Picture is of the Corith Canal, nowhere near where I am right now :o) See? I told you I would try to update more often! Athens was okay, but all the people who say you can see everything in one day are right. I mean, don't get me wrong - it's great - and huge - but not really much to see there. One full day could definitely be enough. The acropolis was really cool to see, but a huge part of the Parthenon was under scaffolding - surprise. It really takes away from it, but you manage. On the 20th I started to go on the free walking tour our hostel was doing. Note the operative word in that sentence - *started*. Even though I thought it not possible, this walking tour was actually much worse than the one I went on in Munich. For starters, there were 30 people going on this tour which is about 15 people above the maximum amount that should be allowed. Number two: the guy doing the tour was actually "in training" i.e. had no idea what was going on and was supposed to be shadowing someone else. However, I heard that that someone else had been out at a strip club until 5:30 that morning and was completely worthless on the tour, other than being another body in the way. At the first stop just 2 minutes walking from our hostel, we spent 25 minutes doing absolutely nothing! We were actually at Zeus's temple and Hadrian's Arch which are pretty cool to look at for about 5 minutes and move on, but the guide couldn't even tell us the name of the arch!! I'm sorry, but even if you've never done a tour before, the arch is literally 2 minutes away from your hostel!!! Ridiculous. I made my mind up then and there to leave after getting to whatever place was next. We finally made it to the Olympic stadium and once again, the guy knew absolutely nothing - someone asked when it was built and he ran over to the plaque posted there and still got it wrong!! I had had enough. As I was leaving, a guy I had met at the hostel bar the night before asked to tag along with me so off we went. We saw the Parliament building and garden area around it before stopping back at the hostel to grab my guide book and switch shoes. Then we headed up to the Archaeological museum which was enormous! Lots of great art, but as the hours went by you really do hit a point where you can't absorb anything else so I breezed through the last section. We made our way back to the hostel after that and I have to confess I gave him the slip once we got back - he's another one of those people you just stare in wonder at how stupid they are. Quick synopsis: 30 yr. old white male from Colorado just up and moved to Europe in a backpack and wanted to get a job. I told him how hard it is for Americans to get legal jobs and he's like "oh really????". Idiot star #1. Later I overheard him talking to the owner of the hostel and he told him the same thing. Duh. Also, I had told him my plans of hiking up Mount Olympus. Later I ran into him again and he said he was going to go out hike up the mountain the next day and then come back to Athens the following. I told him it's a 2 day hike, pretty much minimum and once again looks at me dumbly and says |oh really????. Idiot star #2 among many others. Enough complaining - my last day in Athens I spent wandering about all day. I came across a pet store with three identical kittens playing in one of the window cubes - they looked just like Sniggles and Fritz did when they were kittens so I couldn't help but watch them for a while. Nothing else too exciting, other than I checked out the port which was pretty cool people watching. The 22nd was spent pretty much in the train station and on the train the whole day due to s***ty time tables for Greek trains and my mistake of not asking for a direct train to Litochoro, which is the "village" at the base of Mount Olympus. I finally got into Litochoro at 8:00 and by a stroke of luck, there was another girl going to the same hostel I wanted to go to and she had actually called the hostel one the way and arranged for them to pick her up. That definitely saved me a heap of hassle because the train station is really out in the middle of nowhere and it was dark already. Thanks Kate (from Ireland)!!! The hostel was great and the people running it, Perry & Abby were gems. They gave us a lot of info about the hike/climb up the mountain and even took us into town the next day when the bus didn't show up. On the 23rd we headed into Litochoro and watched as the first runner crossed the finish line. The night before the only other person who got off the train with us was a marathon runner come to tackle the mountain along with 100 or so other racers on the 23rd. It sounded insane so Kate and I made sure to check it out. After that we grabbed a few snacks in a super market and made our way to the main street headed up to Prionia, the start of the trail a good half hour drive up the mountain. We rode up with some guys we "met" and had lunch at a little taverna before starting our ascent. After 2 1/2 hours of pretty much straight up hiking, we made it to Refuge A. We originally wanted to press on to the refuge on the other side of the mountain, making our second day shorter but we had gotten such a late start that we decided against risking running out of light/energy. So, we took of our drenched shirts and bras and threw on our warm gear and set our wet ones around one of the fireplaces to dry. After chatting for about half an hour we noticed these other people hording around the fireplace that had our clothes laid out and they were putting all of their crap over ours! How rude - so Kate tactfully went over to *check* on the progress of her stuff to make sure they knew that we were watching them mess with our stuff. I would like to say they quit after that but they didn't... oh well. The food at the hostel was alright but nothing spectacular. They were also experiencing a water shortage so we were only allowed to use water after 6:30 PM and until 8:00 AM to only wash hands, faces, and brush teeth. No showers for us. Also it goes without saying that the toilet golden rule of "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down" applied. Kate and I had both opted against bringing our books because they'd be added weight, but we soon wished we had. We had gotten there around 4:30 or 5 and lights out were at 10 with nothing to do in between. Even if I had brought my playing cards, there were signs posted in both of the communal rooms saying it was forbidden to play. Weird. 10:00 lights out and I didn't sleep very well. Much too early for bed. On the 24th we set out at 8 AM for the summit of Mytikas (sp?), the tallest point in Greece. After about 2 1/2 hours of hiking we made it to where the trail branches and people either go the easy route to the second highest summit or take on another half hour of scrambling, clinging to the rock face for dear life while inching down, over, and up to the peak. It wasn't so much that the last part was physically challenging, but definitely mentally grueling. You have to be so sure of everywhere you're placing your feet and where your hand grips are to at least attempt to keep yourself from falling if you slip. Halfway across Kate and I decided to have a nice little seat on separate ledges and had a bit of lunch to recharge our bodies. I must say that throwing bags of dried apricots and cashews across the rock face was pretty interesting. After regaining our concentration we pushed ourselves up the rest of the way. It was DEFINITELY worth it getting to the top and writing our names in the book. YAY!! Back down off the summit we hiked back down an hour or so to where we would take the other path safely around the mountain and on to the next refuge - another 2 hour hike away from that point. On the way down to that point we saw some animals that resembled antelope very closely to me which Kate thought were deer. At any rate they were a nice treat to see along the way and after a while some guy up the ridge from us started shouting at us in Greek - we told him we don't speak Greek but he continued anyway and we finally decided he was just telling us to look at the animals. About 10 minutes later he had made it down to our path and continued again rambling in Greek something about Lord Byron and then trekked off..... such strange people. We finally made it to our second refuge that we decided to spend another night on the mountain at and then do the very long but scenic hike down all the way into Litochoro the following day. Along the way we passed some people coming the other way who stopped to give us high fives and what I presume to be compliments in Greek. That wasn't necessarily what was peculiar, but that the people were all pretty old! I mean we had seen a lot of 40-60 somethings out there hiking! Definitely cool to see them out and about. At the refuge though, there was this woman who was just beaming at us and kept patting Kate's back and mumbling in Greek, pointing to me and back at Kate, etc. We were pretty baffled, but finally realized that we had seen her out on the cliffs that day and she was either saying Kate's jacket was good or that she remembered seeing it. It was all pretty comical and we tried to guess privately what her age was. I said 65 and Kate said late 50s, but a quick consultation with the register later revealed she was 64! Imagine, a 64 year old woman climbing a freaking mountain and then beaming at us for doing it! As if that wasn't enough for us to kind of chew on, 3 men came up the the hostel a bit later in the evening and spoke a bit of English. We asked them if they were going to the summit the next day and one guy said no, that he did it 10 years prior and that that was enough for him. We then told him we had been up that day and he just looked at us kind of dumbfoundedly, then asked us how we found it. We told his it wasn't too bad, that Kate had done other mountains but that was my first one and they all just looked absolutely shocked. I didn't know whether I should feel complimented of offended. I mean, the fact that there are people that are 65 climbing the dang thing was amazing enough to me, but that they were so pleased that I, 40 years younger than they had done it.... it just blew my mind. Another amusing thing about staying at the second refuge was that I *got to* have my very first encounter with a pop and squat toilet. I knew I would eventually have to somewhere on my travels, not to mention we were on a mountain so what did I expect, but I still wasn't prepared for it. I had to ask Kate on technique and how best to avoid getting myself wet. LOL. It was pretty comical, but I managed. However, the water there was absolutely FREEZING so once again, no shower for us, but we did manage to use our washcloths and cleanse some essential areas and change our underwear and socks, so it was a little better. Plus applying copious amounts of deodorant to deter super nasty smellyness and downgrade it to a level of pseudo-gross odor. The next morning brought an awesome sunrise and we headed off about 20 after 8, all the way down the other trail to the other main starting point, then over to a monastery and continued from there hiking all the way back into Litochoro. The scenery on the way down was awesome, crossing over a river over and over again, seeing deep pools of crystal clear water at the bottom of tiny waterfalls... definitely nice. On the way down though we came across a couple snakes on our path at different parts of the trail. I took pictures of them both just in case. We threw a few stones at the first one from a good distance to try and get it to move to no avail so we walked into the woods to go around it, giving it a wide berth. The second one we tried doing the same, but it was a bigger snake than the first and wasn't moving, but the woods around us were pretty dense. Kate suggested just running and jumping over it which I quickly and politely said "Hell no" to. There's no way I was chancing letting that thing get his fangs into me, especially another 3 hours away from civilization. Luckily after 2 more minutes, the snake finally left on its own accord and we scurried by. I would just like to note that later on back at the hostel, Perry told us the first snake wasn't dangerous, but the second one was a VIPER!!! Um yeah, chalk one up to Kelly for saving our lives on that one. At another point on the trail we heard a lot of ringing bells which was a donkey caravan, all of them lugging supplies up to a new refuge they were in the process of building. They were really cute in their donkey way and Kate pointed out to me they were toting sit-down toilets for the likes of me! Ahhh the pampered life... Finally after around 9 1/2 hours, we drug our sorry stinky selves into Litochoro. It shouldn't have taken that long, but I am the one to blame for that. After the first couple hours of hiking I had rolled my ankle but thankfully it didn't hurt that much. However, after another couple hours of hiking on it, it was really tender whenever I tilted it left or right, which made it really hard coming down on all the loose rocks. It was okay as long as i kept it level thankfully. Suck it up and move on. That was definitely the moto of the entire hike. Once we got into town, we found out we had missed the last bus out to the area our hostel was in so we grabbed a victory coke, bananas, and a taxi and took showers first thing. We had originally planned on staying at the hostel another night, but then again we didn't plan on staying on the mountain 2 nights, so we offered Perry and Abby an extra 5Euro for the showers and ate dinner there as well before going back to the train station for the 11:45 train back to Athens. That in itself was another adventure, because when we got there, the train station was practically deserted. We asked the woman at the ticket counter for tickets and she said we get them on the train and then left 5 minutes later. We waited on the platform... and waited.... and waited.... Finally at 12:10 I left our platform to go check the timetables and sure enough, it was supposed to be there at 11:45. However, a guy came out while I was on the other platform and mimed to us that it'd be there in 15 minutes. At least that's what we hoped 5 fingers in the air 3 times was supposed to mean considering our Greek vocabulary was yes, no, thank you, hello. So, back to the platform to wait and as we saw the train in the distance Kate joked that it wasn't going to stop. Well, it kept coming.. and coming... and coming!! It blew right by us and then about 100 meters down the track from the station came to a screaming halt. So we sprinted and made it aboard and after 20 minutes of one of the officials looking for seats we finally got put in a cabin with 2 other guys that were less than happy to have been slammed awake and now their comfy cabin no longer had leg room. Oh well. After 5 horrible hours in that stuffy car with 2 more people added to it along the way we stepped out in Athens and said our goodbyes. I spent most of that day in transit again, partially because of my own train blunders, partially other's faults as well but finally made it to Patras, Greece. Patras is a huge transportation hub for Greece but I wanted to check it out for a day or two before heading to Corfu. It's a decently nice city but not all that much to see/do here. One thing that has baffled me though is there are TONS of guys ranging from age 14-28 or so just sitting around in different groups along the ports here. I can't make out their nationality, but they aren't Greek and I think they've all come here (possibly illegally?) on a ship and are just kind of waiting around to see what happens next. Yesterday I saw one of the uniformed port authorities chase after a big group of them, drawing his pistol and screaming. It was some crazy stuff! But, they leave me alone every time I walk by so I can't complain, it's just weird though. Today I visited their church and watched an entire tour bus full of 60 something Greeks kiss all of the glass framed artwork inside. It was really cute! I later went to a nearby town called Rio to see the world's largest cable bridge, 2,250 meters long for Tory of course! Love you sis! Now I'm waiting for my midnight ferry on the deck underneath a blanket of a million stars on my way to Corfu. They've actually started boarding already so I better get going - I still have to run back to my hostel and grab my pack! Hope you've enjoyed yet another installment of the adventures of Kelly!