Friday, October 14th - Athens

The first of a couple of days in Athens, we think-we'd like to go to the island of Crete, so our length of stay here in the city will depend some on when we're able to arrange a trip over there. Woke up kind of late this morning... should really stop doing that. The shower was sooooo nice, though, and that probably doesn't help speed progress in the mornings either. Argh.

Set out after a quick breakfast at the hotel, and got immediately sidetracked at a CD store. Being in a music store anywhere in Europe is somewhat of a hazard, as it's usually possible to find jazz that's impossible to locate at home. So we browsed some, limiting ourselves to a couple of especially hard-to-find titles. Dropped those off at the hotel, and then I end up stumbling across a bookstore that caters to the business school at the Polytechnic University of Athens, and it's got GREAT stuff-practically the entire management "canon," such as it is. So, I narrowed things down to a couple of things I've had trouble finding, took down a lot of titles, and moved on, vowing to avoid this side of town for the duration of the trip. The guys at the store were very helpful, though, in helping me with contacts at the business school (for a project I'm working on), so that helped make the distraction worthwhile.

After one more hotel drop we were ready to get out and see some of the ancient sites. First on the list, of course, was the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and that was only a moderate walk from the hotel. Soon we were at the bottom of the hill, and since we could see one side of the temple of Athena from there I thought it would be a good place to take pictures of my travel bugs. What transpired next was truly baffling: as I'm getting ready to take a picture of a traffic-cone key chain with the Acropolis in the background, a woman employee of some sort approaches me and asks me what I'm doing. So I explain that the key chain was a toy given to me by a friend, and I was taking it on this trip. Unbelievably, she insisted that I *not* take the picture, because the object I was holding was a "symbol" (of what I never could figure out), and that it wasn't allowed. Huh? So after looking around at the multitudes of other tourists with their cameras, having their own various pictures taken with the hill in the background, I put my stuff away and made a private vow to get the shots from somewhere else.

That minor irritation over, we paid our entrance fees and walked up the hill. As people who stayed awake during their world history class (alas, not me) already know, the Acropolis is home to a number of ancient sites. You begin at the Propylaia, the entrance to the ancient city that was first erected around 430 B.C.E. It's being restored right now, but visitors still enter through the structure, proceeding up a walkway that switchbacks up to the temple of Athena Nike. It was on this footpath where we ran into Judith and Amy, who had hired a guide for their visit. They invited us to join them but we decided instead to explore on our own. We did take this as an opportunity to be annoying, though (so what else is new?), and made sure we got a few compromising photos of their party as we ran into them at the site. I think it's this quality that endears us to all our friends.

Moving on from the Propylaia, you walk up a gently sloping pathway to the Parthenon. The path is made up of both soil and exposed marble, and over the years the marble has become VERY slippery, making me glad I wear my hiking boots just about everywhere I go. After exploring the outside of the Parthenon and taking a bunch of pictures, we walked around it to the south and checked out the museum there. This is where the collection (well, most of it) of sculpture from the site is housed, and we spent an hour or so looking around before we moved on.

The next structure--to the north this time-was the Erechtheion. This particular temple was built on the site where Poseidon was to have struck the ground with his trident, and where Athena produced the olive tree. The distinguishing feature of this building is the six "Caryatids," women figures who support the southern portion of the structure in place of columns. We took a stroll around it with the cameras, and by this time were somewhat saturated... there's a lot to look at and learn about, and it gets to be a lot to take in. So we decided to head down through the Agora (the central meeting place/administrative center in ancient times), and we had just about made it through as the site closed. Not a bad bit of exploring for one afternoon.

Needing to relax a bit and soak it all in, we stopped at a restaurant just outside the Acropolis gates. Thinking we might end up someplace different for dinner, we decided to have appetizers here, and ordered a Greek salad, some sort of meatball dish, and a half-liter of wine, all of which were excellent. Dinner never ended up coming together (we were pretty wiped out by the time we got back to the hotel) but we finished up the evening with a slice of cheesecake at-this still cracks me up-Starbuck's. There's one right near the hotel, and at 10 p.m. it was the only place still open.

Off to dreamland once again. Tomorrow, we do some geocaching...
-Leanne