Athens, Greece

So I realized I skipped a blog over one significant part of my trip. I'll have to make it short to catch you up a bit. This was before Mykonos.

I was so thankful that my friend John got back to me, allowing me to crash and hang out with him at his place while I stayed in Athens for the few days I was there. I arrived from Zante alone, Sarah heading home to prepare for the upcoming trip. She would meet me the next day (we thought) in Athens- which turned out to be the following day. The first night, I hung out with John, poor crippled John. He had a leg injury about a month ago plus surgery. So he was still hobbling around on crutches. It didn't stop him though, we enjoyed a long night out, with his friends and a cool little bar/club out of the immediate night life part of town. I wanted to wait for Sarah to get there so we could do the Acropolis together and see all of the ruins, so I didn't do anything the following day but chill out with John and enjoy familiar company once more. But when we found out that Sarah got the days mixed up, I decided I would walk about by myself the following day. Meaning to get up early but slept through my alarm, probably because we had stayed out late again the previous night, I finally managed to get out of the house around 1pm, starting immediately my "sight-seeing." I bought the cheap student pass that let me in all of the main attractions of Athens, and I walked around ruins for quite a bit before heading up the hill to the Acropolis. It was HOT. But I managed to fill my bottle up a few times in the water fountains and walked around the entire mountain, seeing the 2 Theatre ruins, and all of the columned temples. My next stop was the new Acropolis museum. On the way down I ran into people drinking these delicious looking frozen drinks. I was so hot at this point that I didn't care what I had to do to get one of these things… not much of the normal backpacker's splurge, when water would have been about 3 euro less, but the 4,50 euro was worth every drop of it. I downed my strawberry/lemonade frozen drink by the time I had made it to the museum and I was ultimately satisfied. I wish I had gone to the museum before heading to the Acropolis. And then of course, I watched the informative video after exploring the museum bottom to top that gave me all the details about what I was seeing. Why do I do everything backwards? I figured I'd had seen enough by that point, or either it was because the museum was closing and I knew I would have to leave soon anyway, but I took John's advice and set off towards the Old City. I had no idea where I was going, but I just circled my way through the old very narrow streets, lined by homes, all white with red roof tops and plants hanging around outside of the gates. It was crest in its own type of ancient beauty. I knew I was hungry and thought it a good idea to eat somewhere nearby. As I was walking through the small passageways, I ran into this quaint little restraint offering a "menu" of all the traditional Greek foods. I figured I might as well when he threw in a free glass of wine. The perks of being alone and female. ;)

The dinner was nice. I met a very pleasant Australian woman, and we had a wonderful chat over dinner. She was traveling alone too on a conference, and has traveled much of the world, so we had that in common. I was full of the delicious Greek food but had to hurry to meet Sera from the airport. We decided that night to go to Mykonos!