September 3, 2009
Nathan and I are in Athens! We arrived this morning bright and early at 8:10, a whopping hour ahead of schedule. Usually, I’m all about being early on a flight, however, when you already have a 10 hour layover in an unfamiliar city with a very unfamiliar language, I’d have preferred to get an extra hour of sleep on the plane. Albeit we were in business class, so we got to lie down for the whole trip, it’s nothing compared to a real bed.
We each slept, probably not as long as we had hoped to rest, but at least we weren’t wide awake all night. Breakfast came way too early for us today, it was served to us somewhere around 1 a.m. our time.
Since we didn’t have any plans for today, and we had endless hours to spend, we decided to go the tourist route. We bussed it over to Pireaus port, checked our suitcases into a pretty sketchy “baggage check” and hit the road. Since I have way too much camera stuff here with me, I was rolling my big black bag and my medium camera bag around the city of Athens. The light at the end of THAT tunnel is that once we finally get situated in Sifnos tonight, I can rearrange my bags so I’m not carrying too much equipment with me at once.
We headed from Pireaus (via the metro) to the center of Athens, near Plaka, to have lunch. Lunch was mediocre, but it was a fun experience at a café. No big deal. I ordered the Greek Salad, because WHY NOT, right? Turns out it’s not really what we expect as salad as Americans, it was a few (like 3) leaves of lettuce, onions, olives, a brick of Feta, which I love, but mostly cucumbers and tomatoes. I don’t really care for either of the latter, but I did enjoy my olives and feta with 3 leaves of lettuce.
After lunch, we decided to try to go to the Acropolis. What a flippin’ adventure. Since we were on the side of it, instead of trying to find the actual entrance, we ended up going through tiny walkways between people’s front doors with signs that said “Acropolis -->”. Finally we got so miffed with ourselves (because we were so hot and tired of carrying my dang bags) that we decided to go back down and try to find the actual entrance. Even after that we still didn’t make it to the top. Instead, we chose to go to the Acropolis Museum which had two main benefits: a bathroom and air conditioning. Nathan wasn’t felling so hot so we hung out there, walked around a bit and just tried to relax. After we decided to get out of there, we found our way to a metro stop and hopped on the metro to bring us back to Pireaus. So that leaves me here, sitting, in an open door café, waiting, and waiting, and waiting for our boat to take us to Sifnos. Just get me to an island already!
