Athens 2008

Athens, Summer 2008

It seemed fitting that we woulod be in Athens for the start of the olympics. Sure, they weren't starting in Athens this time, but that's just a detail that we were able to overlook.

It may not, however, seem fitting to start out the photos of our trip with a picture of a toilet. I have an excuse for this of course- I didn't get my camera out on the FRA-ATH flight. Tabitha's camera has all of those pictures. It was a nice flight indeed- Aegean Airways treated us well. It was about a 3-hour flight, and they served us a hot meal. This was especially impressive! They also had an upgraded version of the "airshow" program that showed where we were flying over. I noticed at one point that we were over Beruit and thought about how we were amidst places that I had once dismissed as "far away." After hearing so much news coverage about violence in that area in years past, it seemed only natural to want to say "so that's the place that they were always talking about."

Our flight arrived after dark, and it took us some effort to try and call the hostel that we had picked out (Student Traveller's Inn). Part of the problem with standby travel is that you can't really book lodging accomodations in advance. After all, you might get stuck and not get on a flight, and very few places have a flexible enough cancellation policy to account for this possibility. We were not able to get them on the phone, so we figured we would just take the city bus to the neighborhood and show up in person. That worked well, except that our hostel was out of space. The good news was that there were several other options very close by, so we walked over to the next one. He gave us what seemed to be a reasonable rate of 70 Euros for a private double room with its own bathroom. So on the topic of the bathroom, here it is:

Above you can also see the little porch and the rest of the room. The last two pictures are from the next morning, and were just around the corner from where we stayed. It should give you an idea of what at least one person thinks of George Bush.

The Student Traveler's Inn had room for us for our other 4 nights, so we moved over there for the remainder of our stay. The neighborhood we were in seemed old, and lots of the streets were closed to cars. You can see below that the room was about the same as the first one, though perhaps a bit smaller. Tabitha was starting to wonder if we should go back to the other place.

Then we opened the door to the balcony and decided to stay. The spiral staircase led to the roof, and that mountain-looking thing in the second picture below is the Acropolis.

Since it was August, the temperature was high. It was nice and warm for the duration of our stay, especially on the roof. It turned out to be a nice place to go eat supper though, since it cooled of after the sun went down.

Our next mission was to find some lunch. We got the plate that you see and some water for under 10 Euros, which turned out to be a pretty good price. As you can see by the 3rd picture, we didn't leave any behind.

Next we set out for some tourism. You can see that Tabitha was glad to have her hat to keep the sun's heat at bay. We saw lots of cool motorcycles while we were there, and you can see one of them in the row below.

We walked to the Acropolis first. There are two theaters and a few other buildings to around the lower elevations, so we saw them first.

One thing that amazed me about being on top of the hill was the number of stones that littered the site. I guess after so many years and changes of power, lots of structures had come and gone. In some cases modern scientists are able to figure out if a piece was originally part of the Parthenon, but sometimes they discover a piece that belongs in the middle of the wall without finding the stones that would have gone underneath it.

You can see from these pictures why it was such a good place to build an important building. Once on top you have great visibility of the surrounding area.

As we made our way back down the hill, we saw a series of caves. The second picture below has niches that are carved into the wall, perhaps to support candles. In the last picture below you can see how what looks like a natural cliff is actually a man-made wall that encloses a cave.

The first picture below is of a theater that is at the base of the hill. Look closely to see the figures on the far side of the stage. The second picture is of some art in the subway. There were lots of great displays in the subway stations, mostly of things that they learned while excavating.

We were in the subway because we had to go get bus tickets. Why would we need bus tickets? Tabitha wanted to go see a play. Not just any play, but a play in a town called Epidaurus, which was a 3 hour bus ride away. We didn't want to buy tickets to the play until we were sure that we would be able to get there, and we didn't want to buy bus tickets until we were sure that we would be able to go to the play. Since there were thousands of seats in the theater and perhaps 50 on the bus, it seemed like a safe bet to go ahead and buy the bus tickets. After some phone calls it turned out that we were going to have to go to the bus station in person to get the tickets. There wasn't subway service to the bus station, so we would take a subway then walk to catch another bus. We were lucky to find an English speaker on the bus. She was going there to buy a ticket to a similar part of the country, and since she spoke Greek, she helped us get our travel booked. Then she showed us where we would need to come on the next day to catch the bus. Honestly, this seemed like a lot of hassle just to go see a play, especially when there was more than we would ever be able to see within just walking distance of our hostel. Tabitha said that I was just being poopy pants about the whole thing and that I should stop complaining.

Here are a few of the motorcycles that we saw while we were going across town and back.

Check out the first picture below and take a close look at the bike on the right. It's a bit of an old one!

With a second busy day of tourism over, we retired to the roof for some sunset and night pictures of the town. The lights on the hill made for some great shots.

Our next stop was the national history museum. Our AAA guidebook said that it was one of the best museums in the world, so we took the subway over to check it out. It was on the way to our far away bus stop, so that made it all the more convenient. We weren't exactly sure where the entrance was, so we walked down a street to find it. The area was crowded with what seemed to be homeless people, and we actually saw someone injecting himself with what I'm sure must have been some sort of medicine. Yeah right! There was plenty of spray-painted grafiti around, and though we didn't feel like there was an immediate threat to our safety, it wasn't the kind of place where we wanted to hang around. We did see a couple of cats though. One was standing guard and the other was sleeping with the hose. In the last picture below you can actually see where someone spray painted the sign in front of the museum.

We went into the lobby and realized that it was pretty expensive to get in. I don't remember exactly how much it was, but it was close to 20 Euros each if I remember correctly. We didn't have very long to spend in the museum, and it didn't seem worth that much for just 45 minutes of looking. So instead we went to the museum cafe and saw a few of the works that were scattered in that area.

Then we finally made it to the bus station. Once we got there we realized that there were actually about 5 busses that were going to the play, and we were on one of the first. We enjoyed the ride through the countryside, since it was mostly along the coast. There were lots of olive orchards, or whatever you call the places where people grow olives. The motorcycle picture below is the first one that I took once we arrived.

The concession stand was pretty well stocked. They had hot dogs, which were actually 12" loaves of bread with a hole in one end for a long frank, sandwiches, fresh squeezed orange juice, and more. When we got there we learned that the city of Epidaurus was located where the theater is, and it's just that the theater is about all that's left. It is one of the better preserved examples of a theater though.

We got in as soon as they would let us as to pick the best seats. We were in the cheap section (in case you couldn't have guessed that) but the seats that we got were just about as good as there were in that zone. Look in the third picture below to see the amazing scenery. The sun was setting and the mountains made for a great backdrop. The last picture is a view of what we were sitting on.

We were in our seats about an hour before the show, so we just sat and watched the sky get dim as the people trickled in. Before we knew it the sky was completely dark and the place was getting crowded.

Going in to the whole play adventure I didn't really understand the schedule. In the end it was not one play that we would see, but two. They were both stories about Edipus. And since they were all in Greek, we didn't have much of an idea about what was going on. I was talking with Ms. Rhonda when we got back to the US and she said "Well at least you knew what the story was about so that you could follow along." This might have been the case had I been adequately educated, but since I'm a product of the public school system, I had not studied the story before. Now, several months later, I've started to get the idea of what it was all about.

Once the play was over we made our way back to the bus and made ourselves comfortable. Since the plays had run so long, it was very late, perhaps midnight. We slept for most of the trip home, but when we were awake, we were wondering about how we were going to get back to our hostel. After all, we had relied on both a subway and a bus to get to the big bus station, and those services wouldn't be operating at 3:00am when we would be getting back. We also had a tourist map of the town, but the bus station wasn't on it. As it played out we actually got really lucky again though, because the bus was going to drop off at two locations. The second location was the bus station of departure, and the first stop was somewhere that we didn't know about, since we didn't speak Greek. At the first stop though, we saw a subway tunnel sign. This meant that we would at least be on our tourist map, so we hopped off. After some time finding street names, then fixing our position on the map, we decided that we could just walk home. The city seemed safe, and the weather was nice, so we started heading in that direction. It turned out to be about an hour of walking, which wasn't bad.

Below you can see our next adventure day. Tabitha liked the advertisement that you can see in the first picture, so she had me take a picture of it. We were in town right around the 8-8-8 day and thus the start of the olympics. We're not really sure what the ad was about, but there it is. The other pictures are of the sightseeing missions. The arch is Hadrian's Gate, and the other pictures are of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus.

We found some lunch and then meandered through the national garden. Tabitha thought it was funny that most of their plants were merigolds, lantana, and zenias, but I thought it was a pretty smart way to landscape. I think she was just expecting something more like a botanic garden, when it reality it was more like an urban park that happened to have some flowers in it.

We were surprised to find a zoo in the middle of the garden. Not a collection of exotic animals, but more so a variety of fairly common animals in an uncommon place.

We enjoyed a few more sights on our way to the Panathinaiko Stadium, the last two pictures below. This was the stadium from the 1896 summer olympics.

We also got to see a changing of the guard near the palace.

This was our last day in Athens, so on the way back we stopped so that Tabitha could go T-shirt shopping. She almost got the one in the picture, but decided instead that the picture would be enough.

We had a nice dinner at the restaurant across the street from the hostel, and set our alarm to wake up early on the next day.

Click here to read the next part, Germany.

Home	Contact Me	Copyright © 2009 Jared Yates - All Rights Reserved
This page last modified 03/27/09