there."

Full set of pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Santorini

Crazy, crazy, Corfu

To get to Greece from where I was staying outside Sorrento, I took the local train to the Naples train station, then a bus from there to Bari. At Bari, I caught an overnight ferry to Corfu, on which I had a bed booked in a 4-person dorm. It tunred out that the person making my booking accidentally set me up in a male instead of female dorm, which is against the rules, so they gave me instead a two-person female dorm with no roommate (woohoo, super single!). For whatever reason, I still didn't sleep that well so upon arriving at the hostel at 7:00 in the morning, I did nothing but relax on the beach the entire day.

I booked the hostel knowing that it was a bit of a party hostel because they make it so easy and cheap to do things that you kind of can't help yourself. The food there is incredibly tasty good and cheap - breakfast and dinner are both provided, so all you need to buy is lunch. They organize ATV trips and kayaking expeditions and so on. Which is all nice.

But basically it's a party hostel. The whole atmosphere reminded me of what little I've seen of MTV Spring Break with lots of college kids getting drunk and, well, being drunk.

Luckily I met 4 awesome Australians on the ferry ride over so I had chill people to hang out with. I went to the toga party (toga party?! Straight out of Animal House) and actually had a pretty good time - they had traditional Greek dancing complete with plate breaking and everything. But that one night was more than enough partying to last me the entire trip - and more.

The next day, I signed up for an ATV tour of the island so my Corfu experience wouldn't be limited to just the hostel and its beach. It was actually really fun! I was worried that I would be too scared on the quad bikes the whole time, but I gained confidence and was able to relax and enjoy it. Corfu is the "most Italian" of the Greek islands so it's incredibly green and lush and beautiful, as I tried to capture in the pictures I took, available here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Corfu

Sorrento (kind of... Pompeii and Capri)

I'd heard pretty sketchy things about Naples. Not wanting to tempt fate too much being by myself, I decided to stay instead in a hostel in St. Agnello, right outside Sorrento. I was glad I did - the hostel was fantastic and I met a lot of really fun people.

On my first day there, I visited Pompeii. I've wanted to visit it for quite a while, and in the end I wound up spending around seven hours there. The amount of preservation there was phenomenal - it's literally an entire city still there. My favorite part was the hall of mysteries, a room with a big, extremely well-preserved frescoes depicting a rite of some sort that archaeologists still don't understand. It was also really interesting to walk through the graveyards because in a way it's a graveyard within a meta-graveyard. Deep, I know.

The second day there I booked a trip to visit Capri with the hostel and I'm really glad that I did. There were 11 of us that were taken out on a small boat to visit the island. First we traveled along the Sorrento and Amalfi coasts, then were dropped off to visit the little town on the island where the rich and famous spend time. The town was pretty boring really, we just hopped off, looked around, then got back on the boat.

The best part was after that. Our guide took us to a bunch of caves where we could go swimming, jumping off rocks into the water. The blue grotto is the most famous of the caves but we spent most time at the white grotto, and then did a brief swim through the blue grotto. I don't have much in the way of pictures, unfortunately, since I was largely swimming to these places and my camera isn't waterproof but you can see lots of them if you do a search on google images: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=white+grotto+capri&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi.

We did also stop by the blue grotto but it was 11 euro, you weren't allowed to swim in it, and the people who took you in the rowboats were quite rude, so I'm glad that I decided not to go. Apparently it's just a bigger cave with the same phenomenon that we saw in the white grotto - the cave is dark but the light from outside still lights up the water within the cave so it looks like it's glowing.

Full set of pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Sorrento

Florence

Wow am I ever behind. I'm actually in Egypt right now so that means I need to finish up Italy (Florence + Sorrento-area), write about Greece, *and* catch up to where I am in Egypt. Pretty much a losing battle but I'll do what I can.

So, right. Back to Italy. Florence. The Medici. Luckily I like art because Florence is full of it. Michelangelo, the Uffizi, all the churches, the list goes on and on. By this point I was sick and tired of waiting in line for anything, so I signed up for a couple of tours. The first one was all about Michelangelo - we started off at his house, went to the sculpture museum, and finished at the David, where we didn't have to wait in line. I never realized how big he was! In the same room as David, they had a bunch of original unfinished statues that were going to be used for the tomb of Pope Somebody, and they put copies where the original unfinished ones were kept - in this cave in the Boboli gardens. I went and visited that too - it was really neat because they had made the cave after the Greek story of men being formed out of rocks, so between all of the stalactites, stalagmites, and the unfinished statues, it was a really neat effect. I also took a tour of the Uffizi that left us in there to explore on our own. It's a pretty amazing collection but the museum itself is a little odd - all the rooms are different temperatures, which seems like it would hurt the paintings? Anyway, I quite enjoyed it.

My hostel here was great - every day from 6:30-9:00 they would serve bruschetta and some drinks out on the balcony. There was usually enough to eat that I didn't actually ever eat any dinner in Florence, whoops.

The highlight of the trip was the bike tour of Tuscany that I took. We had a van ride out to the castle, then biked along little roads, admiring the countryside at a leisurely pace, stopping for lunch at a family restaurant along the way. Near the end there was a hill - and I mean a *big* hill. All I want to say about that is that I started on the bike, and finished on the bike, and nobody needs to know about what I did in between. (At least I didn't ride in the van like some of the other participants.)

I did quite enjoy Florence, but I kind of had the feeling the whole time that I was getting the sights "out of the way" so that when I come back with more people I can concentrate on relaxing and seeing the countryside instead of the city without worrying about missing out on any of the culture since now I've seen it.

Full set of pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Florence

Rome

Brad flew into Rome to meet up with me for an extended weekend. I had a recommendation from a girl I met in Venice for a walking tour company, so I signed us up for a few tours - one of the Vatican and one of "Classic Rome." Both tours were fantastic and I really enjoyed them and learned a lot.

Rome is an interesting case because there's so much history there literally piled on top of and integrated into itself. We saw churches constructed by integrating porticos of ancient temples into the walls of the building. Tons of the marble columns inside the naves of churches were taken from various ancient buildings. I went on a tour that went underground and you could see about 4 different levels of history all built on top of each other. The guide said that when they were digging to build the new subway line, they came across an ancient Roman villa. Any time they dig anywhere, they come across more ancient construction - and there's already a lot visible above the ground at Palatine Hill and in the forum, etc.

The ubiquity and abundance of antiquities causes an interesting problem. What's more important: underground Roman ruins or the medieval buildings built on top of them? An ancient Roman villa or a subway station that will let modern people live their lives more effectively? Furthermore, even if they did excavate all of it, how do you go about categorizing it and making it understandable? When we wandered around Palatine hill without a guide, it's very difficult to understand what things mean, and there wasn't a whole lot in the way of explanation. After a while, the ruins all look the same without any information to help give context.

In the end, though, my favorite single place to visit was the Gallery Borghese. It has some of the most famous Bernini sculptures (mostly early ones) and a large collection of Caravaggio. I don't know how great of a cardinal that guy was, but he definitely had great taste in art.

I really have to go back; the 4.5 days I spent in Rome wasn't nearly enough.

Full set of pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.earl/Rome