Athens

As Mark continues to work on updating you about our amazing Israel experience, I've volunteered to try to keep us relatively up-to-date and relate our Greek adventures. Mark has already written about our wonderful encounter with Dora and her family. We have met other great people in Greece as well...and seen some amazing sites.

For our stay in Athens, I found an apartment online through a relatively new website called airbnb.com. It's a network of people with apartments to rent all over the world. We'd much rather stay in apartments than hotels...so we figured we'd give it a shot.  Of course, you do hear of scams sometimes when you deal with sites like this (as my mom was quick to point out, asking “What if there's actually no apartment when you get there?” Oh well – then we'd just have to find a place on the fly if need be...) But, of course, there was an apartment and, luckily, it was wonderful. Lina, our Greek hostess, gave us explicit directions on how to get to the neighborhood in Athens from the airport (a train, then a metro, then a bus) where she met us as we stepped off the bus and walked us around the corner to the apartment. (As an aside - Thank goodness the Greek people are friendly and helpful – we never would have found our way around or figured out which buses to take if the drivers didn't patiently tell us which number bus to look for when we asked them if they went where we wanted to go. There is NO other language like Greek in the world – it is truly “Greek to us”.)

The apartment is in a quiet neighborhood outside the center of Athens but close enough to get home by bus after seeing the sites within 15 minutes or so. The 2 bedroom apartment, stocked with sheets, towels, a basket of snacks, a fridge filled with basic necessities (some eggs, butter, ham and cheese, beer, etc), a washer and dryer with soap, and free wifi – was beautiful, clean, and quiet...a nice haven after 10 days of hectic traveling in hotels in Israel. We couldn't have been happier...and Lina couldn't have been more gracious. (Here's her website for the apartment in case you'll be visiting – we are not compensated in any way by her or anyone else but, we'd be remiss if we didn't pass along the information – we recommend her apartment whole-heartedly – www.tastylicious.gr ) (Thank you for everything, Lina!)

As Mark mentioned in his entry about Dora, Athens is VERY different than when we last visited 20 years ago. We remembered a dirty, loud city with incessantly honking horns, hardware stores everywhere you turned, and no bakeries. (Thus our joke about Athens inventing its own form of economy – the Popodopoly. Since there was only one bakery to be found and it had a line out the door, we joked that Athenians decided they didn't want to open a bakery since people hate to wait on line and there's always a line at the bakery...when deciding what type of store to open, they'd open another hardware store since there was never a line there!)

Today, Athens is a completely different place – a large, sprawling city with parts like Greenwich Village, parts like Fifth Avenue, and all parts in between. The part where we met Dora was a nice shopping area with rows of outdoor cafes and all types of musicians busking. The part of town around the Acropolis, where we went our first day in Athens, is a mass of narrow, stone streets, filled with touristy shops and cafes like you might see in many other European towns. The difference is, that only in Athens do you have the magnificent Acropolis high above you as you stroll around. It is truly an incredible site – as you stroll through a thoroughly modern city, you have the most famous ancient ruin in the world, very visible, looming right above you.

We didn't actually go up to the Acropolis until our third day in Athens. First, we took a day trip to Delphi with another person we met through the internet – George the Famous Taxi Driver. (How did people plan trips before the internet???)  Again – George was friendly, helpful, and talkative, as he took us 2 ½ hours outside of Athens to an amazing ruin over 2500 years old – the temple built in honor of Apollo where he slew the Python and where the Oracle of Delphi prophesied the future for the rich and powerful during the Golden Age of Greece between 500 and 400 BCE. It's a beautiful site where you can truly picture what it might have looked like so long ago, when athletes trained for the Pythian Games (like the Olympics) in the gymnasium and ran races every 4 years in the stadium. And where common men and kings brought sacrifices to the gods to ask about whether they'd win a war, or win a lady's heart. (See Ellie's video about Delphi in an earlier post – the singing competition to which she refers is something akin to the first “American Idol”-type competition that we know about – where singers competed and dedicated their songs to Apollo himself.)

Our third day in Athens, we finally went up to the Acropolis itself and saw first-hand the Parthenon. (You can also see Ellie's video about our visit there.)  We also visited the brand new Acropolis museum – an impressive, very modern display of treasures found at the site and reconstructions of what may have been. Beautiful and incredible to imagine.

Yikes!  Quite an early morning flight! 

Greece, here we come!