I remember being really impressed by how the agency took care of us. As soon as we arrived in Athens we were greeted with one of those signs that you always wish were for you. We were taken to our hotel in downtown Athens and we spent the evening strolling around Plaka. Plaka is the old town and weaves around with all sorts of restaurants and tourist shops.

We spent the next day on a guided tour around the city. It was pretty lame but helped us orient ourselves. The sites not to miss are the National Gardens and the Acropolis. I personally thought the changing of the guards in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was a neat ceremony. That evening we went up to the top of one of the seven hills in Athens on a cogwheel train and the view of the sunset and the city was beautiful. On the top of the hill was a little Greek Orthodox church and we ducked in to see the evening mass starting Holy Week. We were excited to leave Athens. It’s dirty and the streets are sketchy. We kept reminding each other how things aren’t like that in Switzerland.

• Photos from Athens

Monday was the beginning of our cruise on the Sea Diamond. Ironically the first thing we did on the ship was an emergency drill. Our first stop was later that afternoon in Mykonos. It was not what I expected. I had imagined a hustle-bustle party town. It felt like walking through a painting. We got lost among the labyrinth of whitewashed houses with brilliantly colored trims. We found ourselves along a beach that was covered with wildflowers and had a little church nestled on the edge. SO pretty. I’m glad it was the off-season. For a while we were the only ones strolling around.

• Photos from Mykonos

Tuesday we arrived early in Kusadasi, Turkey. We had a guided tour to Ephesus. It was really fun to imagine that Paul walked those same streets and taught the people there. The countryside itself was worth seeing even if there weren’t old buildings.

Then we roamed around the markets in Kusadasi. We came really close to buying a Turkish rug. The stupid salesman kept talking at such a rate that Elisa and I couldn’t even converse about whether we wanted it. I think we would have bought it if he had just shut up for two minutes. All the salesmen were SO pushy and in-your-face. They kept saying, “What have you bought your beautiful wife?” or, “What a lovely couple.” or, “Do you want to make your wife happy?” We could not hold a conversation! 😡

• Photos from Turkey

That evening we went to Patmos, the island where John the Beloved was exiled. We went to a monastery that was built in his honor. A fun story about the monastery: The island of Patmos was often raided by pirates. So the people of Patmos built their homes right up to the walls of the monastery. So when the pirates came, the monks of the monastery would throw down ropes over the walls and the people would climb up on their roofs and use the ropes to enter the monastery for safety.

Then we went to the Cave of the Apocalypse. We were especially excited to see the cave where John received Revelations. It is said that a crack in the ceiling formed as the Lord spoke to John. The cave felt sacred. There were notches in the wall where John might have rested his head or his hands. You could imagine that the Lord really spoke to John there just because of the way it felt. I made sure to feel the crack in the ceiling and imagine that sacred moment.

• Photos from Patmos

When we got back on the ship, we had “Greek Night.” There was a show with traditional music and dance from the Greek culture. It was a lot of fun. And Chad and I even got to join in at the last dance. We kind of learned the Dancing Zorba. We had no time to do anything on board. Each day we got a little more tired. We docked early each morning in places and were always busy at night until late. I had one big complaint with the cruise ship, and that was that we were given a room with two single beds! Who wants to go on a honeymoon with separate beds? I tried not to cry. We didn’t leave the staff a tip because of that. Plus, they yelled at us when we sent back a nasty milkshake—or at least what they thought was a milkshake.

The next day was Rhodes. If you ever go to Greece, go to Rhodes. First of all, the sea was beautiful. We went on a tour that stopped at a pottery shop. A guy made a vase on a wheel right in front of us, and then he destroyed it, all in the space of about two minutes. They were showing off. It was fun to see all the detail and symbolism that they pack into one little thing. I also really liked that it was a trade that is passed along within families.

We walked up to the Lindos Acropolis. There were 245 steps to the top, as the guides reminded us umpteen times. The town was really small and it had a lot of fun character. One of the most beautiful things about it was that it was all pedestrian. And all the paths were hand-paved with these beautiful designs like a mosaic. They used white and black stones from the beaches. There was a little church that we went in to and we took some time admiring the ceilings which had frescos with Biblical themes. Adam and Eve were created and cast out of the garden. A soul was being judged and there was a scale. On the side of the devil and his demons were a stack of weights and more demons were bringing more weights. On the other side the scale was empty and yet weighed more than the other, (as an angel was spearing a demon that was trying to pull down the scale). We couldn’t take any pictures.

The Old Town in Rhodes is the most medieval city I’ve ever seen. It has huge walls with a double moat. The guides also told us umpteen times that the moats were never filled with water because they were above sea level, showing that sometimes guides just start to run out of material. Elisa and I liked souvenir shopping here. We got good pictures in the castle-looking museum. There was a cool Muslim cemetery. It looked really old and had the neatest looking tombstones. We sat on the beach and relaxed. It was a nice day.

• Photos from Rhodes

Thursday morning we left early for an excursion in Crete. By the time we got to Crete we were pretty weary of tours. You can only take so much archeology. You can only take so much education. 🙂 Plus, it is nice to be able to see things at your own pace and without a billion other people. So, we went to the ancient city of Knossos. By the time the Greek civilization was flourishing, Knossos had been deserted by the Minoans for 1,000 years. We visited the palace that once had over 1,500 rooms. It was decorated with double axes and engravings of double axes. It had the nickname Labyrinth, which meant “house of the double axes.” The palace wasn’t organized very well, so it was hard to find your way through it. Ever since then the word labyrinth has meant a maze. It’s also decorated with bull horns, which makes it the place where the myth around King Minos and the Minotaur were derived.

• Photos from Crete

It was the last day of our cruise. The overhead speakers announced that the view of Santorini is the best from the front of the ship and that we were already approaching the island. Elisa and I were already reading at the front of the boat and the view wasn’t bad. We had already gotten all ready to disembark. Our suitcases were packed and had been picked up by the crew. We had our backpack with us just so we wouldn’t need to go back to the room. We had gotten our passports and settled our account and we were ready to get off the boat.

The engines made a weird grinding sound when we stopped. I think they had put the boat into reverse. There was a scraping sound like the boat had brushed some rocks too. I thought the anchor had just been dropped. And then, ten minutes later, when the boat started to list, I thought it was just the normal tugging of the boat’s anchor. We were near the bar and we felt sorry for the guy because a whole bunch of the glasses were breaking. Basically the whole bar started to fall apart.

A crew member asked us to go towards the side of the ship that was listing the highest. Lots of people that had just come from their rooms were carrying the standard-issue life jackets from their cabins. It seemed normal to me that a ton of people would have such an overreaction to a normal list. I didn’t even think anything of it. A guy on the restaurant’s staff was panicking and screaming for a few minutes. He was wearing a name tag showing he was a member of the crew, so I didn’t like that he was screaming in front of everybody.

An announcement over the loudspeakers said, “Everyone remain calm! Everything is under control!” That was not reassuring, because it could mean anything. It could mean that they were doing triage, trying to decide which passengers should survive, and the process was under control. I still thought people were just overreacting though. There was a really scared teenage kid. We were joking with him and reassuring him because we didn’t think it was a big deal. About then there was another announcement about how some water-tight doors were shutting and you should keep clear if you saw one. The elevators had been shut down (and the toilets too, but I won’t say more about that). A family that was stuck in the elevator had to get pried out. Their two little kids were bawling. It was hard to watch. I was doing fine but that was probably the most traumatic thing to see. There were a couple other announcements about kids that had been separated from their parents, and I heard that they were all reunited pretty quickly.

We waited for a long time before getting more instructions. In the meantime, some kids raided the kitchen for some sandwiches. Crew members that were sprinting up and down the stairs brought everybody life jackets. Other really tired crew members brought water to all the decks. A few times they asked us to go up the stairs but then changed their minds. There was a lot of waiting. At one point when they began loading a lifeboat, you could hear some people up on the deck in a desperate panic to get on. One of our friends told us that he was on the uppermost deck handing out life jackets, and a 45-year old guy ran up to him and tried to rip the life jacket right off our friend’s neck for himself. So crazy. By this time we had taken dozens of photos of everybody standing on this big incline and we had been exchanging email addresses. Also, we could see that the entire caldera was full of ships (and a bunch of helicopters and a plane) all holding nearby. We exchanged theories about what had happened, and I think I convinced most people that one isolated compartment was full of water and would take all night to fix. Then everyone would leave in the morning.

After a couple hours of this, all the passengers got into a single file line and started going down the stairs. The original plan of going up the stairs to the lifeboats had failed, because they couldn’t get people off on the lifeboats! They started by loading up a lifeboat with little kids and realized on the way down that it wasn’t safe and so they didn’t do it anymore. The lifeboat kept bouncing against the ship because of the angle. And we heard that the crew was missing tools that they needed to work the lifeboat cranes. :/It’s a bit terrifying that no one knew how to work the lifeboats. We’re so lucky that we were so close to shore and other boats could come and evacuate us. Regardless, it took hours, so if the problem had been more severe we’d be swimming. So Elisa and I ended up walking down the stairs with an elderly lady that needed support. A few levels down there was an open hatch where people could be moved to a different boat. There was a lot of confusion. Alarms were ringing loudly in our ears.

At the evacuation point some crew members were yelling, “Women and children first!” By the way, worst thing you can do when trying to keep people calm during an evacuation! For one, it implies that not everyone is getting off. 😕 And secondly, here they’ve been trying to get families back together, only to split them up. Chad made me cooperate and go without him. So I got to “walk the plank. “There were two ways to get onto the rescue boat. You either slid down the mattresses or you walked a narrow plank up to a high corner of the boat. There was another rescue boat where people had to climb down a rope ladder hanging out the side of the ship. I reluctantly got on the rescue boat without Chad. And then, I had to wonder whether he was getting on the same boat as me and whether we were getting dropped off at the same place. I had a great view of the sinking ship. 🙂

While the women and children crowded on, the men sat around sipping water. A crew member brought a tray of biscuits from the kitchen. It was a pretty laid back atmosphere (except for the alarms and the helicopter noise). Someone told me that there was flooding in the lower decks, so that meant that some unlucky people’s belongings were getting destroyed. At one point I moved a suitcase out of people’s way. The thought crossed my mind, “I wonder where our suitcases ended up?” And then in the middle of a pile of luggage, I spotted our suitcases! I thought about bringing them on the rescue boat with me, but I also thought that it might just be easier to get them in the evening when everybody got to come back and get their stuff. And in the end I just decided that bringing them with me would be more convenient, so that’s what I did. I slid down some mattresses into the rescue boat wearing a backpack and toting both suitcases.

Eventually all the crew evacuated and we got uneventfully dropped off on shore. Elisa saw me from the top deck of the rescue boat so we got reunited right away. Since we were disembarking in Santorini anyway, we were all prepared–we had a hotel reservation, we had all our luggage and we had someone meeting us at the port. 🙂 Everyone else was pretty jealous that we already had our stuff off the boat.

The ship had drifted almost all the way into land. Another girl said that it had hit the cliff. After everyone was off they tugged it towards another port out of sight.

Night was falling by now. We got to see our first Santorini sunset. 🙂 They’re famous, you know. Santorini’s pier is hundreds of feet below the towns, so you have to either ride a cable car or ride a mule or ascend 600 steps to get to the top. We tried to leave on the next cable car and were denied because the port authorities didn’t want anyone to leave. We were wandering around and chatting with people for the next couple hours while the cruise director tried to get things sorted out. One of the kids we had met earlier in the week was down in his room when the ship hit. First he smelled smoke and as the boat began to tip, water started to fill his room. I believe he said it got up to six inches within minutes. It was his 21st birthday. So we sang to him on the pier.

They finally determined that they could get 300 people onto another ship that was in the bay. And a sister ship to the Sea Diamond, the Perla, would be in Santorini by 1 am to take the rest of the passengers and crew back to Athens. So they had everyone get registered and I got to give my German notebook paper to help.

The guy from the travel agency found us then. He talked to the authorities and we were free to go. Then somehow he got us to the front of the cable car line (skipping past hundreds of other passengers). By now we had heard that the catastrophe was being broadcast on CNN world news. In the cable car station I got interviewed by a local news crew. 🙂 We got a shuttle to the hotel so we could finally sleep. It was a seven-hour ordeal.

In the morning we asked our travel agent what was happening to the ship. He said it sunk. We laughed and asked what really happened. Really though, he said again that it had sunk. It had been dragged to a shallower part of the caldera and then it had gone under! We then heard from other people later that they had seen on the news that all that was left were the orange lifeboats where the ship had been. It sounds like they have plans to fix it, or do something with it, but I don’t know what. It is sickening and makes everything five times scarier. I thought about everything that was on board being destroyed in the water–except for our baggage. We know that all the people got off the boat safely. There was a broken finger but that’s all I heard of. Elisa and I are the only people from the entire ship that escaped with all our luggage.

I woke up this morning half wondering if it had really happened, because it seemed like another one of my crazy dreams. Unbelievable. It’s all anyone has talked about today.

Elisa and I got in the water today and it was bone-chilling. It felt like below 50 degrees. You know that feeling where all your nerves are tingling, right on the edge where you are about to lose feeling? If we had needed to swim away from the cruise ship, it would have been terrifying. I can just imagine people who are already scared jumping into the cold water and not being able to make out in their heads how cold it is. I imagine jumping into that water, combined with the shock, you would wonder if it would be able to sustain life.

• Photos of the evacuation