I left home, it was the 17
th July I think. I was setting off for 3 weeks of solo travel, mostly, after tackling the 20hr flight to London. London was time with Annie - ballet friend of about 4-5 yrs, Latin dancer extraordinaire, a good friend, and one of the kindest people I've had the benefit of knowing. We shopped, and clubbed, and drank red wine and ate overpriced pasta, and took a dance class at Pineapple studios, grabbed the bargains at
Portobello markets, sat in the 'must pay' seats in the park until we got kicked off, and took the late night bus back to her house in Surrey in the wee hours of the morning.
France was next. Lyon first. Then Nice. Lyon is old
skool. Traditional. Friendly. Scary at night. Yummy pastry shops around every corner. Tapestry district. First films by the Lumiere brothers. Cheese with baguette. Fresh fruit and veg markets. Sock shopping because British Airways lost my luggage. Train to Nice. Over-touristy. Luggage still lost. Boulevard
des Anglais. Beach entry fees. Themed beaches. Russian church, which closed just before I got there, yet the tour group on the bus were allowed through despite their arriving later. Nice Jazz festival, Simply 7 acoustic group,
churros, standing on a tree to see, memorable night. Back to Lyon. Still no luggage. Fly to Rome.
,
Italy =
Contiki! Nick-named '
Piccola' by the hotel staff in
Orvietto, meaning 'little' in Italian. It spread among the group and soon became synonymous with Patrice. So Rome,
Orvieto, Sienna, Pisa, Florence and lots of little Tuscan villages in between. Clear beach, ball games, hot tanned Italian guys, pasta cooking, truffle hunting, clubbing, stain-glass churches and museums, 40 minute power shopping in Florence, the smell of leather in shops, those colour-coordinated Italian women with matching boots, bag, coat and hair dye. Fun with the group - Sarah, Laurel, Toni and many others.... let's not forget the group leader, Amadeus... and along with him come the girls who hopped from one
Contiki to the next, unquestionably with the object of spending more time with him. Aw poor dears.
Greece for 2 weeks! 4 Islands! One person! A bunch of rude
Greeks, good food, some bad food (poisoning), good tan, bad hotel room, good - no great - beaches, ancient ruins, museums, donkeys, hot springs, random kind
Athenian tourists in
Naxos who shared their day with me. So first stop was Athens. A couple of nights in the hostel there, then I checked by bag into storage and hit the islands with a backpack. Ferry to
Mykonos from
Pireaus port in Athens. A rough ride, and feeling a bit sick on arrival. I get there at 10pm at night with no place to stay. People are crowded around the port where the ferry docks when I arrive. Photos, laminated booklets, business cards, all in your face, talking, shouting, trying to get your business. 50 euro per night for a single person. So I end up asking 2 random girls if they wanted to share a room and split the cost. We do. They are Irene and
Eraitz. We hit the town, ride on their scooter and eat
fetta and salami for dinner on the balcony of the house we're staying at. I take a day trip to
Delos - place of most sunlight, hot, ruins pirated to construct the Acropolis and other structures in Athens. A detailed history... but I can't remember it all... it's somewhere in my
writitngs.
Next stop
Naxos. Not so touristy. Do take a bus into
Ano Mera, middle of nowhere. Do get lost in an olive grove looking for a Byzantine church and have to get a motorbike ride by a local back into the main town area. Spend a day with Athenian tourists, Nick and Zoe, searching for ancient temples and castles (which we find), spend some time at St Anna's beach?, get treated to a 4/5 course lunch complete with Ouzo (strong liquorice-tasting Greek liquor) and dropped off home at the end of the day. Lovely people. I recall
swimming in the water just a couple of 100 metres from where the ferries and boats are docked in the main town area. It's as if people are walking down the street, decide they get hot, then jump off the side of the street into the water.
Santorini to follow. I thank my lucky stars for making it through the bus ride up the edge of the cliff from the port to the city. Psycho drivers, taking those corners ridiculously fast and ridiculously close to the edge.
Santorini is
picturesque. I see a sunset from
Oia, with American girl Erin I meet on the day-trip. We glass-bottomed boated it to the small islands - the volcanic crater, the hot springs, take a donkey up one of the islands and decide to walk the way back down. We shared dinner (
dolmathes, crisp bread and feta) on the side of a wall in
Oia as we watched the famous sunset there. Turning around, I feel like I'm seated for a rock-concert. Swarms of people are doing the same as us. People standing, sitting, wherever they can to watch the light fall and fade below the horizon.
Corfu is my last island visit. Completely different from the ones before. Venetian influenced. Gorgeous buildings, despite their run-down appearance. I decided to food-poison myself here by eating feta cheese after it had been left out in the hot
unairconditioned refrigeratorless room overnight.
Mmm not good. Made it to
Achillon Palace the next day nonetheless though. Love
Sisi's furniture and the murals on the ceiling and painted belly of the stairwell. The Achilles statute in the backyard, also pretty impressive. Drank frappe on the walkway beside the
spiniada, swam in the water, random walks around the city on the religious public holiday I arrived (which left me wondering why everything was so quiet, until I realised it was the Virgin Mary's day).
A couple of nights back in Athens, checking out Ammonia and the
Benaki museum - where you could spend days and still not cover it all. Flew out to Frankfurt, to change planes before hitting the US! Excitement to hit Berkeley at last after weeks of full days of walking, scarce showers, eating on the go and constantly changing surroundings. I loved it, but it was nice to have a place to call home for a while. I met my suite mates at Foothill and they were so nice, setting me up with everything including sheets and 'comforter' (read:
doona) for as longs as I needed until I could hit a Target. Classes started. I made the
treck down the
hill in the morning, listening to the likes of Creed and Sting, then made the thigh-building climb back up the hill in the afternoons. Late mornings were consumed by sleeping on Memorial Glade - a big green grassy patch near the Doe Library, which attracted a great morning sun - or reading/sleeping in the old fashioned Reading Room in Doe. I loved ancient philosophy seminars. I was always late to my 8am Case Studies in Economic Development. And sometimes I slept in it. Other times I slept through it and never got there. Overeating in the buffet style dining commons and swiping in cards to register use of meal points we had been allocated. Hitting the frats with Marion and
Nairi. Seeing the red cups, and the disgusting toilets and kitchens. Clubbing in San Francisco. Nights out with Sean, Neil and Nat - the
aussie exchange students. These were some of the memories of semester 1, Fall semester, at Berkeley
