The Acropolis

7/13/2009

The sunrise as we pulled into Greece was luckily later than the previous port, and so after waking up and watching the sunrise, it was time to kill a little time checking e-mail, and then head to breakfast.  I am always amazed when I wake up for the sunrise how warm it is when I go outside.  It seems like early in the morning on the water it would be much colder, but I always open the door to the front deck and am blasted with warm air.  This phenomenon could also be partially due to how cold it is on the ship.  On class days I sometimes have to go out and warm myself before class so that I don’t freeze during class.
After breakfast and getting ready, I set out into Greece with Athena and Kara to see the Acropolis.  We walked along the pier to the metro.  I was happy when I saw that the maps and the stations were set up almost exactly like those in Rome, and I would be able to navigate easily all day.  We switched lines at one of the stations, and then got off at the Acropolis station.  The metro in Greece is basically like a free museum.  There are stations with ruins in them, and almost all of them have artifacts of some form, such as clay pots and statues, and little plaques describing what they are.  They are also immaculately clean.  There are dogs everywhere though.  They are on the streets, in the Ferry terminal at the pier, in the metro stations, all over the place.  They are well fed, and even have collars, but none of them seem to have homes, and they were not very well bathed.  All of them are absolutely adorable though, and if I had it my way, I would have about fifty new pets by now.  I refrained though, forcing myself not even to pet them, which was a very difficult thing to do when they are so cute and friendly.
Back to the metro, we walked out of the station and up the street, and there it was, the Parthenon on top of the huge hill.  We purchased our tickets and went in.  First, we went through old statues and ruined amphitheaters, and then climbed up to the Parthenon and the temple of Athena.  It was absolutely huge!  There was scaffolding along a large portion of it.  The funny things about ruins are they are constantly falling apart, and therefore must constantly be preserved and fixed.  After getting our fill and attempting to soak in the magnitude of what we were seeing, we continued down to try to go to the new Acropolis Museum, which, of course, is closed on Monday.  Instead, we continued on to the streets filled with little shops and cafes.  After shopping around for a little while, we decided to find lunch.  The café we found had amazing food and friendly service!  I knew I was going to like Greece when they brought out a free pitcher of water while we were looking over the menu.  They don’t seem to think water is free in Europe, because everywhere else it comes in bottles, and only upon request.  We all got sandwiches.
After lunch, we found the Temple of the Olympian Zeus.  There were an extremely large number of dogs laying in the shade by the temple, and they were even being fed and had water bowls out.  At least although they are strays, they are being taken care of.  We left the temple and went exploring further through the streets of Athens, and ended up at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  We had missed the changing of the guards by about 15 minutes, but we stopped to take lots of pictures of the guards, who stood as still as statues, only moving to pound their gun when someone got too close.  A constant stream of people would file up to take pictures next to them, and then move to allow the next person to get a picture.  There were also enough pigeons in the square to rival St. Marco’s Square in Venice, and many people were feeding them.  They were some of the fattest pigeons I have ever seen!  While we were there, we ran into Jessica, Katlyn, and Katlyn’s family.  They are our neighbors on the ship, and Katlyn’s family is in Greece for the next week or two.  After chatting with them, we decided to walk down to the library, which was gorgeous.  So intricate and so much detail to every part of it.
We then walked back to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier so that we could watch the guards change out.  They have quite the intricate little routine worked out, that is almost completely synchronized.  From there, we took the metro again looking for the ancient market, and ended up instead in a flea market full of little shops and stores selling fun things.  We shopped around for quite a while, and then once we had our fill, we made our way back to the metro and decided to continue on to the Olympic Stadium.
As the metro continued along, it kept getting more and more crowded, until everyone was packed in like sardines.  We were wondering what station they were all going too, and then we hit the stop we wanted and everyone piled out.  We exited the station, and could see all of the people pouring through the gates to the Olympic Stadium.  Not knowing what exactly was going on, we decided to just go with it, and follow the crowd until we were stopped.  As we got to the second gate to get into the actual stadium, we were convinced we would be asked for tickets, or stopped for some reason.  It didn’t happen, we continued through, and followed the crowd to a tent that was set up, where we received free t-shirts and hats.  From there we walked into the stands, and sat down.  There was the Athens Grand Prix going on, with athletes from around the world participating in track and field events, and as we sat there watching, the crowd kept growing.  It was a lot of fun to watch track and field, and imagine what the stadium must have been like during the 2004 Olympics.  Then, we made our way back to the ship, where we had a mellow night, and went to bed early.