So after the movie we headed back up to the hostel to wait it out until 3:30am when we needed to leave for the airport. Since we didn't have an alarm of any kind I told Meghan to go to sleep while I read and showered and re-packed for the flight home. Unfortunately that night the bar was open until 1am and so our floor was really loud. Then after the bar closed these extremely obnoxious and now drunk French guys were running around and shutting the power off. Horrible. I finally had to go out and tell them to leave. Stupid French. So around 3am we headed downstairs to the front desk to "check out" and have the guy get us a cab to the airport.
Here's fun story #2. The stupid reception guy calls one of his friends to come get us, the guy changes the meter so that it is calculating twice as fast - so our ride costs twice as much and THEN he charged us an extra 10 Euro tourist fee! It was so outrageous. Our taxi ride from the airport the first time was 27 Euro - on the way back to the airport it was 66 Euro!! 66!! I was so pissed. Needless to say Athens did not leave a good impression on me!
So we got on our plane (after freezing in the airport) and rode the 3 hour flight to Amsterdam. We had 1 hour to make it to our next flight so we were walking quite swiftly to figure out where we were supposed to be when we came down the escalator and saw a crowd of easily 200 people waiting to go through customs. We got in line and started waiting, hoping that we would make it through on time. There were lots of people around us complaining because their flights are leaving. We barely make it through with 10 minutes to spare to make it to our gate. By the time we get to our gate, there is ANOTHER line waiting to go through another security checkpoint. So we get in line again. By the time we get up to the front of the line, Meghan and I are led to an interviewing section where this guy asks us questions about our itinerary and our plans and why we went where we did and what kind of lodging did we stay in and who packed our bags. After we passed, we had to go through the sniffer machine and then put our carry-on luggage through security one more time. Eventually though at exactly the time our plane was supposed to take off we walked onboard. It was a crazy run through airports and it was such a relief to get on the plane back to the states.
All in all - the trip was a complete success! Italy was fantastic and Santorini made Greece for me. I'm so glad we went and our next planned trip is to do Jerusalem, Petra and Egypt: who's in?
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