Helloo! This week in the West world, it’s Easter; in the East here in Taiwan, we have Children’s Day and Tomb Sweeping Festival, which comes together and gives people 4-5 holidays (Spring break!). Children’s Day, though it’s called “Children’s Day”, actually adults have days off as well 😀. Cuz well, parents can’t leave kids at home unwatched, no?

As for Tomb Sweeping Festival, it’s a time that relatives gather together to commemorate the ancestors and the deceased. People used to clean the tomb during this season, but over time, more and more families choose to cremate and place family members in a columbarium. So the tomb sweeping is saved. People worship at the place of the columbarium.

Anyway, let’s start the journey in Greece! 🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷

Speaking of Greece, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it Acropolis in Athen or Blue Dome Church in Santorini? For me, both! But after browsing across different sources, I realize there’s more than that!

Here are some places that we listed out at the beginning:

is a UNESCO heritage site that is famous for having monasteries located on top of tall rocks. It takes around 3.5 hours to drive from Athens to Meteora. Since it’s close and is listed on UNESCO, how can I miss the opportunity! 😄

As the tourist attractions in Athen are relatively concentrated, so the plan is more like seeing things and hunting food. In that case, 2 days in the city is definitely enough. But we also wanted to visit Meteora and took some good rest, so a 4-day plan is ideal for us.

As for Santorini, we heard some people could stay on the island for a week, just to chill, walk around and do some boat activities.That’s really relaxing but not our style 😅 Concerning the fact that driving around the whole island takes only 40 minutes and the plan that we only visited some famous places in the West, we think 2 days is totally fine.

Athen isn’t that big and the tourist attractions are relatively concentrated, walking is ideal (especially when the metro, bus routes don’t necessarily connect well, so you still need to walk a few minutes).

As for Meteora, as we didn’t really need a car in Athen, it’s obvious that we wouldn’t bother renting one just for 1 day trip to Meteora. Joining a tour is a better option.

For going from Athen to Santorini, you can either taking a flight (45 min) or a ferry (5 hours with fastest type). We chose to go by ferry for the ferry experience and return by airplane for saving time. Another plan here to save time is: since our next destination after Santorini was Dubrovnik, Croatia, we purposely booked a flight departing 2 hours after our Santorini → Athens flight, so we could just stay at the airport, saving time on commuting. 😄😄