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.