I just had Semana Santa (Holy week) Vacation. Riccardo, Bill and I planned a trip to go to Greece and on the way we had a very long layover in Geneva, Switzerland so we stopped there as well to have lunch with Riccardo's Brother.
Here are my pictures from Geneva. We were only there for a few hours but luckily Riccardo was able to give us a full tour of the city. It was probably one of my favorite places I've seen. It was so clean. The mountains were huge and very beautiful and apparently Riccardo says that Geneva isn't as nice as some of the other cities in Switzerland. We would like to go back and see one of his cabins he has in the mountain.
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| Flying classy with Swiss Airways! Too bad we missed this flight on the way back home from Athens and had to stay another two days! |
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| One of the cool churches in Geneva. |
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| Main church in downtown Geneva, Switzerland. |
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| Riccardo was saying in Switzerland there are many overpass hallways like this between buildings that were supposed to be old bathrooms shared between houses. |
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| Huge Swans we saw by the lake in Switzerland. |
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| Just some of how nicely kept this city was. |
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| Me on the lake in Geneva, Switzerland. |
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| Clock made out of flowers near the Rolex building downtown Geneva. It actually worked! |
Next stop was Athens for two nights. We didnt get into Athens until really late and the metro wasn't running. We ended up getting a taxi cab ride from the airport to downtown. It was $50 Euros but the guy driving was crazy. He drove so fast and was talking about how he races cars and has problems with people racing him. I was glad to get out of that taxi. Its very annoying how everyone in Greece knows English. Its helpful, but annoying because I don't like not being able to talk smack behind people's back like I can in Spain. Haha! I think it really makes me wonder why US citizens don't want to learn Spanish. I think we should make it mandatory to take a language in schools.
Anyway, here are my pictures from Athens. (Its actually broken down into three days because we didn't go to see the acropolis until after we visited the Greek islands.)
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| This is our hostel room door in Athens. We stayed in Hostel Zeus. |
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| Here's a picture of the ruins right beside the metro stop in downtown Athens. There was a couple spots where the metro would open up to ruins. |
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| Me showing how they don't protect the ruins. You were allowed to just walk over anything you want and touch whatever. |
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| View from near the Acropolis. |
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| Columns in the middle of the city. |
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| This old man was feeding a million loose Greek cats. |
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| Fix (Greek) beer and a gyro. I think I had about 10 to 20 gyros while in Greece. They were so cheap (2.50 €) each. |
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| You can see that there are about 7 police officers (white helmets) here on this road. There was a main road near the Acropolis that I would like to call "Do whatever you want" street because it was completely packed. No one obeyed traffic lights and no one wanted to yield to any pedestrians even if you do have the walk sign. |
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| Some animal market near Hostel Zeus. |
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| View of the dirty city from Hostel Zeus. |
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| Syntagma square (This is where all the riots and protests had been previously) It started getting bad again, but they protest on the weekends and we stayed clear of this area. | | |
The next set of pictures are from Ios, Greece. It was the first island we stopped in during our Greek island excursion.
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| Picture from Blue Star Ferry on our way to Ios. |
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| View from bottom of hill to where our hostel is in Ios. |
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| Bed in hostel in Ios. |
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| Window view |
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| View looking downhill from hostel window. |
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| Goats were just roaming around everywhere on the island freely. |
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| The utters were "utterly" out of control! haha! |
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| Stumbled upon this beach! haha! Didn't go naked and we were the only ones there. |
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| Chilling out on the beach. |
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| Sunset in Ios |
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| Moussaka (Traditional Greek Eggplant lasagna meal) with Alpha (Greek) beer! |
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| Blue Star Ferry docking ready to take us to Santorini. |
Next stop was Santorini. It was the most busiest and beautiful looking islands out of the three that I visited.
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| On the ferry to Santorini |
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| Famous Blue and White buildings in Santorini |
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| Sunset in Oioia or however you spell it, supposedly the best of the Greek Islands. |
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| Me trying to look rough on my moped we rented for the day to see all of the island. |
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| Beach Kalimari - Black sand beach of Santorini (Was actually a bunch of black rocks!) |
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| Me after the moped wipeout. I saw a sign that said, "All you can eat Ribs" and I was so excited I was pointing and yelling "Yeahhh!" and when I tried to make an abrupt stop on the right hand side of the road, I hit gravel and slid under the moped. Low speed accident, no bad injuries, but glad I had my helmet on! |
The next and final island was Paros, Greece. This island was probably the least populated that we visited. But it was nice to relax here towards the end of the vacation.
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| Me cliff jumping into the Aegean Sea in Paros |
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| It was very windy and I wanted a superman picture |
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| Drinking and relaxing on vacation... The life! |
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| Another Greek Island sunset in Paros. |
We ended up going back to Athens to catch our flight... Too bad we actually missed our flight, but at least we were able to finally go see the Acropolis. The first time we were in Athens, we made it to the top of the hill to find that the Acropolis was closing and we wouldn't be able to see it. So... for a missed flight at least we were able to see the ONE thing you are supposed to see in Athens.
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| This is the meat market in Athens. It smelt disgusting. Mostly lambs/goats/pigs being sold. Right beside it was the fish market, but that smelt much worse, there was no way I was going to go in there and stink my clothes/shoes up. |
If you don't like to see dead animals.... Don't look at this next picture.
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| They sold literally everything from the animal... Brains, head, lungs, intestines... you name it. |
Thats the trip in a nutshell. Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed it.
