Greece

As I sit in my living room with the window open, a warm breeze hits my face and instantly the smell reminds me of my other home: Athens, Greece. It also helps that two men walking by were speaking Greek.

Experts say that our sense of smell is our most powerful and any of us that have been instantly transported to another place just by a whiff of air would agree.

The smell for me is the warm air mixed with the aroma of diesel fumes, instantly I am taken to my home in Athens, where I am sitting drinking coffee listening to the roar of cars. The way the warm dry breeze mixes with the air you only feel in a foreign country.

Greece is a country deeply rooted in its history. The Aramaic alphabet is the oldest language in existence and is the basis of all languages used today, many words in English hold their roots in Greek.

In my search for blogs out of the country, most often people write about their travels through the unbelievable landscape and culture of the country.

Instead of connecting readers to them, I thought I would give you some of my experiences and showcase some of my favorite places.

I love Athens, it is dirty, gritty and crowded. I tell friends who travel there to only stay for a couple of days because I think it is hard to handle for the average vacationer. Tourist areas in Athens are notoriously high priced and Greeks love to take advantage of the wide-eyed tourist.

My mother and I have tested this. We sat down to eat the heavy tourist traffic of Monastiraki and Plaka, we were speaking English. When the waiter greeted us and handed us the menu we were both shocked at the prices.

We both kind of laughed and then my mom in her Athenian Greek accent said to the waiter, "Give us the real menu."

"I am sorry," the waiter replied, "I thought you were Americans."

He promptly returned with another menu, and the price was 5 Euros cheaper for certain items.

The Greeks have been living with tourists for a long time, and they have quickly adapted their dislike for outsiders by taking them for all they have, I guess it makes up for visitors invading their homeland.

Monastiraki

Native Greek people are homogeneous, and it is hard for them to see outside of their culture.

My sister, Christine, was born in Greece and lived there until she was five years old. My sister does not look Greek with blonde hair and blue eyes, but is 100 percent native.

She traveled last year with her boyfriend Matt to Athens, and said she never wants to vacation in her homeland again unless she has to.

Christine and Matt have lived and traveled all over the world and said that the Greeks were the rudest people they had encountered. It was only when she began speaking Greek to locals that they warmed up to her.

I too have seen this side of the country, as my Greek is at times pretty bad. I don't look Greek either and have experienced prejudice because I don't blend in.

On a much greater scale, here is another example of Greece's reluctance to accept outsiders. BBC Article

But all of this could never keep me away from Greece; the islands are some of the most beautiful places in the world. The highly tourist populated Santorini is one of my favorite with its volcanic cliffs and theory that it was where the lost city of Atlantis once stood.

Fira, Santorini