Our trip!

Finally a message on my site!! Today is my 14th day in Greece and it’s been a great start of my exchange. So let’s just start at the beginning. At February 7, 2.30 am the alarm clock rings, the trip begins! At 5 we have to be at Schiphol to fly to London and via London to Thessaloniki. During checking in the first problem occurs; we are not allowed to take 2 pieces of hand luggage. Wtf?! We definitely didn’t want our laptop to have to go with the normal baggage, so after rearranging a lot we ended up with only one piece of hand luggage. Fortunately, we didn’t have to pay for the few kilos we brought too much. After a relaxed flight we arrived around 15.00 in Thessaloniki. There we took the bus to go to Sofia’s place; a Greek student who spent this first half year studying at our university. She was very enthusiastic and we stayed the night at her place.
The next day we went to Meteora; a place with 6 monasteries built on rocks. It took us 6 hours to get there with the bus, but it was worth it. The views are amazing. We went to the Sydney hotel which is a good place to stay and with Australian owners, according to our guides. So we figured they will speak English there, but no. We ended up drawing pictures of busses etc in order to ask something. But we managed. The following day we went to visit 3 monasteries. However, personally I loved the landscape much more than the inside of the monasteries. The landscape is absolutely amazing, just look at the pictures. Late in the afternoon we caught the bus to go to Ioannina because we wanted to visit the Zagoria villages and the lakes there. We had a nice dinner there and since we were tired we went to bed early. Unfortunately, Mieke got really sick that night and spent the whole night in the bathroom. Therefore, Levinia and I walked around in the rainy city a bit that day and we didn’t go to visit the places we intended to visit. But that’s no problem, because we already had the great idea to go to Corfu!!
With the bus we went through the snowy mountains to Igoumenitsa. There we were lucky to catch the bus to Corfu, otherwise we would have had to wait for 6 hours!
The boat trip was very nice, but also kinda disturbing when a Greek guy, who we suspect of suffering from a social disorder, started a conversation with us. At first he was scared of us because he thought we were German and German girls are, according to him, dirty bitches. Clearly a traumatized boy and I fear for the German girls that might cross his path one day. Thank god he didn’t bother us too long otherwise we would have thrown him of the boat. After 1,5 hours we reached Corfu, but finding a place to stay was not so easy. Everyone referred us to the Pink Palace, but that didn’t really attract us so much and after walking a lot we finally found a hotel open. That evening we visited a fortress and took a look in a city.
The next day we had our breakfast in the port while the sun was shining. We wanted to visit some caves in the northern part of the island and went to the tourist office we had seen the previous day. However, when we got there it turned out to be a regular travel agency. They told us where to go, so we walked back to find the real tourist info office closed. So we called the number in the rough guide to see if the caves are open, but no one answered. So we decided to go somewhere else and eventually we went to Mesonghi, according to the guides a beautiful place with a great beach. When we get there we feel as if we’re in the middle of nowhere and with the help of the few locals who are in town we find our way to the beach which is really dirty. ‘What are you doing here?’, is the question asked by a man who is working on his bar. Well, that’s a very good question, we don’t know why’, is our answer, because the place is so deserted. Wrong choice. But we played cards and another small beach which was rather clean. Back in the city we had a hard time finding a place to have dinner, so we just ate some pita with gyros. A little advise to everyone; don’t go to Corfu in February, because everything is closed! Corfu is absolutely gorgeous but dont go there in winter!