Finally our bus arrives in Athens and we get to our Hostel around 3am. We walked in carrying a pizza box that contained the remains of our lunch. The guy working at the Hostel was willing to upgrade us to a better room for free if we gave him the pizza. Instead, we ended up going on a cigarette run for him in exchange for an early check-in time so that we essential got 3 nights accommodation here for the price of two. Also, in going on this errand for him we got our first look at the streets of Athens. This city completely lives up to its reputation as a dirty dirty city.
We fell asleep around 5am and woke up again around noon for a day of sightseeing. We started by taking a look at The Acropolis and the surrouding ruins. There was very little signage at any of these structures so for the most part we were pretty confused as to what we were looking at. Also, given that most of this stuff dates back to 5 BC we were pretty much just looking at piles of rocks that were once buildings.
The above two pictures are of a mystery building at the Acropolis...Well, at least it was a mystery to us.
This is the Parthenon, it was mostly under scaffolding as you can see.
It was a bit of a hike to get to the top of the Acropolis as Jordan shows us here.
At this point we were pretty tired and decided to call it quits for the day. We headed back to the hostel where we rested for a few minutes before heading out for dinner. We also were looking for something to do so we decided to go see a movie. The selection of movies wasn't all that great so we ended up going to see Zodiac which was in English but with Greek subtitles. The movie was long and pretty slow but luckily it seems to be common practice in Greece to have an intermission in the middle of the movie...much to our shock, we thought the projector had broken or something.
Day two we went to see the Temple of the Olympian Zeus (pictured above with me) and the 1896 Olympic stadium where the First Modern Olympics were held (pictured below with Jordan).
We also booked a ferry today that will take us to the island of Santorini at 7am tomorrow. We should arrive there around 3pm where we have booked a hostel for two nights. From here we plan to vist one other island (which we have not chosen yet) and then return to Athens for our flight to Venice, Italy.
2 comments:
Athens my be dirty and in ruins, but the sky is a beautiful shade of blue! Does Santorini really have the best sunsets in the world?
Enjoy the history lesson anyways. I'd be expecting Clint Eastwood to jump out in a toga at any moment! One week until birthday and beer!
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