Ελλάδα-Italia 2012: The Fire Islands

Another week come and gone. I think it's safe to say that this trip is going way too fast. I've enjoyed every minute and I can't believe it's already October. The highlight of this week was my trip to Santorini. I'll get to that in a second, let's just wrap up the rest of the week quick.

Monday, Tuesday
-For the first time all year, I actually had a lot of homework. I guess I can't really complain.
-After living here for more than a month, we finally made it to the Acropolis. We went for our Ancient History class and had a lecture in front of the Parthenon.

Wednesday, Thursday
-I mentioned it in my last post, but we witnessed the Greek riots in Syntagma Square.
-We visited the New Acropolis Art Museum for class.
-We were able to borrow a few guitars from the school. They aren't the best, but it's been nice just to play around a little bit.

All right, now on to the weekend.

We spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on the island of Thira, otherwise known as Santorini. It is a volcanic chain of islands. The volcano is in the center, with other islands around it to create a circular caldera. All of the cities on the island are built into very tall cliffs. Santorini is famous for its white washed buildings with blue roofs, and their donkeys used by locals to get up and down the cliffs. To get to the island, we had an 8 hour boat ride. Here's the approximate route, with stops on Paros, Naxos, and Ios on the way. The entire group went on the trip, with the exception of our director.

Friday
-Our boat left at 7:20 from Pireaus, so we had to wake up at five in the morning in order to get there.
-The seats on the boat weren't the most comfortable, but I was able to sleep for the first few hours. The ride was long, but we passed the time with playing games and having a long conversation with some very friendly Swedish businessmen.
-We arrived in Santorini around 4:00 that afternoon. We took a bus from the harbor to the main city of Fira, where our hotel was located.
-Our hotel was very nice. A great pool with little houses scattered around it to form a little hotel village.
-The whole group met up to decide what to do that night. Trying to plan for 30 different people became frustrating, so Josh and I broke away from the group and walked around town. We didn't make it two blocks before we found an ATV rental shop. We couldn't resist, and rented an ATV for the whole weekend.
-We drove the ATV up the North coast of the island to a town called Oia. We had dinner at a nice fish cafe overlooking the harbor while the sun went down.
-We got back together with the group later that night. It was our friend Aaron's 21st birthday, so we spent the night in the main town at a great little bar.

Saturday
-After eating breakfast at the hotel, we walked into town and took a gondola down the cliff to the harbor. We bought tickets for a tour of the volcano.
-Once we reached the volcano island, the tour gave us an hour to hike up to the top of the mountain where the active volcano is situated. It was a tough hike up, but we made it to the top and got to look into the crater of the volcano. The ground was hot and smoke leaked out of crevasses in the rock.
-After the hike, we got back on the boat and went to another island to swim in the hot springs there. We got to dive right off the boat into the ocean, then swim into a cove where the water gradually got warmer due to the spring. After a little while there, the boat took us back to the main town.
-The rest of the group decided to follow our example and rent ATV's as well. We all rode them down the South coast to the Red Beach, made up entirely of red volcanic rock. We spent all afternoon swimming in the crystal clear water and jumping off cliffs.
-We ate dinner at a small tavern looking out over the caldera and watched the sunset.
-We got back to the hotel late, but we had a fun time just hanging out.

Sunday
-We had to leave the island around 2, so we spent the morning shopping around the town and seeing anything we missed.
-Another long boat ride back, we finally got back to Athens around 12:30 in the morning.

That's it for now, it's been a pretty busy last few days. Next weekend we are visiting the ancient site at Delphi. Here are some pictures from the weekend below: