Athens is Hot.

Ahh, the morning after the longest 2 day stretch of my life, summarized much less eloquently than L:  left Rome early early early, a train to Bari,15-hour boat, slept on dirty plastic benches that stuck to our skin, another bus to Athens (3 hours), a bus to somewhere else in Athens, a taxi to where we were supposed to pick up the correct bus, that bus to just outside of Athens to find our hostel, got lost a little bit more, found and asked a bloody butcher for directions, took another bus, and then finally found our little hotel. Guess which part of that description was air conditioned? That's right, none.

Old park bench and us

Voula Beach, where we are staying, isn't quite in the city. It's close, but not walking distance which is somewhat inconvenient as the car traffic in Athens is slightly more horrendous than the sidewalks to get there. The beach looks nice but we will be in the Cyclades in just a couple of days so we decided instead to see the really old stuff. I didn't realize that the word acropolis means a citadel or fort typically built on a hill. The hottest day of our trip, found us walking not only in the hot city of Athens, but uphill seemingly forever, up to the Acropolis. The view once we got there made up for the journey. We saw the city from above, the Parthenon, the stage on which Yanni recorded his live album (took a picture for my mom), the Olympic Temple of Zeus and some other sites that are also mindblowingly old. A common undertaking for us in each city is to find a park bench older than our country and to sit on it, like the Minus the Bear song lyrics suggest. That was extremely easy today since everything here happens to be older than both the U.S. and time itself.

The sites have these guards that blow whistles at you if they think you get too close to something or if you touch something that you shouldn't.  We had a collective three whistle blows during our site excavation. Perhaps due to the delirium brought on by uphill exercise, the hot sun, and the rationing of our precious water, we found ourselves creating silly photo-ops:  we did some air guitar, stood just like the immortal statues, and posed as if a rock were a bowling ball and the remaining Greek pillars were pins. Maybe we deserved the whistle for that one...though I don't think the ancient Greeks would have minded as the souvenir stands seemed to sell a lot of postcards, calendars, and knick-knacks illustrating that their ancient ancestors certainly knew how to party, usually doing so naked.

Temple of Zeus

Air guitar

Bowling. Whistle.

We eventually found our sweaty selves back at last night's gyro stand, which is luckily only a few steps from the hotel door. I don't know if I will ever eat a more delicious gyro. We savored every bite of pita, tzatziki and lamb knowing that the stand would not be open when we leave at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow. Good thing we were too far from the Athens nightlife, or else we would have missed the Wesley Snipes movie on the English-speaking channel or the hotel clerk arguing loudly on the phone with what we can only presume to be his girlfriend (or ex).

We woke up very early to get to our 7:30 am ferry in Piraeus. Destination: Santorini.  We made it to the port just fine but soon realized that our ferry was about to take off and our boat was on the opposite end of the port from where we were standing.  We hauled ass with all of our luggage, got on the boat, and as soon as we found our seats, the boat began to pull away from the land.  Talk about a close call.  Since we actually have seats today, maybe I will sleep through this 4-hour ferry ride, dreaming of the feta and olives to come.

<3 kb

Buca, is that you???

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