Weekend in Athens, Greece

I can't help but think about how grateful I am to have this opportunity to travel and see so much of the world. We spent this past weekend in Athens, Greece and it was pretty amazing. The amount of history in this city is incredible and it was pretty crazy to think about how long a lot of the buildings there have been around. I went to Greece with Lea and two of my roommates, Bella and Olivia. We had a VERY early morning flight on Friday morning, leaving our apartment at 4 am to get to the airport for our flight at 6:30 am. We landed in Greece at about 8:30 am their time, which is an hour ahead of Rome. We got an Uber to our hostel and the Uber right took around 45 minutes (the traffic and congestion in Athens was CRAZY). Once we got to our hostel, we were all pretty wiped so we took a quick power nap before going out to explore the new city. Our hostel wasn't too far from the Acropolis, so we hiked up to the top of the city and got a really cool view of the whole city behind us. We hiked farther up to get up to the Acropolis and found out that it was 20 euro to tour it, but if you have a student ID then it's free. Bella and I had our ID's, but Lea and Olivia didn't, so Bella and I went up into the Acropolis and got to check out the Parthenon and the Temple of Athena Nike at sunset which was really gorgeous while getting a super cool view from the top of Athens over looking the whole city. Once Bella and I finished taking pictures, we met back up with Lea and Olivia and headed to dinner. We ended up eating at a little restaurant we found on our hike back down to the city and I got pork chops with french fries (these were a huge thing over there). The pork chops were so good. By the time we finished dinner, it was pretty late so we decided to head back to our hostel and get to bed early so that we could get up and go do things early the next day. Saturday was Bella's birthday, so we started the day out with some shopping, checking out all the shops and pretty cheap prices. We walked quite a bit of the city and even found a Forever 21! It's crazy how much more Americanized Greece was compared to Rome. They had a lot of "American stores" and even had KFC, McDonalds and Starbucks all over the place. After a morning/afternoon of shopping and exploring we went and got lunch at a Greek cafe where I had this amazing pita bread and chicken souvlaki. Honestly one of my favorite meals I've had abroad. It tasted so amazing! After lunch, we hiked back up to the Acropolis so Lea and Olivia could use their ID's to get in. We spent quite a bit of time there, taking a lot more pictures and taking in the sites that had been here since before Christ. It was pretty surreal to be standing next to these buildings that had survived wars, fires and years of wear and tear. Post Acropolis round 2, we headed back to the hostel to get ready for dinner to celebrate Bella's birthday. We ended up going to a really cool restaurant called Navanti and they had super good food. I don't think I ate a single bad meal my entire weekend in Greece. I got beef shank with garlic mashed potatoes and pita bread (I was eating all the meat I could get since it's not as big over here as pasta and pizza). We spent quite a bit of time at dinner just talking and enjoying the evening and then spent the rest of the night exploring the area around the restaurant before heading back into the hostel for the night. Sunday was our last day in Greece before we flew out at 8 that night. We woke up early again and headed out to see all the other landmarks we didn't make it to and had scoped out from our view at the top of the Acropolis. We went to the Acropolis museum which was really cool because it explained the history of the city of Athens and explained the purpose of all the buildings in the Acropolis as well has had a bunch of artifacts that had been found over the years. After the museum, we hiked over to find the Temple of Zeus, or at least what's remaining of it. On our hike over, we walked past a bunch of shops, so we stopped and did some shopping as well as got some sandwiches for lunch. While walking to the Temple of Zeus, we came across a little pedicure shop called Doctor Fish and realized that it was one of those places where you put your feet in a bowl and the fish eat the dead skin off of your feet. It was something that had been on all of our bucket lists to do at some point and it was 10 euro for 10 minutes of fish time so we stopped and decided to do it. It was one of the weirdest feelings I've ever experienced and it took a little bit to get used to it but in the end my feet were super smooth and it was such a cool thing to try out, especially in Greece. After our pit stop at Doctor Fish, we finished our walk to the Temple of Zeus. It was pretty insane to stand next to the i think 6 remaining pillars and try and picture them as a full temple that they used to be. We took some pictures there and then continued our tour to the Panathenaic Stadium, also known as the stadium of the modern Olympics. It was the stadium that hosted the 1896 Olympic games and is the only stadium in the world that is made entirely out of marble. Though we didn't make it to the 2004 Olympic grounds because they were farther outside the city, this was just as cool if not cooler to see. After our stop at the stadium, we still had a little bit of time to kill before we had to head to the airport, so we walked around and stumbled upon the Athens war museum, a museum that chronicled every single war that Greece has ever been involved in. Though it wasn't something we had originally planned on seeing, it was a super cool thing to walk through and see all of the history there. After the war museum, it was time to head to the airport for our flight. We got back to Rome around 9pm and got back to our apartment around 10. I spent the remainder of the night doing some studying and homework before heading to bed. All in all, it was a pretty successful weekend and I'm really glad that I had the opportunity to see Athens and the country of Greece. I'm super excited to head to London next weekend!

View walking into the entrance of the Acropolis

Temple of Athena Nike at the Acropolis

Parthenon --> It was so windy!

View from the top of the Acropolis

View of all the ruins on the Acropolis

Feet Fish!!

Artifacts from the museum

Artifacts from the museum

Lego model of the entire Acropolis

Temple of Zeus

Panathenaic Stadium

Week 4

This past week has been full of relaxation and organization. The Italians do this weird thing where they give you holidays off, but then they make you make up the holidays at some point in the semester. This Friday was one of our makeup days for the semester, so unfortunately that meant no weekend travel for us and instead a nice Statistics class on Friday afternoon. The week leading up to this Friday was pretty typical. I had the chance to get all my homework in order and recover after my long weekend travel to Nice, while at the same time get everything in order to head off to Greece this Friday! On Tuesday night, it was a friend who we met here's birthday so my five roommates and I all went out with a big group to celebrate. The rest of the week was pretty much class and homework. All of my roommates spent the weekend in Rome so we hung out together and got the chance to explore the city a little bit more. On Saturday night, we all had been lounging around for most of the day and for some reason everyone was craving some Mexican food so we "hiked" across the city down by the Colosseum to find probably the only taco bar in the whole city of Rome;) and I didn't even end up having tacos (the nachos sounded too good to pass up). After our Mexican food overload, we just wandered around the city for awhile and explored. It's so crazy how different this city is at night versus going out in the daytime. Sunday, pretty much everyone in our apartment was getting down to business and we all spent the day camped out in our common area studying, writing papers or for one of my (lucky) roommates, watching Netflix. I personally had the privilege of spending the day working on Statistics homework along with studying for a Lifespan Development test that I had to take today (I got an A by the way!) All in all, it was a pretty lowkey week, sorry I don't have more fun, entertaining stories for you. I pretty much just spent the week and weekend, working on homework, exploring, getting all of my schoolwork prioritized and my to-do list smaller. Missing everyone back home and a special birthday shoutout to Ryan (HAPPY 21ST!!!)

Weekend in Nice, France//Monte Carlo, Monaco

My first weekend in a different country is officially in the books. Lea and I returned this morning around 10 am from our weekend in Nice, France with a day trip to Monte Carlo. We left late Thursday night and caught our flight. It was a bit of a hassle as it was our first time figuring out how to get to the airport from our apartments. At one point, we were walking up the escalator to get to our gate and I tripped UP the escalator and cut my elbow, so as we're standing in line to board our plane, my elbow was bleeding a lot. The flight from Rome to Nice was only 50 minutes so it went by super quick and it was really pretty to fly over the Mediterranean at night and see all the city lights lining the coast line. Once we got off at the airport, we had to figure out how to use the public transportation to make our way into the city center to get to our hostel. It actually wasn't too hard and it was super cheap. The hostel was a pretty interesting thing as we were sleeping in a room with 11 other girls who we had never met. We ended up meeting some pretty cool people though, especially a couple Australian girls who had been traveling for the last three months to avoid the Australian winter! Once we got to the hostel, it was pretty late so we just called it a night and went to bed. The next day, we woke up early and got out to explore the city. We walked along the beach, which was about a 5 minute walk from our hostel and just looked around. We ended up seeing a waterfall from a distance and decided to hike up to find it and it was such a cool thing. We found the waterfall AND a super cool view of the city and the sea. After our little hiking excursion, we went in search of lunch. We ended up at a pretty cool little bistrot where we got these really yummy, really big pizzas and mojitos.  After our lunch, we went and shopped around for a bit and then explored the city center a bit more before heading back to our hostel to take a quick nap. After our little power nap, we went back out for dinner. We had wanted to eat at a restaurant right by the sea, but it was a little overcast a sprinkling on Friday night, so nothing was really open/busy. We ended up at an American style restaurant that was surprisingly really popular. After getting really excited about the salmon dish on the menu, we were informed when we tried to order it that they were all out of salmon and we had to choose something else. I ended up getting tacos, which even though we were at an American style restaurant, definitely did not taste like normal, American tacos. Nonetheless, they were still pretty good. By the time we finished up with dinner, it had begun to downpour, so we hung out at the restaurant and waited it out before heading to our hostel for the night. The next morning, we woke up really early in order to catch a bus to Monte Carlo for the day. It was actually really cheap to get there (1.50 euro each way!) It's about a 45 minute bus ride, but Lea and I decided to get off halfway at a little village called Eze Village, known for having an amazing view of the sea and the bays. We did a little of hiking and ended up at a little cafe where we got crepes for breakfast before heading farther into the village to find the exotic gardens where, everyone was right, they had an amazing view of the sea. The pictures definitely don't do it justice, it was so beautiful. After that, we headed back down to the road to catch the bus to go all the way into Monte Carlo. Once in Monte Carlo, we first stopped at the Monte Carlo casino - definitely not like Fortune Bay! It was so pretty inside and they don't allow gambling before 2pm. After a quick look at the casino and all the expensive Ferrari's parked outside of it, we started our walk around the port to get to the other side of Monaco. We took our time walking and had some stops along the way, like a Monaco burger place to try out their burgers and fries. Not too bad but definitely not like Gordys! We stopped at a little bar place right on the harbor to grab a brownie for dessert and then continued our way along the sea. We saw so many little beaches and these bleachers where people just jump into the sea. As we made our way to the other side, we ended up at the Prince's Palace and did a little shopping in the area around there before heading back to catch the bus and get back to Nice. Once back in Nice, we headed straight to dinner and went to a restaurant right by our hostel where we FINALLY found our salmon! Honestly, it was some of the best salmon I've ever had. It tasted phenomenal. After dinner, we walked around the shops enjoying our last night in Nice and ended up at a little bakery where I got some churros for dessert and Lea got some cotton candy the size of her head. After the bakery, we finished up our dessert and headed back to the hostel where we packed our bags and headed to bed before getting up at 4am to make our way to the airport this morning for our 7am flight. Though only there for a few days, we saw so much of Nice and Monaco and it makes me so excited for all of the trips I have planned for this semester. All in all, it was a great weekend trip. 

Beach 5 min for our hostel

Waterfall that we hiked up to

Pizza lunch

view from the Eze Village exotic gardens

Monte Carlo casino

Inside the Monte Carlo casino

A couple of the yachts in the harbor outside Monte Carlo

Cement "beach" where people would jump into the sea and swim

Prince's Palace//Monte Carlo

View from the Prince's Palace

Salmon dinner!!

UPDATE

Sorry, I haven't posted in awhile, things have been crazy busy with school picking up and figuring out how to balance classes while still finding the time to explore. So, a lot has been happening since I last posted to my blog. On Sunday, September 3rd, Lea and I took a day trip to Naples and got a chance to explore the city which was super super cool. It's right on the sea so the view was amazing and the weather wasn't crazy hot! While in Naples, we got to check out the Castle of Saint Elmo, which is a castle that sits on top of the city and overlooks pretty much everything. It was about a 45 minute hike filled with constant incline but it was completely worth it when we got up to the top and had the best view of the city of Naples. Last week was pretty normal between going to classes, doing homework and cooking meals. I got all my trips booked with both Lea and our other roommates, so I'll be traveling around pretty much every weekend for the remainder of the semester. Lea and I actually leave tomorrow for our first out of the country trip. We're headed to Nice, France and are going to spend a day in Monte Carlo as well. As for my other trips, I'm headed to Athens, Paris, London, Krakow, Barcelona, Madrid, Amalfi Coast and Tuscany but not in that order! This past weekend, my roommates and I made the trip to Florence to check out Brunelleschi's dome and the statue of David. It was such a pretty city and actually reminded me a lot of Rome in the way that it's set up, it's just not quite as big. We only were there for one night, so two days but I'm kind of glad because it's a pretty pricy city! We went out on Saturday night to explore the city and ended up coming across a bar that had a bunch of college t-shirts hung up all over the walls. They had a Creighton one hanging up, so the owner took it down and let us sign it which was super cool! Overall, it was a really great weekend trip! We ended up getting heart shaped pizzas from a little pizza parlor and they were AMAZING. Probably the best pizza I've had yet since being here. Since getting back, I've just been focusing on schoolwork this week and looking forward to this weekend. Classes have been going well and I really like them for the most part (except maybe not statistics all that much). Right now, I'm about to head out for dinner with my roommates to some local Japanese restaurant that is supposedly super good so I'll have to let you know how it goes. I promise I'm going to be posting more now that I have more of a schedule going and I will post pictures below so you can check out the start to my weekend travels!

P.S. Fun fact about my trip to Naples, I got attacked by a dang pigeon while I was there. I was sitting outside at a restaurant for lunch and all of a sudden something was pecking at my toe and trying to eat it so I kicked my leg and looked down and there was a pigeon just standing by my foot looking at me! So many pigeons here, it definitely takes some getting used to, and it doesn't help that they all seem to have no fear when it comes to being around humans.

Naples 

View of Naples 

Standing in Castle of Saint Elmo overlooking  Naples

Brunelleschi's Dome in Florence

Signing the Creighton shirt in Florence 

Day 7 - 8/29/17 (ONE WEEK HERE!)

Today I had my first big day of classes! I was up and in class by 8:30 this morning where I started my day off with my history class. I'm taking a class called 20th Century Europe and the World and even after one day I think it's going to be a super interesting course. After that class, I have about an hour break in between classes, so Lea and I went to check out this bagel shop that is located between our two campuses. They have bagels with cream cheese and then you can add anything you'd like onto the bagel. It kind of reminds me a little bit of Bruegger's Bagels back home! After our little bagel trip, I had Italian so I headed back to campus for class. Italian was actually super fun. Our professor is Italian and doesn't speak to us in a lot of English and made the class really interactive while at the same time teaching us how to say different things. It was definitely my favorite class I'm in and I'm really excited to be able to learn part of a new language. Right after Italian, I had my literature class that was a class called Introduction to the Novel. Our professor started out the class by walking in and saying "I'm not trying to scare anyone off but if you're not an English major I would highly suggest dropping this course and taking a different Lit class." Turns out he assigns about 100 pages of reading a night for the course so Lea and I decided to switch to a different Literature class, Intro to Lit. After our classes were done for the day, Lea and I made a stop at the grocery store to pick up some things that we (more I than her) could cook for dinner. We found some hamburger patties and some chicken that we figured we could cook up. So, we went back and decided to have some hamburgers for dinner. I cooked them up in a frying pan and they looked pretty amazing might I add (Thanks toGrandpa Bud for teaching me how to cook burgers:). After we sat down to eat, I went to take a huge bite of it and IT WAS NOT HAMBURGER. It tasted more like sausage on a bun which I am not a huge fan of. Since everything in our grocery store is in Italian, we had to rely more on pictures to figure out what we were eating and there was a cow on the wrapping so I thought we were safe!! But it turns out that they have a lot of different kinds of ground beef from different breeds of cow and so Lea and I think we got some funky breed but were still not really 100% sure what we ate last night! Aside from that, last night was a fun night and we spent the rest of the evening planning more trips and trying to get things booked with our roommates.

P.S. Sorry, no pics from yesterday. I forgot to take a picture of my funky burger!

Days 5 & 6 - 8/27/17 & 8/28/17

Hi guys! Sorry I haven't posted anything the last couple of days, I've been super busy with finishing up orientation, starting classes and booking weekend trips! That's pretty much what I did a majority of the day Sunday. I slept in during the morning and then when I woke up I started working on trip planning. I've been trying to cook for myself more at our apartment so I made myself a scrambler with some eggs, peppers, onions and olives in it:). It was pretty delicious. Sunday night, Lea and I got dressed up and went out to an RA event that our RA was throwing, called an apertivo. It's something they do here in Italy and probably other places too but they have drinks and light appetizers at bars before everyone goes to dinner and then out afterwards. I tried this drink at the bar we went to called the London Collins and it was actually really good. I can't remember what exactly was in it but I know it had some ginger (you could taste that!) After the apertivo, we decided that we wanted to try somewhere new for dinner, so we walked around Trastevere and found a cool place that looked like it had a good menu. Over here, every street you walk down, they have people standing outside the restaurants trying to get you to come get a table at their's. It kind of makes you feel a little bit like a celebrity:). Anyways, I decided to try something different other than the typical pasta and pizza and I got some chicken and salad and it was super good. They had some really good spice on the chicken and I ate every bite of it. Once we finished dinner, both of us were super tired and had stuff to get ready for our first day of classes the next day, so we decided to walk around for a little bit before heading back to our apartment where we got our backpacks together and planned some more trip stuff before heading to bed. On Monday, I don't have class until 4:30 pm, so I woke up early to go with Lea across the river to get her some notebooks, get a fan for my room (we don't have any AC so it's SO HOT) and I also got a new, Italian sim card for my phone so that I could have data to use maps to find my way around. Because I have this new sim card, I can no longer be reached on my old number so if you would like to text/call me you can download the app WhatsApp. That's how I've been communicating with my parents and some friends. I can video call, regular call and text off this app. After our little shopping excursion, we headed to campus for our first class here. STATISTICS:/. It actually wasn't too bad and my professor seems really cool and has pretty good English so I'm not super worried about the class. Once we got out of class, we went out to dinner with our roommates to celebrate the first day of classes. I had this super good fettuccine ala bolognese. Once dinner ended, most everyone was super wiped from the first day of classes, so we headed back to the apartment and crashed. I'll try and make sure I get more posts up on a regular basis, but for now that's what's been going on with me the last couple of days!

Chicken dinner I had while out with Lea

Fettuccine alla bolognese!

AMAZING fudge cake we ordered to celebrate school starting

Roommates!

Day 4 - 8/26/17

Today was our first day without any orientation meeting so we took the day to relax and not do too much. I slept in this morning and then started the day with an RA meeting. After finishing the meeting, a group of us walked to the Pantheon and checked that out (it's so huge!) and got some super good gelato from a place called Venchi's. After that, we walked back to the apartments, where we have a grocery store right around the corner from our building, so my roommates and I all went to the grocery store to stock up on some groceries. It was really cool figuring out what everything was and where to find certain things. Everything was in Italian and we found out that they don't sell pepper or really any spices there. After the grocery store, we went back to the apartment and cooked some dinner. I made spaghetti with meat sauce for Lea and I. After dinner, we got ready to go out and decided to go check out the Trevi fountain because we had heard it was super cool at night. So, we took the tram from our apartments to the stop closest to the Trevi and then had to get off and walk through these back streets to find the Trevi fountain. We knew what general area the fountain was in but we kind of made the mistake of forgetting to look up where it was before we left wifi and didn't have a paper map, so we were pretty much walking around searching for signs and crowds of people. It ended up working out in our favor though, because after not being able to find it and walking around for awhile, we decided to ask someone for directions and ran into an older couple vacationing in Rome from Canada. They had a map and showed us that we had walked right past the Trevi fountain and were actually super super close to the Spanish steps. We figured if we were that close to them, we couldn't pass up seeing the steps, so we changed course and found the steps. They were so cool to look at and the view from the top of them was pretty amazing. You could see the big dome of a museum in the distance and if you moved slightly to the right you could see the Vatican behind it all lit up. After our time at the Spanish steps, we started back in search of the Trevi fountain. After a little reading of signs and a lot of searching, we finally found the Trevi tucked back behind a bunch of buildings. Everything that everyone had told us about the fountain was right, it was so gorgeous at night with all the lights and although there were still quite a few people, it wasn't crazy busy. After a huge photoshoot at the fountain, we decided to just walk around for awhile and explore before heading back to the apartment for the night. One side note I have to add: It is SO HOT here! Everyday it's super humid and in the 90's, plus our apartments don't have AC. Everyday it's super sticky and sweaty but it gets really nice at night because it cools a little bit and sometimes you have a nice breezewhich makes walking around not as hot.

The Pantheon

Spanish steps

View from the Spanish steps - first dome is the museum, second dome is the Vatican

Trevi fountain

My pants were soaked from sitting on the edge to take this pic!