Rhodes, Falikari, Lindos, Greece

 Greece

Lindos

Faliraki

I just arrived back in Salzburg from Greece yesterday.   I had a good time and enjoyed the warm weather while it snowed and rained in Salzburg.

For those of you who don't know, we have two weeks for Easter break.  I say "have," because the first week was spent in Greece, and we're currently just starting the second.  It was a few weeks before break, that Akasha and I decided we wanted to get out of Salzburg for awhile for break, and we didn't want to spend a lot of money.  We looked at various places: Düsseldorf, Bremen, Munich, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, and they were all too expensive.  Originally we were looking at four nights, then I mentioned Greece, even though I thought it would be too expensive, but checked on it anyway, and the flight availability presupposed a week-long stay, but a week in Greece was about a third of the price as four nights in Munich, and less expensive with the flight too.  The catch was, we had to fly out of Düsseldorf--an eight-hour train ride.  But with the price, we couldn't pass it up.

And so we were off on the first Saturday of break.  The train we took to Düsseldorf was really nice.  It was a CNL (City Night Line) and we had our own compartment, and the eight-hour ride didn't seem too long. After arriving at the Hauptbahnhof, we took a train to the airport.  Unfortunately, we went to the wrong airport, which proved to be a somewhat costly mistake, as we had to take a taxi to the correct airport in order to catch our flight.  We went to the international airport, and the correct one was actually a smaller airport that the British used during occupation.

Then we hoped on the plane for the ~3.5 hour plane trip to the Greek Island of Rhodes.  I slept most of the plane ride, but woke up as we were circling the few islands.  From that high, they looked like ink spots on an ocean without texture, as we approached, the mountainous terrain reached up at us.  I find flying boring, long, claustrophobic, and all together uncomfortable.  Landscapes usually prove to be bland, but this was something else entirely.

Lindos

  
We arrived at our hotel at about three pm and then set off for food.  Which we found, ate, then headed back to nap.  After not getting much sleep on the train, we were both exhausted.  After a short nap we just walked around for awhile and visited the beach.

Bildunterschrift hinzufügen

It just happened to be luck, that we worked it out to arrive on Sunday.  We knew we'd be tired, and most things are closed on Sundays anyway, so we explored a little and oriented ourselves with the surroundings before heading to bed.

We were also both lucky and unlucky in our timing.  We arrived right when it was warming up, although it was a little cooler when we first arrived (mid sixties), and warmed up to eighty by the end of the week.  But it was also the beginning of tourist season--the first week, in fact.  So there wasn't a lot of touristy type things open, but we had a lot to ourselves, and it was quiet.  We shared one of the largest and cleanest beaches in Europe with just a handful of other people visible in the distance.

Eventually, we took a bus into the main town on the island, Rhodes.  About 100k people live there, and is the closest thing to the city of small villages knows.  They had the best strawberry ice cream I've ever tasted in my life.

It was also quite convenient that the price of both of us to eat was usually half as much as in Salzburg.  At one restaurant, the price of drinks, bread and two orders of lamb chops was about fifteen Euros for both of us, and for lunch the price for both of us was often under ten.

Anyway, Rhodes was interesting.  The old part of town rests inside a castle.  It houses stores, restaurants, and small shops.  The people are extremely friendly.

 

The landscape is interesting.  It's overgrown and dry, almost like the old west with mountains and rocks juxtaposed with the beaches and villages.  Lindos was especially this way, as the houses, shops, hotels and restaurant ran up the mountain and came together at an acropolis exclaiming the entire village on a much larger scale and darker color than the the rest of the white structures.

Lindos

Rhodes

The people are some of the friendliest I've ever seen.  Everyone is eager to help, from shop owners to hotel managers, to taxi drivers.  The small hotel we stayed at was family owned, and the owner helped us get around Faliraki, explained how to travel to Rhodes by bus, and many more things.  However, on our way back, I was both happy to be back in German-speaking territory in Düsseldorf, but disappointed by the change in weather from eighty degrees to thirty.  Then once we arrived in Salzburg I was again disappointed, because I've grown a distaste for Austrian German.

Summer 2011 just for giggles

Rhodes, Greece

So...  I guess many of you who read my facebook status are waiting for the explanation on why I had to call the Greek 911 equivalent.

It was about five-thirty in the morning, when I hear a banging and crashing.  I thought someone was just outside being drunk, which would be pretty typical.  Then the crashing was coming from inside our small hotel, and eventually right outside our room, then glass breaking.  At this point Kasha had woken up, and I told her to put something warm on.

Then a rapping at our balcony window.  Keep in mind, we're on the second story.  So I tell Kasha to lock herself in the bathroom.  I look at who's on our balcony, and I recognize him as one of the Swedes from next door.  His hand bloodies from breaking the window in the hall so he could climb out on the balconies and climb over the dividers separating them.  So now I'm stuck with some random guy on my balcony a story up.  Perfect.

I tell him to back up to the railing, and turn around before I went out there.  He was very drunk and scared, and he said he lost his friends and zombies attacked them, and told me I didn't know what was going on, and asked me where all the people were--the only plausible answer for their absence at six in the freaking morning obviously being a zombie attack.  Eventually, I convince him to climb over to his balcony, and he does, and I ask him if he wanted to just wait there for his friends or if he wanted me to call the police.  He said call the police, so whatever, I did.  They put me on hold forever to the tune of "it's the end of the world as we know it," and right after the police figured out where we were, his friends came back.  So then I waited for the police to show up, they did, talked to them for awhile, they were pretty nice.  Mostly I just didn't want to be blamed for the broken window at that point, and we weren't.  So everything worked out, and they didn't bother us for the rest of the week.

Lindos

The wildlife there is pretty cool too.  At first, we were confused how many tourist shops had cat-like items, but it didn't take long to figure out.  Stray cats are all over the entire island.  You see them more frequently than you would squirrels.  Some of them are timid, others territorial, and others will pose as you take their picture.

We ended up returning to the beach several times.  Towards the end of the week it became much warmer, climbing to about eighty-degrees.  I think it was on our second to last day that I had a minor sunburn, but it resided in about a day, luckily.  The train and plane back to Salzburg would have been miserable with a bad sunburn.

We ended up returning to Rhodes for a second time,  but the ice-cream place was out of their strawberry ice-cream.  We got some, anyway.  I don't even like strawberry ice-cream normally.  It was that good.  In fact, we almost returned before our flight, because we had several hours between when we had to check out and our flight, but we decided against it.  The buses were usually crowded, and neither of us wanted to haul around our stuff all day.

Other than that there isn't much going on.  I'm back in Salzburg, and my roommate is off traveling around Austria, so I have the place to myself for the rest of the week.  Then next week classes start again, and there's another month until the next break at the end of May when I go to Berlin.  Then another month and I'm back in Ohio.  At least the weather is nicer.  The best part of the week in Greece, was that for a week the weather in Salzburg was really crappy, cold, rainy, and even snowed. Now that we're back, it's getting warmer again, but the cloudy weather is pretty typical.  In Greece it was just clear skies with a few puffs of clouds.  They have 300 days of sunshine a year.

Then Easter we spent on a plane and a train.  It was all right.  We spent most of the flight playing games on Kasha's tablet, and then some of the train ride watching a movie on it, which is also how I was able to use facebook occasionally while in Greece, because I didn't bring my computer.  It felt nice to come back and have a keyboard again, and I fixed my "M" key.  So that's good.  This is one of my favorite keyboards, so now it's enjoyable to type again.

These small pictures don't do them justice.  The full sized pictures are much better, but I figure it'd be annoying to have to side-scroll.

I'll have another update eventually.  Probably after Berlin, maybe before, depending on if anything interesting happens by then.