Greece, part 1

For the sake of my sanity and so that my devoted readers will be able to truly appreciate and savor all the pictures and stories that I have to tell about Greece, I have decided to post my holiday adventure in series. This post will be about my first 4 days in Greece, which I spent in Athens.

On Dec 15th I had my last exam in the morning and then we begin the usual series of transportation hops to get anywhere. However, the one thing that was different about this trip is that Stirling had flooded! The river had completely swelled blocking the main route between university and Stirling, which meant that my exam started about half an hour late because the professor couldn't get there until then! Once I finished my exam, I packed up and said a temporary goodbye to my flat and we took the bus which was going the long way around to the train station. Luckily all the trains heading south were operating normally. I won't bore you with travel details, but I'll just say we took bus to rail station, train to Glasgow, bus to airport, plane to Heathrow, slept in Heathrow, then a plane again to Athens and a cab to the Metaxa's flat! Whew I was glad to be there. We got in around 3 I think. As exhausted as I was, I was too excited to rest, so they took me up on the roof to show me around.



The is my first Greek sunset over nice and hazy Athens (pretty bad air pollution).





They wasted no time in testing me against the culture shock, and that first evening a friend of Alex's mom, Marilyn (she's American), cam over with her new baby and some of her friends.

Marilyn is the one in the pink shirt. You should be able to recognize me and Alex by now. ;) The woman at the bottom right with the dark green shirt is the mother of the baby. The woman in the chair holding the baby is Marianna, the Metaxa's house keeper, and her husband Roland is the guy directly above her. I'm said to say that I don't remember the rest of their names as I only met them this one time and only one of them spoke English.

The languages were actually one of the first impressions I had of Greece. In this room alone, we could speak a total of 8 languages among us. Definitely makes me a little embarrassed of my only speaking English.




Here's Alex holding the baby, which I believe was her first time with one as young as this (40 days old).







The next day they needed to go out and do some Christmas shopping, so we all went out and did a little site seeing and shopping at the same time. Mostly Athens looks like most the other urban European cities I've seen, narrow windy roads, lots of mopeds, and a strange contrast between modern and old buildings. I think this was one of my favorite sights that day.

If I remember correctly, its a church from around 400AD, and everything else has been built around it since then. I don't think you can tell in the picture, but the church is located in a significant dip in the ground. You have to go down stairs to get to the front door, I would say about 3-4 feet. Apparently this is because all the trash and garbage and buried bodies (just in graveyards, nothing too scary) has built up over the last 1600 years and created the height difference in ground level of the buildings!



Marilyn kept telling me that a lot of stuff had changed and been improved after the 2004 Athens olympics, and these buses/trolleys are a great example. They're electric, drawing power from those cables overhead, but the arms are flexible which allows them to change lanes and navigate traffic as long as the stay on the correct route! I thought that was pretty cool.





The next day I think we did more shopping, which wasn't too exciting. Fun to hear the language and see the everyday kinda stuff, but I was itching to go see the acropolis! Luckily on Sunday Alex took me to see it and all the other sites near it.

This is the Olympieion, which I'm embarrassed to say I don't really know what it was. Obviously I'm a tourist. Good work.







This is Hadrian's arch which was one of the main entrances into the city when it was built in *mumble-mumble*. Apparently it was built so large to allow elephants to fit under the arch. I wanted to test it, but we couldn't find any elephants unfortunately.

Now, for those of you who are extremely astute, you may have noticed the fortress looking thing that you can see through the arch. And if you look really close, you can even see the top bit of the Parthenon. Those big walls are the base of the acropolis (which means "edge of the city" in Greek). I'll tell you more about it when I get up there.





According to Alex, this is how traditional Greek bust would've looked. It's not a great example because the guy has another statue sitting on his head, but the general concept is block of stone, face, and penis. All the important bits I guess.








On the path up to the acropolis, there are two Greek theatres. This is one that's still in decent shape and they actually still do shows in it during the summer! I wish I could've seen one.



I'm not sure if I should be proud of this next picture or not, but I am. It's classic tourist-in-front-of-the-acropolis shot, but with a pink bag. Yes, I'm carrying Alex's bag. I don't remember why. Maybe because I'm a little girl, I'm just not sure. . . .









Here's a closer shot of the acropolis. It was so amazing to see it first hand after looking at it in text books for so many years. Also, this picture contains a certain feline element. Can you find it? Apparently there a bunch of cats that live up in the acropolis! I have no idea why cats are allowed inside and people aren't, it's completely unfair.






Here is the Erechtheion (the building) with the Porch of the Maidens. Also very amazing. The columns that are on the porch now are replicas and the originals are in different museums. Three are the acropolis museum which is about 200 meters away from this building, two are somewhere else in Greece and one is still in Britain because of some doofus who decided to steal a bunch of stuff from the Acropolis a bunch of years ago.



And here's our self-taken portrait on top of the acropolis. There's some pretty stuff behind us, but my arm wasn't long enough to get us and the view in the same picture.



That's it for this first post! Stay tuned to see where our brave adventurer ends up next. Will he fall overboard on the boat journey to Paros? Will a stray dog give him rabies? Or maybe he'll be rejected by the father of his girlfriend and forced to sleep outside! All this and more in the next installment of

"I Was in Greece for the Holidays, and You Weren't!"

A story by Quentin Schroeder

Love you all!