Athens

Bo has put me (Windsor) in charge of posting about Athens. This may be because I got into so much trouble in Athens. More on that below...

Saturday night in Athens we went to Plaka, the neighborhood right below the Acropolis, for dinner. Plaka is a lot like the Latin Quarter of Paris, so Tom probably wouldn't have liked it. We liked it though-- lots of Greek musicians playing on the sidewalks, restaurants with tables on the sidewalk and in shaded plazas. We picked a place called Platanos, a taverna serving traditional Greek food. "Traditional Greek food" apparently means gyros and souvlaki, except the gyros aren't lamb meat like they are at Shipfeifer's; they're pork or chicken. Anyway, here's a picture of Bo at Platanos:














Sunday morning we woke up really early (Charlie this means 6:30 am not 1 pm) and were among the first few people climbing up to the Acropolis when it opened at 8 am. Here is Bo hiking up:















You don't realize how high the Acropolis is until you're on top. You can see the entire city and the sea beyond. Here is the view:














And here is Bo, pondering the view:














The Parthenon is full of scaffolding because they're currently in the middle of a restoration. They are apparently repairing the damage caused by the last restoration (19th century). Anyway, it's still the Parthenon and it's still incredible, scaffolding or no:















We also visited the Acropolis museum at the top of the Acropolis. There wasn't a lot there because they are in the middle of building a new museum at the bottom of the Acropolis. The frieze panels from the Parthenon (the ones that weren't, to use the Greeks' description, "hacked off the Parthenon by British Lord Elgin and stolen away to England") and the other major carvings are all in the process of being moved to the new museum.

I nonetheless tried to document the museum visit by taking a picture of Bo with this statue, but this Greek lady started yelling at me, saying "NO POSING! NO POSING!" and she marched over and made me erase the picture. I didn't like her very much...















Despite being scolded by the lady at the museum, the Acropolis was very cool.















We spent the rest of the day in Athens visiting a couple of museums. First, the National Archaeological Museum, where we saw the Mycenaen treasure unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann. Here is Bo, posing like a statue outside the National Archaeological Museum (don't tell him I posted this one):



















Then we visited the Numismatics Museum, which was the second place I got in trouble in Athens. What are numismatics, you ask? Well, that's what I asked when Bo said we had to go there instead of going shopping. Numismatics = coin collecting. We arrived at the Numismatics Museum at 2:30 and it was supposed to close at 3. We figured we had plenty of time, half an hour to look at all the coins-- except apparently the employees wanted to get off work early, and they were mad mad mad that we arrived at 2:30. They decided to let us know how mad they were by following us through the rooms of the museum, en masse, and standing there watching us as we looked at the display cases. By the time we got to the last room, there were about eight Greeks standing at the door chatting loudly to each other and staring us down. I asked Bo how to say some cuss words in Greek but he doesn't know any good Greek vocabulary like that. All in all we spent about 15 minutes at the Numismatics Museum.

We headed back to the hotel around 3, got the car, got yelled at by a Greek lady in a car, and headed toward the Athens airport. This was an adventure because Bo followed the "Airport-No Tolls" sign instead of the "Airport- Tolls" sign and somehow we ended up at the beach in Rafina instead of the airport. This was a little bit stressful. However, we turned around and made it to the airport in plenty of time and by 7 pm we were in Mykonos. Hopefully they like Americans here better than they do in Athens...