Mediterranean Trip - Part 2

[This is my second attempt at posting this.]
-
There are some posts below this about my trip a year ago to the Mediterranean. I've been having a hard time getting anything posted - especially the pictures.

Anyhow, this is about the second part of the trip: the part in Greece and Turkey.

After Sicily, our next stop was in Turkey. When we woke up one morning, the above picture was what we saw out the window. It was a city called Marmaris. There were a lot of stores, so we shopped even though Americans got gouged for their money. The vendors came up to you as you walked down the street and asked you [in English] to visit their shop. If you said no, it wasn't rare to get yelled after...one man yelled after us, "You insult my family!!" They really took it personally. The best thing to do if you didn't want to go in was play foreign. We often just replied "No hablo ingles" or "No parlo iglisi" [Spanish and Italian for "I don't speak English."] They only spoke Turkish and Engish since Americans were their top customers and they were from Turkey. They charges us higher prices, too.

After Turkey, we went to Greece. The first stop there was in Patmos. We walked up to the site where John wrote Revelations...it was way up on a mountain. The picture at the right is out of the window there. There's also a well-known monastery there, but we didn't hike that far up the mountain. It was a really neat place in the cave - there were lots of paintings and really old things and it had the place where John is said to have sat writing, and shows where it said he laid his head, etc. You weren't allowed to take pictures in there, so I just bought a postcard for my scrapbook, because it really was nice.

After Patmos, we went to Santorini, a little town situated on top of a mountain out in the middle of the ocean. It looked like it would topple if you so much as stomped. To get to the top, you either rode a cable car or a donkey...we chose the cable car - the donkeys were expensive and we can ride a donkey at home anyway! There was a lot of shopping there and we went to a Catholic Church [someone who lived there told us that it was one of hundreds on the island]. It was really a cool place. The clock tower shows what most of the buildings looked like. Most of them were shades of white and blue, and all square and plain. They had porches and gardens, and their occupants seemed to be very carefree. There were lots of cats there too - I got a really cool picture of me with a little black kitten that lived outside a bakery. I was offering it food and it looked pleased [though not too much in need].

Note: The previous and next pictures would not load. For the clock tower, click here. For the boat, click here.

Like I said, almost all of Santorini is situated up on the cliff. There was just a little bit down at the bottom, like information and the cable car station, etc. There was also a place that rented out boats and gave rides. The boats were really cool - kind of like a pirate ship. I took lots of pictures of them. We didn't ride on one because it, too, was very pricey. And we only had so much time there - there was so much to do! After Santorini, we started back towards Italy. We had a few days at sea, where we did things like go to concerts, watch fruit carvings, and go to paper-flower-making classes. That was just as fun!

Coming up next: my favorite part! The Vatican's coming at you.