No, I don't speak Greek.

After more than 24 hours of traveling, I am finally here in Athens! The plane ride was pretty standard...the usual annoying guy behind you and the weird old lady beside you, but other than that and the 5 hour delay in Atlanta, it was not too awful. As we landed in the Athens Airport I got a little case of cold feet when I realized this was to be my home for the next 3 months. The difference between the Atlanta airport and the Athens airport was severe...mostly because in Athens things were written in Greek! The airport gave us the luxury of an English translation underneath every sign, but once we left the "airport bubble", it was straight up Greek. I've also found that since I could pass for Greek, natives will just come up to me and start speaking Greek...And I definitely don't speak Greek yet.

I met up with Sara at the airport and the two of us took a cab to our hotel, The Art Gallery. Arriving in Athens by air, I didn't see a huge, dense city...more like shrubs scattered across brown grass. However, the farther the cab driver drove us, the bigger and more intense the city got. Driving on the highway into the city we had an amazing view of the Acropolis, and we drove RIGHT by the Parthenon. It was crazy! You read about these things all the time, and when you see them in person it's so unreal.

When we got to the hotel there were two cats (stray, domestic...who knows?) sitting in the lobby and a super friendly Greek receptionist. She showed us our room and we got settled in after we figured out the bathroom and electricity situation (which was weird considering you're not allowed to flush toilet paper down the toilet, but we figured it out).

After unwinding for a couple hours we decided to venture out into Athens to get some food, considering the only food we'd had in the past 24 hours was disgusting air plane grub. We ended up deciding the safest route would be to just walk up the road that our hotel was on, that way we wouldn't get lost on the way back. Just a few short blocks later we arrived at The Acropolis Restaurant/Cafe and were instantly greeted by a man sitting on the staircase who proceeded to describe and push every menu item upon us, first in Greek, then in English. He then led us up the stairs to a quaint little rooftop seating area which had a beautiful view of the little street below, as well as the Acropolis and another gorgeous monument of which I do not know the name. After our AWESOME dinner, we wandered up the street and got a close-up view of the monuments, and decided that we would come back in the daylight to get some better pictures and a better view.

Anyway...our first night is winding down (even though for the Greeks, dinner starts at 10, so since it's midnight, Athens should be just starting to wake up...), and tomorrow we move into our apartments. It promises to be another exciting, exhausting, and interesting day.