olympic games? we're def in greece

For the most part, days at sea aren’t really memorable enough to blog about, but Sea Olympics deserves to be mentioned, at least a little, especially because our sea DOMINATED the games. Let me back track and explain what that means/why that’s even remotely important or interesting (though it’s going to seem way more exciting to me regardless). Our ship has four-ish floors of student cabins (2, 3, 4, and 5), and each is separated into 2 seas (ie. Aegean Sea, Black Sea, etc.) via port or starboard cabin. I was one of three captains of our hall, the Yellow Sea, and the three of us decided that there was no way we were going to make losing an option, because the prize for the winning the games is disembarking first in Norfolk, which is, apparently, a hellish process and painstakingly long. Usually, the ship docks at 8am and the last people don’t get to leave until at least four hours later… so, long story short, I’m off this ship first – digression aside, on to Greece!


Greece is like Italy’s overshadowed younger brother: not quite as good, but a very close second (although, the Greeks are definitely the nicest people on the face of this planet). Piraeus is a strange port, in that, unless you get a taxi, you will be walking a good 2 miles to get to ANYWHERE you actually want to be... and then it’s another 15 minute metro ride to Athens or a couple (thousand) hour ferry ride to an island. Obviously, the first thing I went to see was the Acropolis, but because everyone else did their tours through Semester at Sea, it was just me and Colby wandering around Athens on our own, with our collective Greek vocabulary amounting to “yassis” and nothing else… you can already tell that this is a good idea. The area surrounding the Acropolis has crazy little shops, including my favorite store yet: Brettos, home of the best wine tasting I’ve ever experienced (I ran into a couple form Fairfax, Virginia in here; small world).
So, while we were in Rome, some of our group went to a bar crawl, so we decided that it’d be a good idea to do it again in Athens… such a bad idea. If Greece is Italy’s younger brother, Athens’ nightlife is like Rome’s gothic second cousin: weird as fuck. One restaurant, 3 bars, and a club later (one free shot at every location didn’t redeem the fact that our group of 15 were ALONE in the club), 4 of us just said ‘fuck it’ at 3am and grabbed a taxi home; we all thought this was the end of the night… our cab driver didn’t get the memo. Here’s a pearl of wisdom that I wish someone had told me before this night happened: it is generally never a good thing when the person in control of where you’re headed to is 1) a stranger and 2) trying to convince you to “come, it’s ok, I show you good time.” I’m not sure how this happens, but the next thing I know, we’re cruising down a side road, slow down next to two “women” standing on the street, and our driver exclaims, “see, that is a man woman.” The only thought running through my mind at the moment, as it should be, was “WHAT THE FUCK??”… and then we stop in front of Anatolia, a strip club, and my mind apparently explodes, because I just start hysterically laughing at the situation. The cab driver shoos us out of the car and says he’ll give us ten minutes; all I’m thinking is “ten minutes to do what??” I guess I can check “go to a shady strip club and watch my friend swing on the pole in Greece” off of my to-do list. We eventually made it home, if that’s any consolation whatsoever.


The next morning, I woke up hating life a little, but I had to make it on time for the bus that left at 8am, and headed to the Oracle of Delphi in central Greece, which was WAY cool. The ruins were not even remotely close to what I thought the Oracle was: it’s huge. We got back to Piraeus around 7pm that night (but Tara and I told Colby that we were going to meet him for dinner at 6, so we hauled ass back to Athens), passing by both the old and new Olympic stadiums along the way, and, because I had no intention of winding up in another strip club, we went shopping around the streets instead. I don’t think I’m really going to be able to explain the eclectic nature of the streets of Athens at night, with all the bootleg vendors and gypsies swarming around, but the ridiculousness of it all can be summed up in one sentence: I bought an old Greek man’s passport. For 5 euro… he told me that he usually sells it for 25 euro, but he was making an exception (which leads me to the question of how many passports is he selling on a regular basis?).

Coby, Hilary, Tara, and I spent the next to days on the island of Hydra (it was that or Mykonos), land of no cars and too many donkeys. I’m not sure how, but everything the first day seemed to serendipitously work out for us on the first day: we made it onto the ferry literally a minute before it departed; when we got there, Colby and I decided to go down a small alley that led us to a guest house, where we were able to book a villa for dirt cheap (it had a terrace that overlooked the harbor, a marble bathroom, a bed with a canopy, a loft, and a jacuzzi)… and then the other shoe dropped: Colby got deathly ill so I bought him sketchy Greek medicine (Coldex??), Hilary’s card got eaten by the ATM and later threw up (unrelated occurrences), Tara sat on a sea urchin and may have had the whopping cough, and I had so many mosquito bites on my leg, we thought I contracted malaria. Beyond those things, however, Hydra is definitely on my list of top three favorite places ever. I got to go cliff diving again, had one of the best gyros in Greece, met an old Irish guy with only one real tooth (he called it a ‘clitoral stimulator’; that ended our conversation quickly), and swam into/explored a cave. I’m happy I didn’t go to Mykonos, because the kids that did all came back to port the next day late, half dead, and possibly drugged. Way to be, Greece.

"dubrovnik is the new ibiza"

Okay, I’m not going to lie, I didn’t really have the best impression of Croatia before we got there… Aside from Leigh Anne’s mom telling me that Dubrovnik was beautiful, everyone else I talked to basically told me I was going to die there. However, I kind of really loved Croatia by the end of it, just in a very different way than I’ve loved Italy and Spain – they’re not really comparable countries anyway, and it was nice to have a relaxing port after those two intense ones anyway.

The first day, I had to buy a new camera in the morning because I broke mine in Venice… it cost 1,670 Kuna to buy a new camera and memory card in Croatia. I almost had a conniption when I saw the figure on the receipt, but then I realized that amounted to around $330 US dollars and felt better about my life (fucking hate kuna though, by the way; worst currency ever). I took a tour around the Old City through SAS and got to see the churches, museums, and city walls that surround the area. I’m not going to go into detail about the history, but it’s definitely wickedly interesting, and ALL the citizens in Croatia are freakishly proud of their independence (just don’t ask about the civil war). Apparently, Dubrovnik is the birthplace of cliffjumping as a sport, and we just so happen to be there the week of the Red Bull Challenge, where these (psycho) guys jump off a wooden plank 20-40 meters above the sea while doing crazy tricks. I guess I got caught up in the excitement, because I (along with Meghan and Tara) figure it can’t be that hard and spontaneously decide that we’re going cliff diving too. We follow this sign that says “this way to the most beautiful view of Croatia,” climb into a hobbit hole, and come out the other side into a bar. The rock we picked was named “Leo” because it’s shaped like a lion’s face; we had to climb UP his face (because higher is definitely a good idea; sometimes we’re stupid) to get to the edge… but if you looked down, you could still see rocks, so you kind of have to leap outwards and just say a little prayer. I got talked into going twice, but it was legit SO FUN. At dinner an hour later, we were still kind of on an adrenaline high. We asked the waiters which clubs were the best ones to go to for people our age, so they told us, and then said they'd meet us there... and then gave us free shots of something that looked suspiciously like vodka, except it tasted more like black licorice fire. Later, when I went to the restroom, I ran into ALL of the waiters in the back room, who proceed to pour me along with each one of them a CUP of this shit and tell me to drink with them. I finally find out that the crap they’re giving us is grappa (which I am positive has to be Croatian for gasoline; I know, smart, taking anonymous drinks, right?)… basically it's like moonshine but much worse tasting. That night is actually not that noteworthy, we just ended up at a club called EastWest, but so did the rest of our shipboard community, so meh.

Day 2 consisted of a trip to Mostar, Bosnia. I’m happy I went, but seriously, there was NOTHING to see there, and the whole trip can be summed up as a string of silly mishappenings, but still, I LOVE MOSTAR.

Meghan and I tried to sneak into Montenegro the next day, but it was nothing short of an epic fail, so we went to the island of Lopud with a group of other kids instead. This was probably the most relaxing day of the trip. That night, the three of us serendipitously ran into the entire boy’s waterpolo team from Stanford who was in Croatia, playing their club team. It definitely became a night that will live in infamy, but not for the obvious reasons. Let’s just say, Norwegians are compelling.

ohmygod italy!

DISCLAIMER: This post is long as fuck. Sorry about it.
I’m just going to start off by saying that absolutely nothing I can say or write will be able to do justice to how amazing Italy is (which is why it’s taken me like 3 weeks to actually update about the country); from the people to the food to the landscape… I’m coming back sometime soon, no question. But, with that being said, that means I’m about to write like an epic post about this place. I’m never going to be able to stop talking about it.

We landed in Civitavecchia on July 1st and literally, every store we pass on our way to the train station to get a ticket to Rome was either a liquor store or a gelato shop. I immediately love the city. As soon as the three of us (Colby, Roby, and me) get out of the train station in Rome, I notice that we’re in Chinatown. I think, wow, that’s kind of weird… but apparently it’s not at all, because for the next 4 cities we go to, Chinatown is right next to the train station… wtf. Why does Italy have a Chinatown?
Anyway, because we only had like a day to do Rome, we chose to spend most of our time traveling around Vatican City and St. Peter’s Basilica (the journey to the top of the cupola is legit indescribable… and I’m not sure if I mean that in a good or bad way), but we got to see other random things along the way to our hostel: tomb of the unknown soldier, the coliseum, the usual. Oh, and a completely psychotic hailstorm coming towards us at the same time as a riot/protest that closed off ALL of the roads headed towards our hostel due to the hundred or so armed policemen in full S.W.A.T. gear. Sweet life. We had to join the protestors just to make it to the other side of the roundabout. I think they were chanting for socialism.

So, we finally make it to this hostel, but it turns out that our group was too big for them to accommodate (and half went first), so we had to go meet the rest of the semester at sea kids at a different, much, much, MUCH, sketchier hostel… that was connected to a counterfeit purse-making storefront. The woman at the front desk was pretty adamant about keeping our passports as “collateral”, but I was equally, if not more so, adamant about not leaving my identity at the whim of some crazy person, and I don’t lose, so homegirl ended up with no passports and two extra people in our room; we paid 9 euro each that night to sleep in the ghetto of Italy.

I got somehow separated with my group for a couple of hours that night and randomly pulled up next to their taxi cab at 2am, so I jumped out of mine and into theirs; the drivers were DEFINITELY not happy (shouting sounds the same in all languages), but playing dumb and acting like you have no idea what’s wrong gets you far in foreign countries. Nicole, Roby and I all decided that it would be a good idea to go see the Trevi Fountain at this point… which is a good 30 minute walk from where we were, so we took the bus… but then found out it was going in the wrong direction… and ended up in the REAL ghetto; I thought I got off the bus and wound up in Detroit. Two hours and a failed excursion later, we never made it to the fountain, but we made it back to our hostel in sketchville safe, so I call that endeavor a success.

7am, or 3 hours later, the three of us have to get up, sneak out the two extra people that stayed with us, and then hop on a train to Pisa. For some reason, our tickets said “Civitavecchia to Pisa” instead of “Rome to Pisa,” so as good Samaritans, we went to the ticket office to pay the extra euro to fix this problem. Only one woman on duty spoke English, so the gentleman helping us pointed our group into her direction. But I guess that day was her designated ‘I’m going to be a flaming bitch’ day, because as we’re walking towards her, she looks up, slams down her “closed” sign, shakes her head, and says “my shift ends at 9am.” Until the day I die, I will remember the time on the wall, reading 8:56am; lying bitch. We tell her we have a train to catch and she’s the only person that can help us/the nice old man pointed us in your direction. She turns to said ‘nice old man,’ has a mini argument with him in Italian, and in perfect English says, “Fuck you, David!” and walks away. So, we said, “Fuck you, Train Station Bitch” and hopped on the train without paying the additional 8 euro. We tried. On a happier note, Pisa was fun. I’m pretty sure they put the train station and the Leaning Tower on opposite ends of the city so that people are forced to traverse the whole town because there’s NOTHING else in Pisa to see. I met a nice old man who spoke just like Luigi in Super Mario Brothers, but Pisa was tame otherwise.

I’m pretty sure I’ve wanted to visit Florence since before I could walk, so I was practically giddy on the way there, and let me just say, it did not disappoint. We found the best hostel (and by ‘best’ I mean ‘includes air conditioning’) and did all that you could ask to do in a day and a half: wandering aimlessly for a couple of hours, full-on three course Italian dinner, illegal pictures of Michelangelo’s David/Boticelli’s Birth of Venus, accidentally stumbling across a gigolo, getting shouted at by an angry hotel owner (“this is not tourist information!!”)… and then we went to Venice.

Venice and I have a love/hate relationship, in that I loved being there, but I do believe that Venice resented my presence. While I was there, we got screwed on our hotel situation, got lost for 4 hours, didn’t get back to our hotel until 3am, only inhabited the room for 4 hours, probably caught malaria, and paid 30 extra euro because they hate Americans. We drank by the canal, on the steps of some church at sunset with another group of SAS kids that we met and they told us that we should go check out San Marco on the other end of the island… obviously we decide to just go. We immediately get lost, so Colby decides to ask EVERY single person that passes our way which direction this place is. On the way there, we stumble across a concert? Legit, the best time ever. We met super nice Italians, a bunch of kids from Minnesota studying for the summer, and some Californians that wanted to buy Roby gelato. We made it to San Marco (eventually), but it took us FOREVER to get back. We eventually ran into a group of shit-faced American girls walking with a couple of Italians (looked like a poster for human trafficking for real) who got us back to where we needed to be.

The next day I literally went to church and thanked God for letting us find them because we were about fifteen minutes away from just laying down on the street and sleeping, and as safe as Venice is, it’s never okay to be homeless. When we got to the bridge that led us to the side we recognized, all 3 of us for some reason just sprinted over it and almost broke down, we were so happy. Oh, and then I busted my ass about two centimeters away from the dirty-ass water and broke my camera. Funny thing is though, I completely didn’t care about any of this crap, because realizing you know where you are in a a foreign country for the first time in 6 hours has a way of making nothing else seem like that big of a deal; I just rolled with it. So the next day, after we got into a fight with the hotel manager’s younger brother, we visited Murano, the glass making capital of the world; they seriously make everything imaginable out of this sweet looking glass. I’d show pictures, but I smashed my Canon into smithereens the night before. Sad life. Anywho, we caught our flight to Naples after doing some last minute shopping and got back on the ship on the fourth of July, aka America’s most glorious holiday in the history of the world.

Let me start off by saying that Naples has been my least favorite place, strictly because it’s like a big slum, everyone there is grouchy, and it reminded me of inner-city areas in the U.S. That being said, I was still in Italy, and I did go to the shop where pizza was invented to have a slice, so I’m going to stop complaining about it.
Anyway, back to the 4th. So, for the 4th of July, I made sure I only found people to go out with that were ready to be stupid Americans with me (when’s the next time I’m going to be in Italy on a major holiday)… we shoved 8 people into a taxi because we were told that you definitely should never walk from the port to Vittoria Square. Ever. and headed to the ONE strip of bars that was for people our age and mobbed the streets. Sidenote about the taxi though, Italians can’t drive worth balls. For part of the journey, we went the wrong way up a one way street. But anyway, seriously, 400 college kids mingling amongst locals all along the streets. It was fantasic. I made people sing the national anthem, god bless America, and, at one point, got the old man who owned one of the bars to give me free food and a bottle of wine? He also taught me key Italian phrases like “do you have a facebook?” and “no thank you I don’t want your drink.” Nice man. He loved me for some reason; I think his name was Giuseppe.
So I legit talk to everyone anyway, but two bottles of wine later, I’m even more loquacious. Tara has pictures of me with people that I don’t really recall meeting? I don’t really know how or at what time we got back (or at what point of the night did we lose Lois), you just know that it had to be the BEST Independence Day ever when you have people coming up to you for the next two days “Wow, you two were really feeling good that night; do you even remember seeing me?”

My last day in Italy consisted of me roaming around Pompeii and Naples until on-ship time because didn’t wake up until 9am and missed the ferry out to Capri. Oh well. You win some, you lose some, and I’d call 7 cities in 5 days of Italy a win for sure.