Pending

Oh woe is me. I'm still in Greece. Sigh. Yes, the visa process to go to Saudi has taken rather longer than anticipated. But I now have my visa, and am just waiting for plane tickets, then off I go! The semester officially begins on Saturday (remember, ME Saturday and Sunday is Thursday and Friday), so we all will be cutting it rather close. In the meantime, I must content myself with more ruins and baklava.

So I guess I left off on our train trip to Athens. Well, it departed Thessaloniki at 11pm, and we thought it was only supposed to take 4 hours. We also didn't understand why one lady at the train station said all trains were full, and another lady sold us tickets. We were triumphant, but that was only until about 10:50pm, when some guy told us that we were in his seat. And we asked, where are out seats? And he said, you don't have seats. And we were like, oh. No wonder the one lady said all seats were sold.

So we sat on the floor of the car by the bathroom with about a dozen of our closest friends. Apparently they sell tickets until there is just no more space left anywhere. At one point, some dude came barreling back, and started to smoke and make a rumpus. Then, he reached over and started stroking Lauren's leg. Oh, that did not go over well with either of us. But we got no back up help from the Greeks, who conveniently all decided to try to sleep at the same time. Lame. Then, the guy next to us turned out to be Moroccan, which meant of course that he wanted to speak to us. I need to stop being so friendly. At around 2am, he informs me that I am very beautiful, and he thinks his parents would love me. I was like, I am so not in the mood to be propositioned right now. An hour later, when we thought we were supposed to be arriving in Athens, we were informed that actually we were only about half way there, and had another three hours to go. Sitting on the floor. Oh, dear. Well, it was an adventure. Thank GOD our hotel was only a short walk from the train station.

Then for a few days we did all the Athens sights, and then went to Santorini for a couple days. It was very lovely, and the ferry ride was half the fun. We frolicked around on the black sand beach, and then took a bus to on of the towns to try to get the iconic shot of Santorini. We didn't do too bad for ourselves. We came back last Saturday, and Lauren left me on Sunday.

Since then I've been just bouncing around Athens, loathe to get too far away in case I finally got my stuff, which I did on Tuesday. Yesterday I went to the Embassy, and today I'm just trying to combobulate myself to get ready to go. I'm ready to be getting back to work. If I were still traveling, that would be one thing, but I'm pretty much done with all of this sitting around business. :)