Saturday, October 15 - Athens

Up again after somewhat of a fitful nights' sleep. Seems that about 2am there was about fifteen seconds of gunfire near the hotel. I didn't hear it (I must have actually been sleeping at the time and woke up later), but I guess I must have been the only one who didn't. Nobody seems to talk about what it was, and I'm guessing it's the anarchists the cabdriver told us about. Hope they missed whatever they were shooting at.

Found a travel agent today and booked passage to Crete and a hotel. We'll leave on Friday morning from Athens, stay one night in Iraklion, and then return on Saturday to Athens as we have a 9:00 flight back to Rome on Sunday morning. Cool. Also booked a rental car for the rest of this week, and it'll be dropped off at the hotel tomorrow. Apparently, it's customary for the agencies to do that here, which is kind of neat. Sure beats having to go back to the airport to pick it up, or to have to find a rental car lot here in the city somewhere.

Next of the agenda was to track down a couple of geocaches here in Athens. The whole premise behind geocaching is to get the seekers of your cache to neat places, and because of this it ends up being a cool way to explore parts of a city you might not see otherwise. The first caches we looked for were located in the National Gardens, which are very much like Athens' version of New York's Central Park. Out of three caches hidden there we only found one-there were far too many people around to grab the other two without tipping someone off (non-geocachers who stumble across caches often move, throw away, or pillage them, and in rare cases get suspicious and call bomb squads), so we skipped them and moved on. The park was fun to explore, though. It's a popular place for families, and in the center of the park is a small zoo with a handful of critters who seem well-enough taken care of.

Moving on from the National Gardens, we boarded a subway to the location of our next cache. This one was located on the Hill of the Nymphs, and we got there by walking through a residential neighborhood near the Acropolis and then taking a trail that began right behind a small church. The trail actually led to several interesting spots; the first was an observatory that was built in 1842. It was closed (it's open to visitors one day a month, apparently), but in front of the observatory was a stunning view of the Acropolis, the surrounding hills, and the city. After gawking at the vista and taking my travel bug photos (ha!), we moved on to the adjacent hill of the Pynx, which was an ancient assembly site at which the great orators would address the citizens. It was awe-inspiring to think of who spoke in this place at one time: Aristides, Pericles... and the site is supposed to have held an assembly of about 5000. Wow.

Back on the trail once again, we got to the summit and were greeted with a cool breeze and a great view of the Saronic Gulf. From there it was a short walk to the cache, and after locating it in a crevice we signed the log and swapped a travel bug I picked up in Scotland for one in the cache. We went back the way we came along the trail, and taking a right turn just before arriving back at the church put us right at the ancient city again, which gave us a great chance to walk over to the theater of Dionysos. This ampitheater, first built around the fourth century B.C.E. and then reconstructed in stone and marble in about 345 B.C.E., is where theater as we know it is supposed to have begun. Of course we couldn't leave Athens without paying homage to such a place, so after taking a few pictures, we took seats and waited for ancient voices to speak to us from beyond as the sun set in a cloudless sky.

By this time we were getting hungry, so we went off in search of sustenance. Tonight's feast turned out to be a tomato and cucumber salad, bread, and an unbelievable risotto, made with pork, cheese, onions, tomatoes, peppers, and who-knows-what-else... one of those meals that will stand out in my memory as a highlight of the trip. Finished it off with a white wine and some sort of apertif supplied by the waiter (I've got the name of the stuff written down somewhere, but I can't seem to find it), and feeling somewhat dumbstruck after all the great food, we wandered back down the hill toward the hotel. Once we had left the tourist center, it seemed everything was deserted except for the cats, which are EVERYWHERE in Greece (this country is in desperate need of a spay-and-neuter program). So we scratched a couple of ears along the way, bidding our thanks for the hospitality, and retired for the night. Hope there's no shooting this time.