Some days I can't help but think about Greece. Apart from Chile and Spain, it's the country where I've spent the most time, so it holds a special place in my heart.
My first two weeks in enchanting Hellas were spent with an old roommate in her hometown of Mytilini on the island of Lesbos. She and her adorable mother fed me delicious, possibly even life changing, homemade cuisine that I dream about to this day. I took a little ferry ride (10 hours...) back to the mainland and roamed around Athens for a few days where I single handedly fended off men named Apollo and drug dealers until my college friends Tim and Jolene met me. Tim and Jolene had just finished their first year of their Peace Corps service in Niger and were also, coincidentally, vacationing in Greece. We had planned to make our way around the Peloponnese peninsula, but once we arrived to our hotel in Nafplio, with air conditioning AND TV, we decided to scrap our ambitious travel rout and rest our weary traveling bones for a while. We stayed there for the rest of the week, until we had to go back to Athens to catch our flights out of the country.
When we were leaving Nafplio to return to Athens we hopped on the bus at the bus stop outside of our hotel rather than backtracking to the main station in the city. With most buses in Greece you can buy a ticket on the bus, so we were surprised to find out, after we had boarded and and the bus was on its way, that we needed to have purchased tickets in advance, and that all of the seats had already been purchased... Essentially, we got kicked off the bus an hour or so later at the next stop so we could properly buy a ticket. It was not embarrassing at all...haha. Above is what it looks like to be an American tourist freshly kicked off a bus in a random city in Greece.
