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Before I start writing about the AMAZING place I’m at this weekend- Meteora, let me start by writing about our foray into Athenian nightlife on Friday night.  We took the Metro to a neighborhood called Gazi, which is full of bars, but there aren’t like American bars; they’re more like cafes with a bar inside.  Right when you exit the Metro station, everything was bustling, even though it was midnight.  There were vendors selling souvlaki, sunglasses, etc (basically everything that is sold on the street during the day).  This is the complete opposite of what you would find in Pangrati, the neighborhood we live in, at that time of night.  There is a row of bars with loud music and modern furniture on the patios, where people sit, drink, and talk.  We looked for a bar called Bar Rouge, because a friend knew someone who was playing in a band there, but we never found it.  We did get a nice idea of the bars in the area by walking around trying to find Bar Rouge.  When we decided to give up searching for the bar, we met up with the rest of our group at another bar, in which we took up the entire second floor.  Drinks are just as expensive here as they are in bars in Chicago.  I paid 7 Euro for a Malibu and pineapple!  After we left that bar, we wanted to find somewhere where there was dancing.  This was difficult because there were only bars around, no clubs.  We found a place on the main strip of bars with some dancing, but even there, people were just dancing around their tables because there was no dance floor.  We danced for a while, then took a taxi home since at that time, the Metro was closed.  It was a fun night, and it was nice to see some Greek people our age.

Now on to Meteora!  Meteora is in northern Greece, so we had a nice 5 hour train ride through Greece to get here.  We arrived at 2pm.  On the train ride, I realized that I had forgotten to print out or write down the address of the hotel.  We tried to find the hotel on the map by the train station, but it wasn’t on there.  We asked a taxi driver, and he pointed us in the right direction.  Along the way, we kept asking people we saw if they knew where Hotel Odysseon was.  This was really effective, and we made it to our hotel without getting lost. 

There are six monasteries on top of the rocks, each one on a different cliff/mountain, that are open to the public.  Since not all eight of us were staying two nights, we wanted to get started seeing the monasteries right away.  Different monasteries have different hours, however, and the walk to get to the monasteries is about 30 min to an hour depending on which one you are going to, so we were only able to make it to one monastery, Rousanou.  We walked along the road to Holy Trinity monastery and up the stairs from which there was an amazing view, but we weren’t able to go inside the monastery.  There was a path down the mountain that led to Kalabaka, which we took back.  After going back to the hotel to rest a little and clean up, we went out to dinner at a taverna.  We treated ourselves to retsina (wine) with dinner and chocolate soufflé for dessert.  We planned on watching a movie together that night, but we were all so tired from traveling and walking that we went to bed.

This morning, we woke up early, had a good breakfast at the hotel, and set out to see the monasteries.  We went to the Great Meteoron monastery first, and we took a beautiful, but strenuous walk up a mountain path to get there.  The monastery has a church, museum, and spectacular views.  There aren’t many pictures from the inside of the monastery, because photography is not allowed in many rooms.  Women aren’t allowed in if they are wearing pants, so there are wrap-around skirts you wear while in the monastery.  We also saw Varlaam, St. Nicholas’, and St. Stephen’s monasteries today.  There are beautiful frescoes inside the churches.  Half of our group had to catch the train to Athens in the evening, and the remaining four of us had dinner at a pizzeria.  Tomorrow, I’m going to the one monastery we haven’t seen yet, Holy Trinity.  I’ll write more about the history of Meteora tomorrow.