So we didn't see Johnny Depp on the French Riveriera...

...but we saw Annalyn McCord (Naomi on 90210) and Kellan Lutz (Emmett Cullen in Twilight) at the Santorini Airport this morning!

(picture taken from another site)

We were just sitting there waiting for our flight when I saw Annalyn walk in. She was dressed very flashy so I noticed her right away. We then saw the guy she was with and recognized him as as Emmett from Twilight! We even made eye contact with them. We didn't take a picture though because we couldn't figure out a way to do it that wasn't obvious. But they were on the same flight we were to Athens. They even were right next to us on the bus that took us to the airplane. It was funny because Kellan Lutz even kind of listened in on our conversation when we mentioned to this woman that we were from California. It was fun to see celebrities. It was an unexpected surprise! They also had SO much luggage!!

Anyways, we're back in Athens for a night before we head home tomorrow! We are in shock that our trip is over. We had a fun day just relaxing in Athens. We ate at our favorite restaurant, and went back to our favorite cafe. We even did some last minute souvenier shopping.

We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. It takes 10 hours just to fly from Athens to New York City. From there we fly to San Francisco and then finally home. Leaving our hotel tomorrow morning to arriving in San Diego airport will take over 24 hours!! Not looking forward to it...we're going to invest in some neck pillows.

See most of you soon!!

Volcano!

Even though we are very sunburned we didn't want to miss out on one of the main attractions in Santorini: Nea Kameni, the volcano in the Bay of Santorini. We had to walk down a steep path covered in donkey poop to reach the port, but we made it down alive and in time to catch our boat. The boat took us across the bay and dropped us off at the base of the volcanic island. We then began to climb a very rocky and uneaven path up to the crater at the top. We were very glad we had decided to wear tennis shoes instead of sandals. We eventually reached the top and looked into the crater. You can't see any lava, but you can see sulfurous steam rising out of vents in the crater. It was pretty cool. We walked around the top for a little bit, taking in the view, and were almost blown of the mountain by the strong winds. Then we made our way back down to the port to catch a boat back to Fira. We wanted to take donkeys back up but there was a line and my sunbun hurt so we took the tram up instead. We were so exhausted from the climb and from being sunburned that when we returned to our hotel we both fell asleep. After a three hour nap we went out for a little shopping and dinner. We found a restaurant that overlooked the water and was actually reasonably priced. Since it was getting close to sunset we decided to eat there. We had Greek salad and pasta while watching the sunset over the water. It was a great way to end our trip to Santorini.

Sunburns

Today we slept in, ate at a delicious bakery, climbed to Ancient Thira, read on the black pebble beach called Kamari, had cocktails by the sea, and had scrumptious Greek food for dinner. We also got painfully sunburnt! Ouch!

Santorini!

We're in Santorini right now! It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. We've already eaten 2 gyros each, shopped, hung out in a cafe, and went to Oia to watch the sunset. I think for this post, we should let the pictures do the talking...

We Miss Italian Gelato, But We Love Greek Coffees!

Today we went to the Athenian Acropolis. We headed out kind of early to try and beat the Athens heat. It didn’t really work. We reached the Ancient Agora around 9:30 and it was already pretty hot. We walked around the agora for a bit and then began the climb all the way up to the Acropolis. As we walked we noticed that everyone seemed to be with a tour group and we thought we had missed some notice about taking tours. It was very hot by the time we reached the top. The Parthenon was really cool. In front of it we noticed a girl taking pictures of her parents and speaking English. We jumped on the opportunity to have he take our picture too and then offered to take one of the three of them. They were happy to get a picture with all three of them since they apparently didn’t have very many from their trip. We walked around the Parthenon and then sat in the shade where a security guard began talking to us, practicing his English.

We then walked back down the hill and over to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which was also included in our Agora/Acropolis ticket- a great deal for only 6 Euros. We looked at the temple, which looks like all other Greek temples, and then walked across the street to some gardens. We found a very friendly cat there and pet it for awhile. It was so cute. I wanted to take it home in my suitcase. Then we headed across the street to an area called Plaka. This area is supposed to be historical. It didn’t really look like it, but it had a bunch of cool touristy shops that we looked at. We ended up back in the area of our hostel which is where a Greek Souvlaki place that our guide books recommended was located so we went there for lunch. It was really good! We had kababs on pita bread with tzatziki sauce for under 8 Euros each.


Next we headed to The Poet’s shop. This is a famous leather sandal shop. It was so cool! They made shoes for John Lennon, Jackie O., and the 2004 Olympic opening ceremony in Greece. The “Poet” doesn’t run it anymore, but his son does. They have all these sandals on the wall and a catalogue that you look at and pick which style you want to try on. Claire and I both loved the same pair so we tried them on. The assistant actually loosens the straps for you and tightens them when you have them on and they cut the strap to fit you. They pretty much fit the shoe to your foot. I also really liked another style and decided to get both. They were a really great price- only 27 Euros for handmade, leather sandals! (The pair that we both got is on the right.)


After that we decided to head to an area of cafés that the guy at the front desk of our hostel, Neal, recommended to us because they have free internet and good “coffees”. We found a really cute looking one with couches looking out onto the street through openings in the wall (That’s actually where we are right now) called Asteroskopeio Café. We had a really nice waitress. She came up to us and started talking to us in Greek. I froze and forgot all the Greek I knew, but managed to spit out “angleka” (English). She smiled and started talking in English. I then ordered our coffees in half English, half Greek. A Frappé with ice cream for Claire and a Freddo Cappuccino with ice cream for me. These are really popular in Greece. We see EVERYONE drinking them. Thanks to Neal I was able to ask for the first level of sugar in Greek, metrio. Our waitress looked really pleased that I was attempting to speak Greek to her. I attempted a little more Greek while we were there and it was actually really fun to speak the language. I think I’d really like to learn it now.

We decided to have dinner in the same area that we had lunch and ended up eating right next to where we had lunch. I had kababs again and Claire had spaghetti. Claire really liked hers, but I thought the kebabs from the other place were better. We then went to Mattonella, a gelateria/bakery by our hostel that Claire wanted to go to because it had "Matt" in it.

It’s All Greek to Me!

We left Rome and flew to Greece! Our 6th and final country. I can’t believe that we’re on the last leg of our trip.

Our flight was actually amazing. We flew Aegean airlines and they were one of the best airlines we’ve flown on during this trip…if not ever. We didn’t have to pay to check on our bags (like other budget airlines), they handed out a piece of candy to everyone before we were even in the air, and not only did we get a free beverage, we also got free food and unlimited coffee. It was great!! The flight lasted about 2 hours. We arrived a bit late since it took them a while to get all our baggage onto the plane. When we arrived, we felt like we were in the middle of no where. We walked right onto the runway and onto a bus which took us to the terminal. The scenery around us was beautiful, and looked very much like southern California.

After we got our luggage (Brittany’s bag came out the very last of course), we figured out how to get to our hostel all by ourselves. The metro line that our hostel told us to take was under construction. The hostel did tell us to take a bus if the metro line is down, but it didn’t tell us which bus to take, just where we should get off. So luckily the Athens airport is very well marked in Greek and English and we found a nice, huge, detailed map of public transportation and figured out which bus to take. We then bought our tickets and hopped on our bus to the nearest metro station. From there, we figured out how to buy our passes from the automated ticket machines, and followed the directions to our hostel, which funny enough is right by an Applebees. Below are pictures of what we see when we got out of the metro station….

Our hostel is also pretty great so far as well. It’s in a good central location with a lot of good authentic Greek food places around. The staff is also really friendly and helped us out a lot. Our room is also really cool because the whole thing is a gigantic mural.

Anyways, after we got settled in, we hopped right back on the metro to go to the National Archaeological Museum. The museum was amazing and huge. We saw Greek statues and pots starting from antiquity. Below is one of Brittany’s favorite statues that she studied in school. I, too, fell in love with it after I saw it!

After wandering around the museum for a while we were starving. We ate at a café right outside the museum. Look at the cool pigeons they have in Athens:

We then headed back to our hostel. Two stores down from our hostel we noticed a leather shoe store. We then realized it’s the very famous leather shoe store that we have read about while we were planning our trip! It’s so funny because we never wrote the address down so we were going to attempt to find it online that evening, but there it was, on the very same block as our hostel! So we were very excited to visit it today. Apparently the store has been around forever and even the Beatles visited it. When the owner was asked why he didn’t get an autograph from them, he responded that they should have gotten an autograph from him, since he will be around longer. I guess he was right!

When we got back to our room, we changed into some cooler clothes and headed to our hostel’s rooftop bar. It was happy hour so we each got a cocktail for a total of 4 euros! Not bad! The roof has a breathtaking view of Athens and the Acropolis. It was fun to sit outside and just admire the beauty of these historical monuments of Ancient Greece.

The Gelato Hunt Continues...

Today we went to the Pantheon, one of the places I was most looking forward to seeing in Rome! It was built by the emperor Hadrian to be a temple to all the gods of the Roman people, except Christians. Kind of ironic since it later became a Christian church, which is how it got preserved. I was very excited to see the dome over the Pantheon because it is such an amazing feat of architecture.

We then headed to Piazza Navona, a famous piazza, for lunch. There were a bunch of local artists selling art and a fountain sculpted by Bernini in the center of the piazza. We went to this piazza because we had read that the oldest gelateria in Rome was located there. We couldn’t figure out where it was though so we decided to have lunch at one of the restaurants with outdoor seating overlooking the piazza. Our food was pretty good. A bit over priced, but good. When we were finished we decided to try and ask our waiter if he knew where it was. After a little struggle to understand each other he was finally able to point us in the right direction. It was actually back towards the Pantheon. We pulled out our map and had him tell us what street he thought it was on. We set out to find it. It was further past the Pantheon than we expected and we thought we weren’t going to find it when we turned a corner and there it was! It is called Giolitti. They had a bunch of flavors and we knew they would be good because there banana flavor was a weird color (an indicator that they use real bananas and a way to tell if a gelato place is good). Claire ordered tiramisu and biscotti, but got caramel and biscotti and I ordered chocolate and creama di whisky al Bailey’s. Mine was really good. The creama di whisky tasted like Bailey’s Irish cream ice cream. Claire wasn’t very impressed by hers and was also disappointed not to get her tiramisu.

Italian Gelato Stats:
Brittany
1. Grom- Florence, Dark Chocolate (amazing) and cream de Grom
2. Vivoli- Florence, Chocolate and mousse café (it actually had the texture of mousse!)
Giolitti- Rome, Chocolate and Creama di Whisky
Tie- The chocolate was better at Vivoli and the mousse café was really interesting, but the creama di
whisky was a cool flavor and they had a lot of other flavor choices.
3. Milan Place that Nino took us to, Dark Chocolate and Coffee
4. Fata Morgana- Rome, Cream and Caramel, Basil with honey and nuts, and Claire’s Chocolate Espresso
5. Cecre- Rome, Coffee and Chocolate

Claire
1. Vivoli- Florence, Tiramisu and some other flavor she can’t remember and doesn’t matter because she went back for seconds of Tiramisu
2. Fata Morgana- Rome, Tiramisu, Chocolate Espresso, and my Basil with honey and nuts (the reason it places second for her even though I didn’t like it)
3. Milan Place that Nino took us to- Tiramisu and Chocolate
Grom- Florence, Espresso and Cream de Grom (they didn’t offer Tiramisu)
Tie- She liked that Grom’s tasted like real espresso but liked the Milan place because it was the first time
she had Tiramisu gelato and that started the trend, plus it was really good Tiramisu gelato.
4. Giolitti- Rome, Biscotti and Caramel
5. Cecre- Rome, Tiramisu and Caramel

We went back to our hotel and rested for a tiny bit and then headed out to the Catacombs. We had to take a metro and then a bus and then walk forever (in the heat), but we finally found it. We went to the San Callisto Catacombs. This cemetery was started at the end of 100 AD. It was really cool. Literally. The temperature dropped drastically down there and it felt amazing. The catacombs were also really neat. We took a tour of them with one of the priests who look after the cemetery. We climbed down to the second of four levels and walked through the passage ways lined with graves cut into the walls. It was a maze down there. There are twelve miles of galleries total! The guide took us into a couple rooms as well. One was where the body of Saint Cecile had laid until the 9th century. A marble copy of the statue that used to be over the grave was there. It shows the slit marks on her neck from her martyrdom and is interesting because it depicts her lying, bound and dead. Not your typical Roman statue.

We had originally planned to visit Trastevere, a part of the city that retains its medieval character. But my feet were killing me and I wanted to rest them before doing tons of walking in Athens. So we went back to our hotel for an early night. We went to a pizzeria next door where a really nice Italian guy helped us order by the point method. Claire got margherita and I got french fries and hot dog pizza. It was really funny, but good. We took it back to our room and watched Italian MTV.