Beautiful Athens

Sorry for the late blog(s).  Tiredness and busy-ness have kept me away from it.

We enjoyed dinner at our hotel’s rooftop restaurant - our first night in Greece.  Here’s why.

First of all, it’s a wonderful setting on top, looking over some of the city.  It’s not a hugely tall tower, or anything, but it’s enough.  Here we are sitting at a covered-over outdoor area.  Good job it was covered, because the sun was hot.

And then this is our view of the Acropolis.

But then, that’s not the best part.  Check it out at night.  Yes - we can view the Acropolis and the Parthenon from here.  Of course this was after the sun went down.

And the sun going down.

An even better photo from the bar up there.

This is why we came to this hotel.  Not bad, eh?

So the next morning, we were leaving the hotel and had arranged a tour of Athens.  So our guide picked us up.  We stopped at several historical sites.  This is the Arch of Hadrian or Hadrian’s Gate.

We went to the bottom of the “hill” on which the Acropolis stands.  If you look closely, there are tons of people lined up to get in to the Temple of Nike (the Parthenon is over to the right).  It was such a hot day, and humid.  We decided to forego going up there and waiting in line.  So just observed it from below.  After all, we had the best view of it the night before.

We then went to the Panathenaic Stadium - the first stadium of the modern Olympic Games.  This is where it all starts (the flame).  The stadium itself will hold over 100,000 people.

You can see the Olympic rings in the distance in the 2nd photo if you look closely.

We then went on a hilltop - Lycabettus Hill - with a view of the City of Athens.  Incredible.  And this is just one side.  The other side is the same.  Most buildings are white or off-white.  Quite unique.

This was on the hilltop.  Looked like someone (sort of) sitting there.  Weird.

Then we went to the Greek Parliament building, and here are those dudes again (who we saw marching down the sidewalk yesterday) - standing on guard outside.

And this last picture of our tour was a dedication to 53 mostly young people who died in a train crash about 2 years ago.  There is much controversy over a person in Greek politics whose fault it was over what the train was carrying, and why all these young people died.  I’m sure you can read about it online.  Such a sad story.  Their names are written in red and people go there every night to call out their names.

At the end of our tour, our guide took us to lunch - a traditional Greek lunch of gyros and wine.  We then went off to the port in Piraeus to meet up with our cruise ship.

This is the ship - but the photo was taken this morning in Mykonos.  Largest ship I’ve ever been on.

There’s a separate blog coming from Mykonos.