Hello all! I'm back from my weekend in Mykonos and it was a blast. We got back at 3AM this morning and I got up at 9 for a full day of school, but I'm not too tired because I was able to sleep on the nine hour bus ride back, and the five hour ferry before that....we spent a lot of time traveling to and from Mykonos, to the point where the amount of time we actually spent on the island was disproportionate to the amount of time we spent trying to get there or get home. It was worth it, though, for a really fun weekend.
We left Thursday night and drove to Athens to catch a ferry to the island Friday morning. It took forever--the drive from Thessaloniki to Athens is a max six hour drive that somehow took us nine hours, both there and back; I don't know if the driver was going super slow or what, because there was no traffic at three in the morning. It didn't help that we constantly stopped for up to thirty minutes at a time so that all the Greeks and Serbians could have a smoke break. They smoked on the bus anyway--it was freezing because they took shifts sitting at an open window and blowing smoke out it.
I actually got to know a lot more of the regular students here at ACT over this trip, which was kind of nice. I don't have many classes that the Greeks/Albanians are interested in taking, and I rarely hang out with them and this proved to be a rare opportunity to talk with them get to know them a little better. They're all super nice, and it was great to meet a wider range of people than just Americans, although it's a little unfortunate it happened this late in the game.
We got to the hotel around noon, jumped in our swimsuits, and headed to the beach. We spent the whole of Friday and Saturday this way. The beaches were really beautiful, and busy but not overly-crowded. We also walked around Mykonos Town and got food there a lot, which was gorgeous as well--they typical Greek-island style you picture when someone says Greece. I recognized a lot of places from when I was there with my family a few years ago on our cruise, which was fun to remember. I'm really bummed, though, because I have absolutely no pictures! I charged my battery before I left but for some reason the second I tried to turn on my camera to take a beautiful panoramic picture of a gropu of windmills on a hill overlooking the town and the water, it said my battery was dead! I'll post some for you later once everyone starts posting them on facebook and I steal them...
We rented ATVs for the weekend, which was the best thing we could have possibly done. It gve us the freedom to move about the island as we wanted, from the hotel to town to the beach, etc, and it was so much fun! They had them fixed for tourists so even if you floored it over a flat, straight surface you could never really get above 40 km/hr, but it was still fun; plus, you wouldn't want to go faster than that over the curves and twists and hills anyway. I loved it--they were a blast to drive around and sturdier than mopeds or scooters so a bit safer as well. It must be so annoying to live on the island, constantly having to drive around these slow tourists clogging the roads. Friday night we drove them into town to grab a gyro and got a little lost wandering the streets--it took us a good hour to find our ATVs again because we got all turned around!
There was a restaurant right by our hotel called Oregano that was some of the best food I've had in all of Greece. They had just about everything, and it was like Skopelos where it was laid out and you just pick out what you wanted--it was all fabulous. The pastitsiou especially was amazing! They really liked me there too--I went back for dinner just to grab something to bring back to the hotel and they gave me all kinds of free food.
Other than that, it was just a fun, relaxing weekend with a group of people I've come to care a lot about whom I'm going to leave in two weeks. There was a hint of that all weekend--we had lots of fun, but we see the fun ending soon, so we made sure to cram as much fun into the weekend as possible!
School all day today, followed by a field trip with my Folklore class to see a firewalking ceremony, which I'm pretty excited for. I'll make sure to have pictures for that one!
We left Thursday night and drove to Athens to catch a ferry to the island Friday morning. It took forever--the drive from Thessaloniki to Athens is a max six hour drive that somehow took us nine hours, both there and back; I don't know if the driver was going super slow or what, because there was no traffic at three in the morning. It didn't help that we constantly stopped for up to thirty minutes at a time so that all the Greeks and Serbians could have a smoke break. They smoked on the bus anyway--it was freezing because they took shifts sitting at an open window and blowing smoke out it.
I actually got to know a lot more of the regular students here at ACT over this trip, which was kind of nice. I don't have many classes that the Greeks/Albanians are interested in taking, and I rarely hang out with them and this proved to be a rare opportunity to talk with them get to know them a little better. They're all super nice, and it was great to meet a wider range of people than just Americans, although it's a little unfortunate it happened this late in the game.
We got to the hotel around noon, jumped in our swimsuits, and headed to the beach. We spent the whole of Friday and Saturday this way. The beaches were really beautiful, and busy but not overly-crowded. We also walked around Mykonos Town and got food there a lot, which was gorgeous as well--they typical Greek-island style you picture when someone says Greece. I recognized a lot of places from when I was there with my family a few years ago on our cruise, which was fun to remember. I'm really bummed, though, because I have absolutely no pictures! I charged my battery before I left but for some reason the second I tried to turn on my camera to take a beautiful panoramic picture of a gropu of windmills on a hill overlooking the town and the water, it said my battery was dead! I'll post some for you later once everyone starts posting them on facebook and I steal them...
We rented ATVs for the weekend, which was the best thing we could have possibly done. It gve us the freedom to move about the island as we wanted, from the hotel to town to the beach, etc, and it was so much fun! They had them fixed for tourists so even if you floored it over a flat, straight surface you could never really get above 40 km/hr, but it was still fun; plus, you wouldn't want to go faster than that over the curves and twists and hills anyway. I loved it--they were a blast to drive around and sturdier than mopeds or scooters so a bit safer as well. It must be so annoying to live on the island, constantly having to drive around these slow tourists clogging the roads. Friday night we drove them into town to grab a gyro and got a little lost wandering the streets--it took us a good hour to find our ATVs again because we got all turned around!
There was a restaurant right by our hotel called Oregano that was some of the best food I've had in all of Greece. They had just about everything, and it was like Skopelos where it was laid out and you just pick out what you wanted--it was all fabulous. The pastitsiou especially was amazing! They really liked me there too--I went back for dinner just to grab something to bring back to the hotel and they gave me all kinds of free food.
Other than that, it was just a fun, relaxing weekend with a group of people I've come to care a lot about whom I'm going to leave in two weeks. There was a hint of that all weekend--we had lots of fun, but we see the fun ending soon, so we made sure to cram as much fun into the weekend as possible!
School all day today, followed by a field trip with my Folklore class to see a firewalking ceremony, which I'm pretty excited for. I'll make sure to have pictures for that one!
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