It seemed unreal that I was really in Greece! I woke up to the sound of mopeds racing around and horns honking. However it wasn't as busy as I thought it was going to be on the streets at 9 in the morning, very unlike America. This was just one of the differences I was going to be noticing during spring break.
One of the girls I was with had the great idea of listening to the Mama Mia soundtrack while we were getting ready. It really put us in the mood to travel. Once we were all ready we were off to the city centre, which is called Syntagma. Dee had given us directions to a kiosk so we could buy trolley tickets and get on it right down the street. Well the man did not like us so he did not sell us tickets even though he was supposed to. After looking lost for about 5 minutes and trying to read the map of the city, some girls who spoke English helped us out and gave us very easy walking directions to the city centre. The directions took us through the National Gardens. It was very nice walking through there because there were orange trees everywhere and you could smell them. Right before we hit the National Gardens we managed to find the old Olympic Stadium, also called Panathenaic Stadium. It is the only stadium in the world made entirely of white marble. We loved being at the stadium because there were tourists everywhere; it was a place where we didn't get stared at, finally. Then we made our way to the centre. We decided to get on the "hop on-hop off" bus to tour the city because we could tell there was going to be a lot of walking involved if we didn't. The tourist attractions were very spaced out. While riding the bus we got a brief history of all the sights and the city. It was nice because it was like having a tour guide.
We first hit up the Parthenon and Acropolis. This was a very touristy area. There was also some great views of the city on other parts of the rocks around it. I took too many pictures here. Parthenon is the temple of the Greek goddess Athena, whom they thought protected the city. Of course it was under renovation while we were there so it has scaffolding everywhere on it. At this point we decided that scaffolding was going to be a big part in our spring break because it seemed that we just couldn't get away from it. Not only did we see Parthenon, we saw many other ancient Greek temples and buildings that were on the Acropolis. The Acropolis, for those of you that don't know, is the large flat rock that all of these buildings are located on. There are actually many of them located throughout Greece. This just happens to be the most well known one.
After soaking up the sun and Acropolis we hopped back on the bus and road it around for awhile and listened to more of the history. At 11 everyday is the changing of the guard so we got to see that while we were on the bus. For lunch we found some cafe around the city centre after quite a walk around it searching for something cheap.
Everything closes pretty early compared to what we are used to. So later in the afternoon we headed back to our hostel and took a shortcut through an alley that had cats everywhere and smelled like cat pee! It looked clean and everything just had so many cats in it.
Back at the hostel we lounged around and tried to use the internet. I know I was worn out from the sun and went to bed pretty early!
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