Saturday, June 22
If the night is ruled by cats in Athens, then the dogs have the day. And they use it to sleep.
Everywhere we went today, there were stray dogs passed out. They were on the sidewalks with their backs against shops, in the wooded areas curled up next to (or around) tree trunks, or sometimes sprawled out literally in the middle of the street, in areas with no cars.
Shortly after midday Amanda and i got the opportunity to pet one. She was musing aloud how much he looked like Alyssa's dog Herman, and he must have picked up that he was being complimented, so he began to follow us and eventually stuck his head right into Amanda's hand. This was right before lunch; we saved some of our bread that we were too stuffed to eat to give to the dog, but we were unable to find him again.
Backing up, though. We got a late start to the day, probably because our bed was so damn comfy and the air conditioning like sweet nectar from Olympus. Once we started moving, showered individually in the tiny, leaky shower stall, and got our luggage repacked, we stored it in the hotel's office downstairs at their offer, and set out immediately for the Acropolis. As you might imagine, it wasn't hard to find.
There's really not much to say about it; you pay an entry fee, climb a long, winding staircase, and then there's the Parthenon, in shambles. It looks infinitely worse than any pictures you've probably seen, all decrepit and falling down. There's been restoration work started, but it must have began recently; they're not very far on it. Amanda's professional estimate is that tourists may be able to walk around it the way we did the Coliseum in Rome in another 50 years.
There was a second site that we were admitted to with our Acropolis tickets. It had a few columns sticking in the air, and one downed one that had split into even sections like a sliced banana, but mostly it was an open field. I'm not really sure what it was that we were supposed to see there. Ruins, sure, but there are ruins randomly scattered about the city, fenced off in the middle of commercial or residential areas, easily viewable from the roads and walkways.
And then we visited the Panathenaic Stadium, where the ancient Greeks held the Olympic Games every four years for over a thousand before Christianity rose to prominence and banned them in the third century. The Olympics would not be held again until 1896, when the Stadium was restored to its original greatness. That's when the modern age of the Olympic games began, and it immediately started moving around the world from there; Athens would not see the Olympics come home again until 2004, when some events were held in the Panathenaic Stadium (a small stadium by today's standards), and where the marathon ended.
The really striking thing about the Panathenaic Stadium is that the whole thing is wrought of marble. Can you imagine it? An entire sports coliseum, holding 68,000 screaming fans, being completely constructed of white marble? I mean, think about how much a marble counter top will run you. It's really a sight to behold.
The audio tour led us then through a cave, the mouth of which opens near the starting line on the track. This cave was used as a preparation area for athletes in ancient times as well as recently, but apparently was also used in the old days by naked teenage girls praying for husbands. Culture is a weird thing.
It leads then into a room memorializing the history of the modern Olympics. There are posters with the logos of, i think, every summer Olympic Games from 1896 through 2012, as well as a small amount of memorabilia. The audio guide didn't mention it at all, which i thought odd, but at the back of the room there are four torches mounted to the wall, and in the center of them is a golden pedestal with what looks like a gas stove inside of it. I wondered if that's where the Olympic Flame originates; i mean, it only makes sense, but i'm not sure why it wasn't covered in the tour.
As we were finishing up our audio tours of the Stadium is when we started to really notice our sunburns. We'd put on sunscreen at the beginning of the day, but apparently, upon further examination of the bottle later, it broke down after two hours. We're nowhere near New Zealand-level sunburns, but it's enough that tomorrow's probably going to be an unpleasant day for arm-moving.
Next order of business was lunch/dinner. It was already 4:00 and all we'd eaten was some pastries shortly after our initial subway ride to the Acropolis area. There was a place we had seen while lost in Plaka last night that had little menus available at the back of the building in like ten different languages; we'd taken a look, at first thinking they were maps, and were impressed by the sound of “Meal for Two: choose 5 of 13 items + drink + mineral water + bread + dessert for 28 Euros.” We'd taken the little menu with us, since it had the name and address of the place as well as a tiny map on the back, so that we could find it again today. However, we left the damn pamphlet at the hotel in our luggage. So what could we do? We started in the general direction of Plaka hoping to get lucky.
We came to the main road that had guided us back to the hotel last night, very close to where we'd joined it then, but on the opposite side, and then started trying to retrace our steps. At this point we were both getting to be quite hungry and almost desperately thirsty (it's been very hot), and Amanda's feet were hurting from the uneven cobblestone or gravel roads and sidewalks that make up most of the thoroughfares in Athens badly enough that we were now having to take breaks every now and then.
But we managed to work our way through Plaka, remembering various graffiti and odd buildings, recalling the ice cream shop we'd gotten cones at, the alley where we heard a cat fight break out, certain angles of the view of the Acropolis above. And with really only one error, we found the place. Walking up, the host saw us and waved us in, i'd say as though expecting us, but they do that at lots of restaurants in this city, whether you intend to eat there or not.
It was everything we'd hoped it would be. We sat down and were presented with water and bread immediately. There's no menu, though; the way they do things is literally exactly what was in that small flyer. It's not a special; they charge you an amount for the number of people you have, then they bring out a platter featuring all 13 of their items, and from it you pick up the ones you want. Since we were a party of two, we were allowed to select five items. We didn't exactly know what all of the things were, but they looked good, and they WERE good, so i call it victory. And for what we've been paying for food in Europe, this was probably the best bargain we'd walked into. We ate almost every bit of the five items we'd selected, and then were brought dessert, which was some strange gelatin-like thing with orange peels and raisins in it. I was a little put off by the texture at first, but was totally sold on the flavor.
This is where Amanda saved the bread for the dog. That bread is still in one of our bags. I don't know what she plans to do with it at this point; maybe save it for another one-toed pigeon.
Now full and with all of the sights we'd planned to see in Athens seen, except possibly whatever was on the top of the highest precipice in town, some kind of great white (probably marble; they've got a thing for it here) building, we were unsure what to do with ourselves. Amanda suggested climbing to that summit, but my blurting of “mother fucker” put her off of it. Besides, she reasoned with herself, her feet hurt so badly at this point that she would likely be unable to make it. Winner: fat guy.
Instead, we decided that there was a beach we'd like to see. Amanda favored heading right over, dipping our feet in for a bit and being good with it. I, on the other hand, have been itching to use my GoPro chest harness for the purpose i purchased it for: filming while swimming. So far i've only used it to walk through airport security and get some more or less interesting shots of one train station, which probably has not been worth adding it to the gear manifest on our supposedly bare-bones trip. I motioned that we return to the hotel, get our swimsuits, the GoPro, and that god damned sun tan lotion for reapplication, and then hit the beach, which Amanda then agreed to. Our train wasn't to leave from Athens until 23:55, giving us several hours still to kill, and we were both pretty sure that squeezing a meal in was not going to be necessary.
When we had completed that, it was 8:00pm, and we were heading to the beach. Maybe not what normal people do, but the sun was a good way down and neither of us particularly wanted it broasting us like juicy chickens, so a twilight dip suited us fine.
By subway, it took us 35 minutes to reach the beach, which we found to be made of gravel and garbage. This was more garbage than i'd ever seen in one place in my life, outside of a landfill, and i've seen Chicago (not New Jersey though...). We tromped through it down the beach, which couldn't have run for more than 100 meters, crushing refuse and kicking gravel underfoot the whole way. We found one patch of sand, an oval maybe two meters across by one wide, maybe enough to have a picnic on if you don't mind being surrounded by trash.
We were both quite sure that we did not want to touch the water with our flesh, so we took some pictures and dejectedly called it a day. I did shove the GoPro into the sand a little bit and let the small waves wash over it a couple times; haven't seen the shot yet, but it might be cool. But all in all, the beach was a bust, bringing a sad ending to our otherwise very good day.
The sun being just about down, we were pretty well out of things to do in Athens, so we returned to the Nafsika Hotel, collected our belongings, and took the subway one last time to the train station, to sit and wait for our train. We were there a little more than an hour early.
A bonus, though: the train station had free WiFi, something we'd not seen anywhere else, so that gave us something to do to pass the time. However, it cut us off after 30 minutes, which was probably written somewhere in that fine print that i accepted without reading, mostly because it was all in Greek and i just needed my social media fix. 31 notifications and a friend request on the Facebooks.
Well, we're on the train now, so i'd better get some sleep while i can. It's a six hour ride to Thessaloniki, where we wait for two hours and then get on a bus to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where we will get on a plane and fly back to Germany because our travel plans got weird. We are stuck in another one of those bullshit six-person compartments with two people who are reading books, a woman who is trying to sleep, and a baby. So far the baby's been quiet.
So. Far.
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