Athens Ancient vs Modern
Post date: 21-Sep-2009 15:33:21
On Wednesday, Sept 16, 2009 Colin and I took an 8 hour ferry from Santorini to Athens. It felt odd
to step off the ferry and see big city advertisements in Athens. It´s definitely a change from the small island town living. Our hostel Athenstyle is decorated half with Ikea furnishings and half with old furniture. The view of the Acropolis from the rooftop bar is magnificent. It´s great to see the Parthenon lit up at night. It´s so amazing to be just a short walk away from the ancient 400 B.C. buildings.
We toured the 6 Acropolis sights and went into the new acropolis museum that opened on June 21, 2009. It cost us 2 euro total and the Metro is also inexpensive at 1 euro per person. The Metro is clean and very modern. The stations are well lit and the trains run smoothly. The brand new Metro is quite the contrast to the many dilapidated buildings in the city.
Athens has the most beautiful graffiti that I have ever seen in a city. I wouldn´t even call it graffiti or vandalism. All the drawings are art work that someone should pay to have drawn on the outside of the building...perhaps some of them were planned sketches.
You know it´s safe to drink water in a European city if the bottled water is 0,50 for small and 1,00 for a large bottle. The tap water in Athens tastes fine. My favourite drink in Athens is the "cold chocolate." It´s a chocolate milk but it has crushed ice in it so it tastes like a chocolate slurpee. So good. The food at the Acropolis Museum was also affordable and tasty. We had salad, sandwiches and watermelon balls with a sharp, soft white cheese.
There are no shortages of street vendors selling everything from coins, flowers, beads, jewlery, smack toys, umbrellas etc. I bought what I call a smack or slap toy for 2 euro because they had ducks. It´s a stress ball that flattens out when you slam it onto a hard surface (sort of like those sticky hand toys).
We also both tried on a few pairs of shoes in a few stores. The leather gladiator sandals are everywhere. However, customer service does not exisit in Greece. It was like pulling teeth to get the clerk to let me try on a pair of sandals. Even when she agreed, I was only permitted to try on the right shoe. The sandals were vey hard and did not have good support with the ankle zippered back. I gave the right sandal back and she actually sniffed the shoe before she put it back. She also did not speak one word to me the entire time or smile. We had similar experiences each time we ate in a restaurant. We had to ask for menus and wave when we wanted to order. When we finally managed to get a server to our table the guy or girl would just stare at us and we had to be the first one to speak. Unbelievable. It´s sad to say but even with our economic crisis and lack of servers I could have had better service in Edmonton. Everywhere else in Europe we´ve had impecable service.
In our too short of time in Athens we had to decide between seeing a sunset from St. George church (which is on top of a cliff opposite the Acropolis) or going to Cine Paris to see a movie from a rooftop theater. We picked the theater and I am so glad we did. We watched "The Burning Plain" and it was in English with Greek sub titles. There was a bit of Spanish too but we understood enough to get by. Towards the end of the movie it clouded over and we saw some great lightning. We grabbed gelato in the following wonderful flavours-Nutella, Katifi, chocolate coconut, and yoghurt and honey with walnuts.
No cool map with pictures today, but you can see a map of the route that we walked on our first day in Athens. It may look tiny on the map, but we were very tired by the end of it!
And for the moment you've all been waiting for, here's the slideshow of all 458 pictures from Athens, complete with the Parthenon and the Acropolis, lots of graffiti and ruins, ruins, ruins.