Athens is Dirty...

A view from half way up the Acropolis and only a tiny portion of the sprawling city

Well, we arrived in Athens to begin our Honeymoon in Greece. It's our last run around and check things out spot before we head to the Mediterranean to swim and relax.

It's been a rough couple days for both of us. First we arrive and the train that is supposed to bring us straight to where we are going is down for rennovations, so we had to make a transfer and the guy at the train counter was helpful, but not willingly helpful, begrudgingly helpful would be a better word.

So we arrive at the hotel, it's awesome, the clerk is great, in fact he's probably the best hotel manager guy I've ever met, we got orange juice and cake and a map tour of the city before we even try and venture out. Our room is the nicest we've been at, it has some shower pressure so that's nice!

After freshening up we head out for dinner and we're trying to get to this area called Psiri (it's supposed to have good food) and we decide to take a street and cut over so we'll be there faster. We cut down this street and it slowly turns into what we believe to be a Greek compton. It felt like we had big read "Rob Us" beacons on our heads. I believe it would be similar to being a toursit and getting a hotel on the edge of Gastown and heading East when you should go West. We were pretty unsettled for a few blocks before getting out on the other side and veering back where we re-directed ourselves and found our destination and ended up having a pretty nice dinner.

The next day, today, I woke up feeling crappy, Bonnie's been fighting a cold for about a week now, poor girl and it finally caught up with me. Basically what that means is, she's a trooper and I'm a whiner. Anyhow I filled myself full of drugs and we hit the road to check out the Acropolis. There's a 400 bus that will tour you around and we felt it might be a cool way to see what the city has to offer so we hopped on and checked it out. The was actually worth it cause it took us through areas which weren't quite as grungy as the area where we're staying wich was nice to see.

We stopped off at the original Olympic Stadium, which was great, they fixed it up for the Athens Olympics but it's still cool to be in the spot where it really was.

After that we waited for a bus for 40 minutes in the hot hot heat caught it and realized we were down the road from a huge acheological site. So after feeling stupid we hopped off the bus one stop later (about a 2 minute walk, stupid tourists, don't know why we didn't look at our map!) and standing there was The Temple of Zeus, that was really awesome.

The Temple of Zeus

We then walked to Acropolis, by this time we're exhausted and questioning whether or not to actually do it, but I couldn't in good faith let myself know that I was there and I didn't do it, so we hiked all the way around it in 35 degree heat (which isn't that bad here) and checked out an Ampitheater on the way. We found out there's still one that gets used! We noticed a billboard for Green Day earlier in the day that said they were playing tomorrow and thought, how rad would that be to see Green Day in the old Ampitheater! But alas, the one at the Ampitheater was a different show and it was playing the day we leave so no luck there.


When we finally got to the Acropolis it had scaffolding all over it so it was hard to get a really good look, but it's absolutely incredible regardless. It's amazing what those ancient civilizations put together.

Anyhow, we're feeling tired and crappy and we're going to get some rest retire early and head out to hopefully swim. We're heading over to Pireas to check out an island off the coast and get away from exhaust fumes and dirty buildings. (Maybe there'll be more over there too who knows.)

Anyhow, still having fun, but getting tired. Beach here we come!!

Take Care

Love Jason and Bonnie!