More Santorini

Well I am back in Madrid after my wonderful vacation to greece. Here are a few more pictures from the island that we stay on for 5 days. This is overlooking the capital city after we got back from the boat tour and swim.

Ahh here is my little friend :) There are 600 stairs to get down to the old port so most people take either the cable car or the donkeys. We took both. This little donkey was really good, but he looks kind of sad.

I just like this picture...it is one that I want to frame when I get home because its so beautiful. The boat on the far right was our tour boat.

And here I am in the cable car waiting to go daown to the old port. This is a lot faster and its actually cheaper than the donkeys, but its not as fun.

This is the ferry that we took to santorini. I can't remember if I posted this one already, but it is obviously a really big boat. It took 8 hours to get to santorini.

This is on the volcano. You can see the water behind me and the ground that I was standing on was actually warm and if you dig a small hole it gets really hot really fast. This path is actually throuh the active crater so you can smell the sulfur and see steam coming up through the cracks.

This is just a pretty view from the volcano. I have a lot more pictures from the volcano site so I will hopefully be posting them soon.

Santorini

Hello again :) Here are a few pictures from Santorini, the island I have been staying at for 5 days. Today was our last day and we had the most fun finally. But I will talk about that at the end. This picture was taken at the Old Port and this boat is the tour boat that takes people to the nearby volcano and the hot springs which I will also talk about later.

This is also at the Old Port, and the water was very cold. We took a cable car down to see this port because all the towns are high up on the island.

This is a church in Fira, the capital town on santorini.

This is the path that goes along the back of the island and it gives a great view of the town and the water. You can see how far dosn the water is. The town in the background is also Fira.

Another view of Fira. Ok so I have a lot more pictures but my friend has a lot of them on her camera so I will get them from her later. Today we took the tour boat to the caldera volcano near santorini. Aparently it was once the most violent erupting volcano in the whole world, with an eruption 40 times larger than the biggest one today. And its still active. We walked along the crater and smelled the sulfer and saw some steam coming out. The ground was hot too. On the other side of the island there is another island that has hot springs as a result of the volcano. They told us we were going there to swim, but what they didn't tell us is that they were going to anchor outside of the cove and we had to swim the rest of the way to the hot springs. And I actually did it :) Which is something I can't believe I did. It was really cold and the hot springs was really more like kind of warm springs. And there was a lot of brown seaweed. The water smelled like sulfur too because it was by the volcano. It was definately an adventure :) Now I can finally say that I swam in the sea :)

More Athens

Hello again from Athens!!! Well actually I am writing from Santorini (yay!) I finally have a goo dinternet connection here and I can post lots of pictures. So far I took 375 pictures, so I can't share them all. This is just a picture from a walk that we took up a hill and we got a very good view of the Acropolis, once again.

This is in the Roman Forum...which was a marketplace/meeting place a long time ago. Now its more like piles of rocks and pilars. This pilar is an example of the hundreds I have seen in Athens so far. :)

This is the tower of the winds...I don't really know its function, but it looks cool.

This is a very common sight in Athens. Its a pile of rocks if you couldn't tell that. Sometimes there is a sign by them that say they were a house or an altar to some god, or whatever. Most often, there wasn't a sign so we just made stuff up :)

This was my lunch one day when we were at the roman forum. Its meatballs and rice and french fries. It was good but it was so windy that it got cold right away. :(

This is at the Olympic complex in Athens...it was so cool to see :) Here are the swimming pools, obviously. There were actually a few people swimming in them, and I really wanted to join them. It was over 70 degrees that day and sunny.

This is by the entrance to the complex. There were no people there so it was cool to see that way. We were a little late for the olympics...they were in Athens in 2004.

And here is me just sitting normally on the side of a pool. I'm not sure which building is in the back, but it looked cool. :)

And this is me being crazy. :) It was such a beautiful day and I was at the olympics!!! How can you not do something crazy?

Here is the olympic track :) It was pretty cool to think that olympic runners ran right where I was too. The whole complex was kept up really well and it was beautiful.

This is inside the main stadium. We had to walk all the way around it almost twice to find a way inside, but we finally made it. I remember seeing this on tv and now I was actually there! Wow!

Another shot of the acropolis...I like this one because it is at dusk so the light is different.

This is on top of a hill opposite to the Acroplis and we found a random pilar there so I sat on it :) I told you there are pilars everywhere.

One more night shot. This one came out really good and it looks so cool at night. Now I am in santorini and tomorrow we will explore so I will have more pictures to post soon!

GREECE!!!!!! (Athens)

Hello everyone! Hello from Athens, Greece, which is where I am now. It is my spring break and I came here with my friend from GVSU, Amanda. We are in Athens for like 4 days and then we will go to an island, Santorini, for 5 days. The weather is beautiful and so are the sights, so enjoy the pics. I have so many, so if you want to see more, see me when I get home! I would love to show you. The history here is amazing.

I'm not sure if you can see me in this picture...you have to look really close. I am standing next to the few remaining columns of the Temple of Zeus. Can you believe how big they are? Oh and this is in Athens by the way. We got here yesterday about 1 and explored a little. Today we went to see the main sights like the acropolis and this temple. There is so much more to see!

Here is a better view of the temple of zeus and the acropolis in the background. The weather was beautiful and 70 degrees. I even got a little color from being out all day :) More views of the acropolis and the temple of zeus. Really, you can walk around it and find a new angle each time to take a picture and they all look different.

This is the parthenon at night. We took this the first night we were here. It took me like twenty shots to get this one because it kept coming out blurry. I think this one is pretty good :)

This is a view of the Acropolis from a nearby hill that you can climb. Beautiful, no? Everyone asks if it is under construction because of the scafolding but I think that is mainly there to hold it up because its so old that it could fall easily.

Here is a close up of the parthenon. It is so big and amazing to see in real life. The detail is amazing and I don't know how they managed to build that so long ago.
This is a view from on the acropolis. The parthenon is to my left and the erecthion is what you can see on the right. The women statues holding up the roof are some of the most famous in Greece. These ones are not the origionals though, because the origionals are in the museum to preserve them. And you can see Athens in the background.

Here is me sitting on a wall on the acropolis with the parthenon in the background. You can see all the people around...and there were a lot of americans there. It was such a perfect day to visit and I am so thankful for that.

This is and ancient theater and it is right next to the acropolis. The stairs next to me are what lead up to it. The steps were made of some kind of marble and they were really slippery so we had to be careful. This is a view of the agora, which is kind of a park or hang out place for the ancient greeks. This is where aristotle, paul and the other famous people from this part of the world came to speak to people. I think they said that this is where paul gave his speech to the people of athens about "the unknown god". This place is full of little sanctuaries, statues and altars to different gods, but we didn't find an unknown god one. It was cool to be able to walk where paul walked though. Its hard to imagine that this stuff is so old because it is contrasted by new buildings if you just look around. I would love to have seen all this in the time when it was new and being used for its origional purposes.

Well I hope you have enjoed these few pictures. Believe me, I have like 150 more so I can't post them all. These are a few of my favorites and Amanda has more that I have to get. We had a really good time today and we are looking forward to seeing more tomorrow. I will kep you posted as best as I can :)

Vacations

Hola everyone! So I am leaving tomorrow morning for Greece, so I won´t be online for a few days. We should have internet at the second place we are going so I hope I will be able to post some pictures then. I am sure we will have a good time, I just have to get to the airport. We had a little issue because we were goin to take the metro but it closes and won´t open in time for us. I am going to try and take the bus, but if i can´t figure it out then i will just take taxi. Ok well I will write again as soon as I can!

Meeting Ken and Deanna

On Saturday I went with Ken and Deanna and Alvaro (Ken and Deanna's exchange student) and his dad to try some spanish food. We had jamon serrano, which is dried, sliced pig leg, and some special cheese of which I don't know the name, and calamares fritos (they look like onion rings, but they are calamare). Not my favorite meal, but it was ok.

These are pictures from church when Ken preached. The woman translating for him is Angie. I went to her daughter's first birthday party a couple of weekends ago. The other picture is the choir. After walking around Madrid on Sunday, we went to Plaza Mayor and had supper. The picture didn't turn out very well because it was dark, but you get the idea.

This is me and Alvaro, Ken and Deann's exchange student. He visited michigan last summer for a month and was an exchange student the year before. We are in Sol, the big shopping district. I have pictures from here in other posts. Apparently the statue we are standing by is the symbol of Spain...I don't know why. :)

This is me and Ken and Deanna at Retiro Park. Its the biggest park in Madrid and its right in the middle of the city. It was kind of cold when we were there though, and Ken was distracted by something...I don't know what.

I liked the view from here...you can see all the gardens and I can't wait to see it in the spring when the flowers come out. Sorry, its kind of dark, but it was at night when we were there.

Palacio Real

This is just another view from the courtyard. We couldn't take pictures inside, so I just took a lot outside. And that is all the pictures my internet is going to let me post. I'm surprised I got this many in. I will try to make another post with the rest of the pictures from here and from Salamanca. I also have a few pictures from when Ken and Deanna were here. Deanna took a lot more pics so you can see her's when she gets back. I told her to send me her pictures because I haven't seen them yet.

This is me standing in the middle of the courtyard. You can see some of my group behind me. When I saw this picture I thought that it looked like I was standing in front of a fake background. We got to see 28 rooms out of the 200 and something. It was so crazy how lavish they made these palaces. The walls had embroidery in them, the ceilings were all painted with different frescos by famous painters, and the furniture was all especially made for the king. There is one room that they redo for each new king. Everything in the room is made with the current king's coat of arms. Like his initials are on the print of the curtains, the upholstery, the wall paper, everything. Crazy, I'm telling you.

This is just a cool view, I thought. I love the huge arches that are all over europe. You can always look through them and see something cool like this steeple.

This is the front facade of the main living chambers of the kind and queen. I took this picture from inside the courtyard of the palace, so you can only see this if you go inside. You can see the Spanish flag flying...and there is another pole for the King's flag. They fly that flag when the king is in the palace. He comes once or twice a month only for special occaions, and then the palace is closed to visitors. Yes there is still a king in Spain, Juan Carlos the something...I don't know what number he is :) He doesn't have any power though.