It's All Greek To Me!

Athens Day 1

After spending the night in the Rome Airport, we headed to Athens, Greece bright and early.

Greece from the plane

We caught a bus and then a tram to get to the location of the hostel. Turns out our hostel was in the perfect location. The Acropolis and downtown were right around the corner. Since we got in so early, we couldn’t check into our hostel right away so we just left our bags there and started exploring the city. We stopped at our first Greek restaurant for some lunch. Electra ordered a gyro and I ordered a kabab. Pretty much everything comes with fries in Greece. I also ordered a frappe! A frappe is a cold coffee drink make from Nescafe, sweetened condensed milk, and either milk or water. They are delicious!

Steph drinking a frappe

Lamb kabab

We spent the afternoon exploring and getting lost and then doing some laundry. The hostel had a laundry mat nearby and it was attached to a bar! So we drank some Greek beer (Mythos) while we did a load of laundry. We made friends with a girl from Turkey, Merve, who shared our hostel room with us. She joined us for dinner and showed us a really cool spot to eat. The view of the Acropolis was amazing in the nighttime. Electra and I both ordered traditional Greek dishes and we even tried Ouzo! Ouzo is a Greek liquor that tastes a lot like black licorice. It’s a clear liquid and you drink it with ice. When you add the ice and stir it a little, the liquid turns white. It’s a pretty strong flavor so we added a little water as well. We both loved it!

Acropolis view from the place we ate dinner

Ouzo!

We haven’t had any trouble with the language so far. All of the signs are also in English and pretty much everyone speaks English as well. We had trouble when we first got here cuz we kept speaking the few Italian words we know. Eventually we memorized “thank you” which is efharisto.

Athens Day 2

Today we took a walking tour through the hostel. It was about 3.5 hrs and walked all around the city and major sites. Our guide, Michael, was from Canada and he was very informative. We really enjoyed the tour. Below are pics with captions describing the sites we saw.

Stray dogs everywhere! It all started when some stray dogs saved one of the first doctors in Athens, ever since the people take care of them

Hadrian's Arch

Temple of Zeus

Stadium built for the first modern Olympics

Zappio, built for the first modern Olympics when they tried to have agricultural competitions as well

Crazy Turkish guards dressed from the time when the Turks ruled Athens. Their skirts have 400 pleats!

Parliament building

Syntagma Square

Downtown Athens

Roman Marketplace where the first working clock in the western world was created

Democracy was created here!

After the walking tour we bought tickets to go inside the Acropolis. Our old student IDs came in handy once again and we got half price tickets! The Acropolis was HUGE and it was so cool to actually walk around the ancient architecture.

View of Acropolis

Parthenon

Then we hiked up a mountain right next to the Acropolis to see the view. This is also the spot where Democracy was first used.

We were pretty exhausted by the time we were finished with all the site seeing. So, we headed back to the hostel to eat some leftovers and figure out a ride to the airport. There was a transportation strike, so buses, taxis, and the tram weren’t running. You have to pay a lot of money to have a bus, taxi or tram license and anyone can buy them from someone else when they are done using it. So, many Grecians use this as a retirement. When they want to retire they sell their license to someone else. The Grecian government is trying to change the way this works so that the licenses will not be worth as much. Thus the angry transportation drivers. This worried us a lot because we had to get to the airport for a super early flight to Santorini the next day. Luckily the hostel was on top of it. Some of the people who worked at the hostel ran a shuttle to and from the airport all day and night. We had to catch an early ride though. Even though our flight wasn’t til 5:30am the next day, we had to get to leave for the airport at 12:30am. So, we had to sleep in the airport once again. At least the Athens airport is a lot nicer and clearer than the Rome airport.

Side note: Sorry it took us so long to post an update about Greece. Internet wasn't too reliable and we were too busy adventuring! Electra will post about our time in Santorini tomorrow!