Hannah's RYE year in Switzerland: Athens & Egina

Before I say anything I would like to thank my host Rotary Club for allowing me and sponsoring me to go to Greece with my school Choir. At the beginning of the year a previous exchange student told me to join the choir because they go on trips, and last year he went to France for a week. When I found out about the trip to Greece I went and signed my self up for the choir as soon as I could. We would practice every Tuesday at lunch for 2 hours. Every month we had at least one concert. Fun fact: I can technically sing and I love it but I’m vvveerrryyy bad! I was always out of tune so sometimes I would just do a trick I learned in the Starburst summer camp and mouth “watermelon”. Not going to lie I did that the majority of the time but it was for the best. In the choir we sang songs in French, English, German, Swiss German, Greek, and Russian. In the second week of the Spring/Easter/last ski break the choir went to Greece for 8 days. We started our adventure Tuesday morning by meeting in Fribourg to catch our train to Zürich Airport. The plane ride to Athens a little over 2.5 hours. After getting everyone’s bags from the luggage carousel, we made our way to the busses that would be taking us to our hotel. On the way over there, we were lucky enough to get some tour guides that spoke French that would be accompanying us on the bus. They were able to explain the cool things that we were seeing while driving to the hotel. One of the most noticeable things about Athens is how many houses there are. The tour guides explained to us that while 11 million people live in the country of Greece, around 4 million of those people live in Athens. Which explains why when someone were to look at the city of Athens, all they would see is an ocean of white houses. It was really quite remarkable. Our hotel was about an hour from the airport and when our hotel was about an hour away from the airport and when we arrived, since we were such a big group, they organized for us to get a private meal from the hotel. We sat ourselves down, and waited to be served. They started with a little appetizer (half of an eggplant stuffed with cooked vegetables) and the main course (pork, potatoes, and more vegetables, with a salad) and then we finished everything off with a dessert (some great ice cream). It was really good! After dinner we all got together for rehearsal for a few hours because we had a concert the next day. After rehearsal we all went to the roof, there was a bar and a pool so we just went and hung out and played card games. The cool thing about the roof was the view. We could see Acropolis, which is the main attraction of Athens. It was all lit up and drew a nice spotlight on this point. It was hard to get a good picture because of the lack of day light but I wasn’t stressing because we were going to visit it the next day. The main program was going to Acropolis, so we woke up in the morning and got tickets to go to the metro. Fun fact: the metro door closed on me and it started moving but then it stopped and I got out. When we arrived to the Acropolis, we bought our tickets and started making our way up. We came across some artifacts and an old concert site where we sang a quick song and then we had some free time to explore before we made our way out. We had free time to get lunch this day so my friend Ryan and I decided to get some good old Greek Gyros that met all of my expectations. We also got Tzatziki w/ pita and some Baklava for dessert. After we visited the Acropolis museum which was also very cool. Later that night, we were going to preform our first concert in Greece. The cool part about this concert is that we were preforming for the Greece-Swiss ambassador at his house for an event he was throwing. After our short concert we were invited to eat with the others. The next morning we took a ferry to the island of Egina, off the coast of Athens. The boat ride was about one hour to Egina and once we arrived we made our way to the Temple of Aphaia. It is one of my favourite temples, and we were lucky because we were the only group there. After the temple we were given free time for lunch. My friends Nils, Eduard, Guy and Ryan went to a fish restaurant on the water, we had fresh fish and it was so tasety. I later went swimming in the ocean with some others. On our way to Delphi the next morning we stoped at a monastery in the mountains. I really liked it here beacause it is tucked away so its not so touristic and the architecture is just beautiful.