A couple weeks after my high school graduation, my best friend and I boarded a plane for Greece. We had been planning this trip for months, budgeting our savings and finding the cheapest hostels, planning every last detail we could. I had never been so excited for anything in my life; I mean my parents were letting the two of us go off to explore Greece on our own for 2 whole weeks. What could be better?
Our trip started off by flying from Montreal to Athens, with a quick stop in Paris. It was exhausting travel, but finally arriving in Athens was amazing. The hotel we stayed in was unbelievable, The Athens Gate, and their was a view of the Acropolis from the balcony. We felt pretty cool and very grown up. We even hiked to what felt like the top of the city.
We spent a day hiking the ruins around the Acropolis, and it was amazing. One of the coolest parts was listening to all the other tourists around us, because almost everyone spoke different languages. There was such a diverse group of people, and it was something neither myself or my friend had ever experienced, having done no travel other than to Canada or Mexico.
One of the most difficult parts for us was getting around, which was much harder than I had imagined it would be, and it also made us feel very uncomfortable. Our hotel was in the middle of Athens near the Acropolis, which meant there was always bustling traffic and the streets were crowded. There was a strong language barrier and it was surprisingly hard to communicate with people as many did not speak English.
We had a difficult time figuring out where to eat, and settled on a pizza place around the corner. We ventured out of our hotel to be completely overwhelmed by the traffic and people. There are no rules in Greece about yielding to pedestrians, and it seemed as though people would hit you with their cars and not seem to care. Culture shock really set in as we scrambled across the street dodging cars. It hit us then that we really were all alone halfway around the world from anyone we knew. But we were not going to let this stop us from fully enjoying our trip, and we prepared ourselves for the next leg of our trip, to Santorini.
Santorini, to be continued.
