On touchdown in Athens, the Greeks on board applaud loudly. They are happy. They also pay no attention to the stewardess, and immediately after touchdown, jump up to get their overhead luggage. The Greek-American sitting next to me shook her head and muttered unkind words about her distant cousins. Much of Athens got a good infrastructure upgrade for the 2004 Olympics. The airport is a good example. It is new and clean. It is nicely connected to the subway, for which 8 Euros gets you into the city center. The subway sparkles. It is fast, clean, and smooth. And since there really wasn't a subway before, it has had a nice impact on car traffic, which is pretty manageable here. Of course, it's also a contributing reason to why the Greeks are presently broke.
Exiting the subway at the Sygrou-Fix station just south of the Acropolis near the city center, my first impression of Athens was a quiet, clean, and surprisingly uncrowded city. Perhaps this is because this is a holiday weekend when most have left town to their ancestral villages. But the cleanliness belied some more long term effort. I checked into my hotel, the Athenian Callirhoe on Petmeza & Kallirrois. It is fine, with the typical European style of an overdone lobby with modest rooms in need of some building code standards.
After cleaning up, I set out for a walking tour of Athens, directed by my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook. It did not fail me. I first took the short walk to the Acropolis district. The Acropolis itself is at the top of a high hill, which will have to wait for another day. I had a good lunch of pasta and Greek salad on the sunny streetside cafe. Then I skirted the outside of the Acropolis in the Anafiotika district. The area has uncrowded narrow and clean streets with scenic views.
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| Anafiotika view |
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| JMP in the Anafiotika district |
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| Roman Agora |
I kept on plowing through the lightly crowded streets, and came upon the parliament building, pictured below...
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| Parliament from Syntagma Square |
Next door to Parliament is found Athens best Hotel, the Grande Bretagne. It housed visiting monarchs, served as Nazi headquarters, and was the scene of an attempt on the life of Sir Winston Churchill. Today it is still quite nice, but the image below captures well the Athenian spirit on this holiday weekend. I chose to let this quite happy and fat sleeping dog lie, right in front of the main entrance.
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| Restful canine at the entrance to the Hotel Grande Bretagne |
Underneath the Syntagma Square, adjacent to the Parliament building is the cool and elegant subway station pictured below, which is the main intersection of the metro's two lines.
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| Syntagma metro station |
I then took a short walk through the National Botanical gardens (nice but no Central Park) to the Panathenaic Stadium, built in 400 BC, and upgraded in 1896 AD for the first modern Olympic games.
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| Panathenaic Stadium |
I then took the short walk to the Temple of Olympian Zeus ruins, shown below.
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| Temple of Olympian Zeus ruins |
This was followed by a short coffee break with full bodied Greek coffee, shown below.
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| Greek coffee |
Shortly after, an overly friendly Greek fellow tried to pull the same stunt on me that my Mongolian did in Beijing: invite me for a drink and stick me with a large bill. He had the same MO: find out if I was in a group, ask where my hotel was, etc. It was right outside the Acropolis--right where my LP guidebook noted the scamsters work their magic. Nada.
Later that evening, I tried to get into a well regarding restaurant in the neighborhood, which was alas closed. So I settled for an overpriced cafe with a view of the Acropolis, where I think they microwaved the stuffed squid, which went down fine.
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| Undercooked stuffed squid and potatoes partaken near the Acropolis |
I turned in around nine for a long sleep to compensate for the unrestful plane ride.
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