Greece - Day 7 - Athens

So, Athens. One of the great cities of history - and yet everyone tells us that a day will suffice. I'm guessing that those people don't like museums as much as I do, but it's not actually that far wrong. We start off the day trying to book our train tickets to Thessaloniki, which is a bit of a mission due to the nationwide public transport strike - we end up having to book an extra night in our Athens hotel, and get a next morning train to Thessaloniki, which isn't too much of an imposition, I guess.

From there to the touristing, which means starting with a trip to the Acropolis museum, which is large, well presented and rammed with fellow tourists. The museum is built on glass over an archeological site - you can look down, and twenty metres below your feet, there are partially excavated buildings. Fascinating place. It's crammed with statuary, most of it of stunning quality. I got lost well behind Dave pretty quickly, due to my slow reading speed and my tendency to read, look at exhibit, re-read, and then look again, and then go back to another one that I thought was nice... Quite interesting were the many signs up stating the case for the Elgin Marbles return. These were very strident about the Marbles "theft", but the signs were very careful not to mention that they were lying in ruin when they were taken, nor that they were taken with the blessings of the legal authority at the time, nor that the nation Greece, from which the Marbles were "stolen", did not in fact exist at that time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure that it's right that the British have the things, but if you go about with weasel words and half-truths, you certainly get no sympathy from me.

That said, the bits of the facade left in Greece are well-presented and great to look at; really fascinating.

Anywho, after wandering the museum for a while, it was time to head out onto the site itself; brave the beating sun and climb the Acropolis. The feeling of climbing onto one of the most famous sites in the world was special, though the heat was rather hard to deal with, especially with the stone radiating it from below. The Parthenon is about as impressive as you'd expect - very - though it could do with a little less scaffolding. Still, spectacular stuff. We wandered around it in a pretty leisurely manner, taking some obligatory tourist photos and looking out on the rather spectacular view of Athens that you get from that high up. We stopped for a while to watch some musicians practising in one of the ruined theatres (the Odeon of the ubiquitous Herodes Atticus, I think - seriously, that dude basically just seems to have gone everywhere in Greece, and put up buildings. You can't go more than half a day without hearing about him.) which was pretty cool.

Later in the afternoon, we walked up to the archeological museum, which was honestly one of the biggest museums I've been in. We spent hours in there, and covered maybe one wing. By the time we left, I had aching feet, I was kind of sick of pottery shards, and I was under the impression that 3,000 years ago was pretty recent. Wow, just wow. The Zeus throwing the lightning bolt (sans lightening bolt, sadly) is amazing, considering it spent millennia at the bottom of the sea. There are many pics on Dave's camera, which I'll have to get him to make into a book for me....

We finished the evening with dinner in a nice restaurant, charming the waitresses with our three words of Greek, and then headed off to bed, via a few bars and a fair bit of beer.