Overall we had a great trip. It definitely wasn’t what we expected, but that is always the fun of seeing a new place and culture.

A few things worth noting:

• - People are really nice, with the exception of bus, train, and ferry station workers. While nice, they do like to argue with one another. We saw about one argument per day where two Greeks were going back and forth, and we had no idea what was going on since they were speaking their native language.
• - Ferries are expensive
• - Gyros are cheap
• - There’s a ton of graffiti throughout Greece, especially in Athens
• - There are many different spellings for the same place. For example, Chania, Chanea, Hania and Xania are all the same city.
• - People don’t bargain. As one guy told us, the price is no more or no less.
• - People aren’t real pushy. This includes taxi drivers, street vendors and beggars.
• - Don’t be surprised if your dinner includes a shot and some ice cream.
• - People smoke like it’s the 70′s.
• - Greeks have their shower heads connected to a hose coming from the bathtub spout. This made for a messy shower. This was their way of saving water throughout the country since you had to turn the water on.. rinse… turn it off… put on shampoo… turn it on… etc.
• - The exchange rate sucks. We were at $1.5 for each Euro.
• - They are big on worry beads and you see a lot of people carrying them around.
• - Greeks don’t usually start dinner until 8pm so if you want a ‘special’ you should eat earlier.
• - There are battery recycling bins everywhere; grocery stores, restaurants,  train stations, etc.
• - Book: Frommer’s Guide to Greece – Next time we will choose a different company to rely on for our traveling book. Frommer’s didn’t provide very good mixture of economy hotels. They usually only posted hotels that started at about $75+. They were wrong about the guide in Knossos (which is okay), but they didn’t even mention the famous sunsets in Oia.  Also, there recommendations as a whole were very general and basic. I think we may go with Rick Steves or Lonely Planet next round.

Posted: Monday, October 5th, 2009
Topic: The Daily Grind Tags: None