July 13, 2009

This morning we were up fairly earlier to get ahead of the masses in Athens. After we docked in Piraeus, a port city around 7 kilometres from Athens, we walked around 10-15 minutes to a bus stop where we caught a public bus to downtown Athens – Syntagma Square. Once we arrived we decided to pay a few Euros each to hop aboard “The Happy Train,” a train on wheels that had a route through Athens that included the Acropolis. We could hop off and on throughout the day, and the train came every half an hour. It was a good economical way to go and saved us a lot of walking in the hot sun (the temperature was around 34 C. today).

Once we arrived at the Acropolis we hired a tour guide for the seven of us and she guided us around the site for the next hour, giving us a lot of history and answering all of Sol’s questions. Sol is a bit of an expert on ancient Greece, having studying it in grade seven this year. The site was full of people, which we expected, but we were able to get close to some of the buildings, including the Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, the Erechtheion, and the Propylaea, and get a good look. Unfortunately much of the Parthenon is covered in scaffolding. Beginning in 2002, work began on restoring much of the structure, and this will continue until 2012. We could see how they have inserted new marble into the existing columns, which was interesting. Fortunately, the front of the Parthenon is visible so I got some good pictures. We also walked to the mount where the apostle Paul gave us speech about the “unknown god” to the Greeks as described in the Book of Acts.

By noon we were finished with the Acropolis, and we were able to visit a few other sites in Athens, including Hadrian’s Library, Hadrian’s Arch, and the Panathinion Stadium, built for the 1896 Olympic Games. We also did some shopping in Monastiraki Square before catching the metro back to Piraeus. Outside the metro station we came across a flea market run by mostly west Africans. We made a few purchases and then walked around 20 minutes back to the cruise ship, taking a shuttle bus for the last stretch.

In the evening we watched “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants II,” which winds up the story in Santorini, where we will be docked tomorrow.