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| The View Over the Atlantic at Dawn |
The past 48 hours have been a blur. We left the Jacksonville airport at 1 P.M. Eastern time and arrived at Charlotte international airport at 3:30 P.M. In Charlotte we took the liberty to find some food before our flight left for Frankfurt, Germany-but due to an early boarding call I was "forced" to eat my meal on the plane. This worked out well for me, because it held me over until dinner was served.
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| A healthy last American meal |
Maneuvering this little box was a lot harder that your may think-
especially with my carry-on, backpack, and passport in hand.
With a 8 hour flight ahead of me the next item on the agenda was
keeping myself occupied. This was pretty easy, because United Airways has an on-demand media setup for each seat in coach.
I was able to chose form 40 movies and 20 TV shows. I ended up
watching 2 movies: X-Men: First Class and Date Night. They were both very entertaining and took up about half of my flight.
The airline also served dinner at around 8 P.M. which was very simple but satisfying (mostly just because of my hunger).
The last couple of hours of the trans-Atlantic flight went by fairly quickly. Cloud cover blocked the view of the British Isles as we soared over head, but once we made landfall in France we had a little better view of the landscape. The land in Europe is dotted with big windmills and a lot of green farmland, especially in Germany.
When we arrived in Frankfurt we realized how large this German
Airport truly was. We had to take a tram to get to a secondary portion of the airport where our connecting flight was. The airport smelled a lot like cigarette smoke, and was filled with little glass smoking rooms for passengers to get their fix before flying out.
The security agents in Frankfurt seemed a little clueless and ended up pulling aside a couple of people from our group for various reasons before letting us pass through.
After about a solid 30 minutes of travel time, we arrived at our connecting flight's gate. This was the flight that would take us from Frankfurt to Athens. When we boarded this flight it was roughly 9:30 A.M. local time and 2:30 A.M. Eastern time. So I was obviously exhausted on this flight-having not slept at all on our overnight transatlantic flight. Luckily, after getting breakfast I was able to sleep for half of our 2 hour flight to Athens. As a side note, the airline that we took from Frankfurt to Athens was call Lufthansa, a German company, that took very good care of us.
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| Destination: Reached |
The Athenian airport was very busy, with many scrambling to claim their baggage and acquire transportation.
I was surprised by how much English was used in all of the advertisements, and how many American companies are represented here in Greece.
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| The Athenian Airport |
Baggage claim was nerve-racking since we had 3 connecting flights but proved ultimately successful.
Our group was now ready to move toward the bus!
The bus ride was about 20 minutes long and took us through some of the countryside. There were a lot of abandoned, smaller building on the side of the road-most likely a result of the economic crisis here in Greece. Regardless, the breathtaking mountain landscape in quite a sight to be seen.
Alright, we finally arrive at our dorms at around 2:30. We were greeted and showed around by our very nice RAs. Both of them were very fluent in English.
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| Very large balcony with a great view |
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| Another great view |
The evening was finished off with a very nice, family style Greek dinner. An interesting aspect of Greek restaurants is that they do not split checks. Its up tot the people in the group to divide up the money evenly. This definitely will take some getting used too. Also, the Greek night life is very loud and crowded and usually gets started pretty late. This is a little out of my comfort zone but I am sure I will soon get used to the culture. The travel was a success, now onto the rest of our agenda.
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