2022 – Late May – Exploring Greece – Athens

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On the road

Acropolis

Our ride to Piraeus is smooth and uneventful.  We meet a friend of the family, and former taxi driver, he knows the best way to get across town.  We arrive at our apartment in less than hour.  Glyfada, a suburb of Athens is filled with shops, restaurants and cafes.  Locals are out enjoying their evening.  After emptying our bags and getting familiar with the apartment we head out to see what’s in the area.  Walking several blocks, we see the restaurants are full and curiously we see everything but Greek cuisine.  We start our search for a market.  After getting directions we find a mini market for water and a few basics to eat.  In addition to the mini market, we keep an eye out for pharmacies.  Pharmacies in Greece do Covid tests, which we will need within a day of our flight back to the States.

Athens

Acropolis entrance

The apartment we are staying is close to the tram route leading into Athens.  The next morning, we head out looking for one of the stops, hopefully finding a map that tells us where to transfer since this route doesn’t go to the Acropolis.  Being Sunday morning there are only a few people riding the tram.  We shoot an image of the map and continue studying it memorizing some of the stops, so we know when to get off.

Parthenon

Everything goes well with our ride into Athens.  The tram ends its trip a few stops early due to a bike race going through the area.  We get some general directions and start our walking tour of Athens.  Our goal is the Acropolis, but we are directed to the Olympeion, our first, of several, archeological sites in Athens.  We walk around briefly before getting redirected towards the Acropolis.  After purchasing tickets, we head into the park with dozens of others.  Gusty winds encircle us at the bottom of the Acropolis.  We stop to read about some of the buildings, but our reading is curtailed by wind driven dust.  Once we climb the steps through the Acropolis’ entrance the dust ends but the winds get even stronger.  There is a continuous progression of people entering the Acropolis.  We dance around people slowly making their way up the steps, stopping for photos, selfies or just taking in the scene.  The size, the workmanship, the work that must have gone into constructing this is inspiring.  The buildings we see now were started in 525 BC.  There is evidence that the first construction was in the 14^th century BC.  The Acropolis is flooded with tourists.  Many are on their own, we also see large groups of people huddled around their own guides.  We hear English, German, Italian, Spanish and a few other languages we are not familiar with.  Athens surrounds the Acropolis as far as the eye can see.  The Parthenon is in the middle of renovation.  A huge crane sits in the middle of the Parthenon.  It prompted me to think about the building technique that had to be employed to erect the stone columns in 500 BC.

Foreground - 
Theater of Herodes Atticus

Erechtheion

Acropolis viewed from
Areopagus Hill

After contemplating each of the buildings we exit the Acropolis.  We walk past the Roman Agora and Hadrian’s Library before finding a restaurant serving Greek food.  We share orders of chicken souvlaki and stuffed grape leaves before heading on.   We tour through the Ancient Agora and museum seeing more works from that period.  The Agora was the main market of Athens.  While it doesn’t look like much now, with ruins of buildings overgrown by weeds, it was the center of Athens; economically, socially and politically.  The philosopher Socrates walked the streets during that time.

Church mosaic in
downtown Athens

Statue of
Emporer Hadrian

We start making our way back to one of the tram stops but come upon Syntagma Square, the central square of Athens, also known as Constitution Square.  In 1843 the Athenians rose up against the first king of Greece, Otto, demanding a constitution.  Evzones, presidential guards, dressed in traditional uniforms, guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  The hourly changing of the guard is quite a spectacle.  The steps are intricate and challenging to perform, worthwhile to see.

Evzones

Evzones

We head back home to our apartment.  Once back I head out looking for a pharmacy to see what we need to bring for our test.  None are open on a Sunday.  Hoping for better luck tomorrow.  We relax in front of the television, one of the few times we have one to watch, and dessert.  Tomorrow is our last day to tour Athens.

National Archeological Museum

I wake early with errands on my mind.  First, I want to find an open pharmacy for our tests.  Just around the corner from our apartments I find one.  Yes, they do the tests; yes, they print out the results; 10 Euros and we are good, bring identification.  Success.

Early Cycladic
figurine ca 3200 BC

Funerary shrouds

Sword handle

My other errand is to find some rope to secure Nicida’s suitcase.  It stayed closed on the last flight with one rope but we are taking two flights so we anticipate the worst hoping that securing it with three ropes will work.  Google leads me to a hardware store, it’s not a Home Depot by any means.  It is closer to a small single aisle shop with high ceilings.  The walls, up to the high ceiling, are packed with stuff.  Hardware stuff.  There is so much it would be hard to find anything.  The owner who fortunately speaks a bit of English leads me to the ‘rope section’ of the store.  The 2’ x 2’ counter has a stack of a half dozen spools of rope.  I get 5 meters, 16’ for 40 cents.  Success.

On the way back I spot a bakery selling large pieces of spinach pie.  When we are not eating our home cooked oatmeal we opt for the spinach pie.  It is delicious.

Jockey of Artemesion
Bronze statue

We make our way back to the area of the Acropolis with our goal the National Archeological Museum of Athens.  Instead of walking from the tram we find a subway station which takes us to within a few blocks.  The museum has artifacts dating from 6800 BC through the early Roman times, 100 – 200 AD.  There are statues, vases, frescoes, gold items, bronze items, jewelry, weapons, and funerary items.  We also see items from Egypt.  We spend hours looking and nodding our heads at the craftsmanship from that time.

Funeral stone

The statues catch our attention because it seems that they were individually made.  Different clothing for men and women, different hair styles for the women.  There were statues made to look like old people, middle age, children.  Heavy people, skinny people.  Important people and people unknown to us.

We have to leave before seeing the whole museum.  Our capacity to take in any more is overwhelmed.  I think one could spend a couple days there and not see everything.

Philosophers and other
important Greek people

With assistance from shop owners, we find our way back to the subway.  It is very crowded.  We mistakenly get on the car and get separated by an organized gang of pickpockets.  Neither Nicida nor I have ever come across pickpockets.  It is scary, they work as a team, in our case two teams, providing sensory overload distracting you.  One guy was permanently attached to my hip, if I moved, he followed not losing contact with me.  Another was yelling and laughing at me making it look like we were friends so nobody else in the car would pay any attention to what was going on.  A third person was grabbing my camera, playing with it.  There may have been a fourth, I don’t know.  Nicida was experiencing the same.  She noticed a woman standing to the side directing the gang.  Fortunately for us we had to get off at the next stop.  We manage to get off the car and catch our breath taking in all that had happened.  Nicida, growing up where she did, recognized what was going on right away, I did not.  We took stock of our stuff.  They may have gotten some money, about 20 Euros from me.  Nicida thinks they may have gotten a phone charging cable, nothing else.  We have our passports, credit cards, wallets and frayed nerves.  The next several nights I wake in the middle of the night reliving the incident.

We make our way to the connecting subway.  We look around as we get on the next car.  No problems.  We exit at our stop, our goal the Acropolis Museum.  Approaching the museum, we notice the lack of activity.  Asking a police officer we find out the museum closes in 30 minutes, so it is essentially closed.  We heard good reports of the museum and are sad we missed it.  We hit a few tourist shops, the last on this trip.  We find a few small items which is all we can fit into our bags.  Then back to the apartment.  We go out for a last meal, ordering chicken soup, grilled zucchini, and a mixed meats platter.  Way too much food.  The platter was for ‘two’ it said.  Maybe 'for four' would be a better estimate.  We return to the apartment packing the last time.

The next morning, we meet our taxi driver arriving at the airport three hours before the flight.  After standing in line for over an hour we finally arrive at the TSA line.  That done we have just enough time to order some food before boarding the plane for a 12-hour flight.  Both flights go well, after an hour drive, we walk into our house at just after midnight.  We are exhausted but too wound up to go to bed.    BTW Nicida’s bag did split open, but the three ropes kept it closed enough that we didn’t lose anything.  Even though we get to bed very late we are up again at 7 starting our life at home, laundry, weeds, the usual stuff.

Back home

A number of you asked me how I remember so many details from our trips.  I wish I could say it's my great memory, but it's not.  I use 5 1/2" x 8" journals for our trips.  The hard part is sitting down at the end of each evening to write the events of the day.  This trip is the best I have kept on top of my journaling.  I'm usually keep up for a couple days then....  On this trip I wrote 55 pages of notes.  Here are some random pages from our trip.

Nicida is amazed at my writing.  I sit down and start, rarely stopping until I'm done with our days' events.  When we return home, I usually have to hit some websites to fill in details, but overall details are in my journal.

Our trip through Greece was five weeks.  We went during May to beat the summer heat and mobs of tourists.  It worked.  Santorini and Mykonos were full of people, but they always are.  In fact, I have seen Mykonos with many more people.

For us, renting a car is the way to go.  Coupling the car with the Garmin GPS reliably got us to our destinations, even though we made a few changes to some of Garmin’s directions.  Gas is expensive but it allows us to come and go on our schedule and stop where we want.  The hotels I found were in the center of our activities, so we were able to leave the car sit for a day or so while we explored on foot or on an organized tour.

For hotels I use a combination of Hotels.com, Booking.com, AirBnb.com then following up with the individual hotel websites and Google maps.  Google maps allows me to see where we will be staying relative to places on our itinerary.  I want hotels close to museums and other points of interest.  Do not take these websites as recommendations, this is my process.  Just be prepared to invest a lot of time putting your trip together.

We did determine that five weeks is too long for us.  We were exhausted at the end of the trip.  Walking/hiking anywhere from 3 – 5 miles each day probably has something to do with that.  Carrying cameras, each an additional few pounds also wore us down.  We enjoyed our time there and will do Greece again.  There is so much to see and history to learn. 

I hope you enjoyed our adventure.

Thank you for stopping by,

Mark