Back in Ghana

Hi everyone,

Well, I am officially off of vacation and back to real life here in Accra. I don't even know where to start with our vacation we did so much in such a short time. We only had 8 days in Greece but due to a labor strike in Athens I was stuck in Cairo for 2 days. Egypt Air put me up in a 5 star hotel and I got to see the pyramids so I had a nearly free extra 2 days of vacation! I was excited to be able to see a bit of Egypt even though it was unexpected.

Greece.... Well we landed in Athens just a few hours apart from each other and we immediately went and booked our boat tickets for Santorini and Milos. A little bad luck for us but all of the good seats on the slow boats and the fast boats entirely were booked out when we needed to go to Santorini. This wasn't a huge deal except for the fact that it took us a little over 10 hours to get from Athens to Santorini... more on that later.

So we booked our boat and then hopped on the metro to our hotel in the center of Athens, or Monastiraki square. Our hotel was basic but fine although we were up 4 flights of stairs and no elevator so it was kind of a pain to drag our bags up and down. Our first day in Athens we went to the Parthenon and the Agora, the new museum in Athens directly across from the Parthenon and did what we would continue to do over the next week.... ate a LOT of Greek food. The food is so delicious. We had dolmades (vine leaves wrapped around rice and meat and herbs), lots of baklava, fava (kind of like hummus)... etc etc. I think I could fill a book on the food in Greece.

We also did a little shopping and a lot of wandering. I think we walked over twelve hours that day. We also were apparently getting picked up on quite a lot although I was mostly oblivious to that due to the language barrier. One of our waiters had apparently asked Nicole and I out on a date but I barely understood a word he said so I just kept nodding and smiling and Nicole would catch a word here and there and I would catch a few others, needless to say we ended up not going out with any of the guys who tried to pick us up but it was funny that I didn't even know it was happening until we left and Nicole said, "Bri, he asked us out on a date" and I responded with, "who and when?" haha..... This incident was immediately followed up with joggers stopping to ask us if we would like to go out with them for the night which I deflected with a "we have plans" at least that one I understood!

We got on our boat to Santorini on Friday morning quite early and settled into our deck seat (a plastic bench on the very top of the boat) and almost immediately realized what a mistake we had made wearing summer clothes, the wind coming off the ocean was FREEZING. We spent ten hours huddled together trying to keep warm and moving every now and then to relieve the cramps in our legs and butts. Plastic benches are not recommended for such long trips.

Santorini was kind of incredible to come into, the ocean is the most amazing blue and the houses are set high above on the cliffs. One of the first things I noticed was that the island landscape was very close to Arizona. A lot of dust and desert landscape just surrounded by a different architectural style and of course the ocean. I guess this makes sense considering it is a volcanic island and they get very little rain. We rented an atv on Santorini and I drove Nicole and I around on it for two days. We took a trip to the Volcano which was interesting. There are still places you can see steam floating from little crevices in the rocks. We wandered around Thira and Oia which are the two larger towns and ate lots of great food. I watched the World Cup finals while Nicole did some shopping and then fell asleep at the cafe table while I finished watching. We also saw a black sand beach and a red beach... unfortunately the red beach had a naked man lying on it (luckily we only got the back view) and we only stayed there a few minutes. The black sand beach was incredibly beautiful but very hot. I also drove Nicole to a wine tasting where she tasted all the wine and I drove her home, she liked it enough to buy two bottles to bring home.

We went to Milos on the last leg of our trip. The island was absolutely beautiful. It is bigger than Santorini but more sparsely inhabited and I think was my favorite place in Greece. We arrived with enough daylight left to see the sun set. We had a nice dinner in the port and our room there was quite nice. The next day we took a small yacht around the island to see some of the less accessible beaches. The trip was very nice and I even got Nicole to go swimming which is a big feat for her.

I'll have to update on the rest of the trip later or this is never going to get posted! More to come.....

Love to all.