soooo its been way too long since my last blog and i have WAY too much to blog because so much has happened in the past 3 weeks! I have been to 10 different countries in the past 3 weeks and it was absolutely crazy! The first week I was in Palermo, Sicily and Athens, Greece and then the following 2 weeks i traveled to 8 different countries...Spain,Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, and Switzerland! I'm going to do my best to recall every single detail of every trip so here i go!

March 6, 2008

I left Thursday afternoon for Manchester because I was picking my brother up from the airport at 7:15am the next day! It was my first time really traveling by myself and it actually was a lot of fun! I met quite a few people on the train and in the hostel I stayed in. I met a guy from Spain who was in England trying to find a job. He didn't speak English very well and I know no Spanish... but he had an English/Spanish dictionary so we communicated back and forth through the dictionary! I got up the next morning around 5:30 so i could make it in time to meet Brendon at the train station. Little did i know it was going to be one of the most hectic mornings I have every had! I didn't know what flight Brendon was on so i asked someone and they pointed me in one direction. So I wait in one of the terminals for about 20 minutes and by this point it is already past 7:15 so i'm starting to freak out a bit. So I went and asked another person and they told i me I needed to walk all the way to the other end of the airport...it was a 30 minute walk! I sprinted and was already really upset because I was late to pick my brother up. Keep in mind that I had was lugging my suitcase and purse around. I was sweating by the time I got to the terminal Brendon's plane was supposed to come in to. Brendon came walking out about 10 minutes after i got there and I ran up to him to give him a hug. Turns out Brendon's morning didn't start out so great either. Not only did he just get off an 8 hour flight, he had been detained for 2 hours in the airport. The border control wouldn't let him in because they didnt believe that he was here to see me! So we had a little rough start to the vacation but the rest of our travels that day were pretty smooth. We didn't get in to Palermo until about 10:30 Friday night. Brendon had been traveling for over 24 hours and we were both beyond exhausted so we just went to bed.

Hannah and Jennifer went to Palermo a day earlier than Brendon and I, so we met up with them Saturday morning and strolled the streets of the city. Palermo isn't a huge tourist town so there wasn't a whole lot to see but it was a beautiful city. We were expecting it to be really hot in Sicily, which is partially why we chose to go there, but it really wasn't that warm! After walking around all the big sights we stopped at a restaurant to try REAL pizza....it was so good, not greasy at all, and everything in the pizza tasted really fresh! After that we had our first taste of italian gelato! I'm pretty sure we spent half of our day searching for a grocery store because the street signs in Palermo were ridiculous! That night we hung out around an outdoor cafe/bar and it was so crazy! Hannah and I were the only blondes in the entire city i'm sure of it! We definitely didn't go unnoticed, every time we would sit down the men would swarm, and i'm not even exaggerating any! They would make kissy faces and deliberately stare at us! I have never experienced anything like it...it was fun for a while and then it just got annoying so Brendon and I went back to the hostel and Hannah and Jennifer went out dancing.

Sunday was our day at the beach. You think beach, you think warm right? wrong...it was not warm at all, but it was still beautiful! It was a pretty lazy day...mostly just hung out in the sand, enjoying the view of the ocean! We cracked open the melon that Brendon bought and ate it along with whatever the vendors were selling along the beach. We ate pizza and gelato again that night and we called it a fairly early night because we had a flight to Athens to catch at 7:00AM!