FRIDAY 22ND – PIRAEUS – ATHENS

Athens today. Very interesting. Not surprisingly, it is not unlike Rome in its general impression. The city is very busy and traffic is a bit chaotic but it seems to flow OK. All residential accommodation in Athens is apartment living with very little car parking so everybody with a car parks on the street, often two cars deep. Cars parked on the street in Rome generally have a battered appearance. They appeared a little tidier in Athens.

The port at which we are docked is actually Piraeus, the port for Athens but the towns are merged into each other with a population of approximately four million, almost half the total population of Greece.

 

The focus of the day was the Acropolis. We headed off at 8:30 with a very informative guide and, because we were part of a tour, we didn't have to worry about queues. We were warned that they could be very long but they weren't too bad when we arrived.

As we learnt, the Acropolis is the hill on which a building, the Parthenon, is constructed. It has had a very complicated and turbulent history since its original construction in the fifth century BC and is in a constant state of renovation. I suspect it would have been a very long time ago that it existed without construction scaffolding around at least part of it. Given that we didn't have a helicopter, I couldn't get a photo of the complete structure but you get the idea.

After we comprehensively explored the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis, we got back on the tour bus and explored the city.

 

We elected not to come back to the ship with the tour and stayed in town. We had lunch by the ruins of the Zeus Temple and then spent several comfortable hours in the air conditioned Acropolis Museum viewing the numerous artifacts recovered from the Acropolis since they started giving it some serious archaeological attention in the 1860's. We eventually returned to the ship by taxi.

The museum itself is built over Roman ruins so they have glass panels in the floor through which you can view the exploration which is going on below.

That is the last of our archaeological exploration. From now on, we will be focussed on the scenery of the Greek Islands. We wake up tomorrow in Mykonos followed on successive days by Rhodes, Iraklion, Santorini and Argostolion. I hope they will be good as they sound.