(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!!
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!
After we went through security, Susan went to get tickets on the second level so that the 4 younger people in our group (including ourselves) could get a student discount. We were able to and she gave us some of our money back which was really neat. We then went on to look at many paintings. It was really nice having a tour guide, especially one as well-informed as Susan is, because we learned so much about things we wouldn’t know about touring the Vatican ourselves. Plus, Susan has connections. And was able to show us things that other tour guides can’t. For example, she was able to spin one of these old pots that are meant to spin but aren’t supposed to be touched. Also, a guy in our group was able to turn this huge globe thing. We think it’s because Susan is quite friendly with most of the security guards in the museums!
We also saw some amazing Belgium tapestries done of Raphael’s paintings that are spun in gold string. We saw the apartments that Raphael painted including the famous “School of Athens” which was amazing. After many hours of looking at paintings and tapestries and ceilings, we finally got to see “the” ceiling. The Sistine Chapel that is. It is nothing what I expected but Brittany was amazed by how huge it was. We didn’t get a picture of it because we are not allowed to even though everyone else was taking photos as guards ran around screaming at people. We chose to respect the ceiling however and just admire it with no camera up to our faces.
As we were heading back to the chapel to meet up with Susan, I realized that I was so overwhelmed with the ceiling and everything going on around me I hadn’t even looked for the famous “Creation of Adam” right smack in the middle of the Sistine Chapel. So I stopped to admire it and then I lost Brittany. I couldn’t see her anywhere. Figuring she went out the exit to meet with Susan, I followed the masses of people who were leaving the chapel. However the exit went on forever, and went into many other rooms full of artifacts and paintings. There was no end in sight. There was also no Brittany, Susan, or anyone else in sight. There was, however, the too-much-make-up Asian-American lady with her husband. At that point I felt panicked so I approached them. Together we attempted to find our group. Eventually we realized there were two exits and we much have went out the wrong one. We headed back and there was our group, still in the Sistine Chapel. Nobody left afterall. I was relieved to find Brittany again. And I also felt a little bad laughing at the makeup lady. Just a little though. She was pretty ridiculous.
We were ravenous at this point. We didn’t have a lunch break during the tour. The only thing we had was a small breakfast delivered to our room at 8am that morning. Well, it was now 5. The supposed 4 hour tour took 7 hours! It was worth it though. But our stomachs were growling. We found our way to the metro station and started our journey to the Trevi Fountain. We were so desperate for food, we just ate at a small pizza place we found along the way to the fountain. It was really disgusting, old pizza. We should have just went a bit further because then we found more restaurants, but it was too late. At least we got some food into our stomach. We were surprised when we turned the corner and found the Trevi fountain. We both imagined it to be in a more wide open space. Instead it was literally just squeezed into this tiny piazza. It was still fun though being there among the crowds, throwing our euro cents into the fountain. We even found an older couple from Michigan who took our picture for us.
After gelato, we found a place that had internet and bought 15 minutes each for 1 euro (super pricey!) where we got our Internet fix for the day (and when we updated our blog post telling people we weren’t dead since we couldn’t post for 3 days). We then headed to the Spanish Steps. We got lost a bit, but it was nice wandering the streets of Rome. We finally found our way with the help of these convenient McDonald signs everywhere. We’ve noticed that in Italy, McDonalds has street signs telling you, with an arrow, where the nearest McDonald’s is and how long it takes to get there. The Spanish Steps were filled with people. We had fun just sitting on them and watching the sky turn colors as the sun set. I even changed my camera to black and white setting so it would be more Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday-esque. 
We had a quick lunch outside the Colosseum and then joined the group for the Palatine Hill tour. It was so hot by then. We had a really fun and eccentric tour guide who knew so much about everything we saw and ended up extending the tour from 40 minutes to a couple hours. It was really cool. We even got to go into the recently restored study of Emperor Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. We liked our tour guide so much that when she told us she was giving a tour of the Vatican tomorrow (which we had planned to see then anyway) we decided to join. After the tour we walked over to Trajan’s Column and then back towards the Colosseum for dinner at this restaurant that was recommended in our guide book.
We then hopped on a metro in search of a gelateria, Fata Morgana, that our tour guide had mentioned. The owner makes his own gelato and experiments with the flavors, creating some very unique ones. We got lost and ended up passing it, ending up in a sketchy-looking neighborhood. We back-tracked, very disheartened that we couldn’t find it, when Claire noticed a girl eating gelato and pointed her out saying “I wonder where she got gelato” I looked above her at the sign over the small, hole-in-the-wall shop and it was the place we had been looking for. We were excited and went in. We wanted to branch out and try his random concoctions, however, all the flavors were in Italian so there were very few that we could figure out what they were. Claire ended up playing it safe with tiramisu and chocolate espresso. I noticed the basil, honey, and nut flavor our guide had talked about and decided to get that and a cream and caramel flavor. Not a great combination. The basil flavor was interesting, but not really something I liked. It was really basil-y but also really sweet. Claire tried it and really liked it though. She ended up getting bored with her chocolate and so we switched cones and she ate my basil and I ate her chocolate. We then headed back to our hotel, completely exhausted from a long day of walking.
