Final days in Athens
8:10p 7/17 Athens, Greece
We arrived safely in Athens from our 4 day bus trip through Greece. We exchanged contact information with our Aussie friends, Barbara super wants us to come stay with her on her family's farm in west Australia. Meanwhile, Steve & Annette said we should rent a caravan (an RV) and drive across Australia and visit them on the east coast. We just might have to look into flights and such for a couple years down the road once we get the debt from this vacation paid off.
Last night and today we've been in a lovely hotel in the Monastiraki district of Athens, right on the metro lines. I have to say that though this hotel also has an excellent view of the Acropolis from its roof top garden, I miss the Plaka district that our other hotel was in. It had many more authentic restaurants and lots of businesses geared for the tourists (laundry, food markets, souvenirs, etc). Monastiraki is louder, with busier streets and tons more bargain hunters at the large flea markets on either side of the tram entrance.
Today was our last day in Greece and we had a fabulous time. We went to Hadrian's Library, Roman ruins next to Ancient Agora, followed by the National Archeological Museum. Emperor Hadrian was a pretty cool fellow, even though he was the ruler of an occupying force (the Romans). Hadrian was keen to revive the Classical style from antiquity in art and sculpture as well as restore and even finish temples and ruins that were built hundreds of years before his time. In fact, had it not been for much of Hadrian's work, many of these temples would be in terrible shape nowadays or canabalised by later occupying forces. (On the other hand, he also took a bunch of the most beautiful statues in order to decorate Rome and took several of the best Greek sculptors to work for him in Rome.)
Anyway, Hadrian built a humongous library on the slopes of the Acropolis, which archeologists are still excavating and finding new pieces everyday. We watched them haul off the last bit of dirt that had been covering a mosaic floor of a church built on top of the library ruins. Neat! That's the weird thing about this town (well one of them anyway), all of central Athens is built on ruins that were built on top of other ruins and so on. Christians in the 4th century AD used toppled bits of columns to shore up their shoddy masonry when building the church walls; they looked like cavemen dwellings compared to the incredible library walls nearby built 400 years earlier.
As I recalled in a previous post, we tried visiting the Nat'l Museum on Sunday but managed to get lost. We got lost again today from horrible directions (oh sure, you'll see it when you walk straight out of the metro...) and also because there are no signs at all pointing the direction to the museum. Fortunately since today was a Friday, all of the shops were open so we bugged people about every block to point us in the direction of the museum and finally made it.
The museum was as awesome as everyone made it out to be, truly a world treasure. The museum is enormous and was arranged chronologically with markers for every period, explaining not only the artistic changes happening but the cultural, political, and geographical changes as well. There were some great maps showing the time periods different civilisations existed in which areas and it was very apparent that particular parts of Greece have always been favored by man and, indeed, the new culture built on top of the old several times; few sites were ever completely abandoned. Walking through the museum helped tie every site we visited on our tour together. I sort of wish we could have seen it the Sunday before we left but it was still awesome to say, "we've been there!" We spent a solid 5 hours in the museum and it felt like we breezed through it.
After we left, we took the metro back to Monastiraki and went to a restaurant outside of Ancient Agora. We'd actually been there before but didn't eat much and decided to go back because the dolmadas were incredible! The moussaka and the baklava were also the best we'd eaten during our whole stay in Greece. I'm glad we got to go back there for our last meal here. I should get a nap as our taxi picks us up at 2am to catch our 5am flight to Amsterdam then on to Dallas.
See you all soon!
We arrived safely in Athens from our 4 day bus trip through Greece. We exchanged contact information with our Aussie friends, Barbara super wants us to come stay with her on her family's farm in west Australia. Meanwhile, Steve & Annette said we should rent a caravan (an RV) and drive across Australia and visit them on the east coast. We just might have to look into flights and such for a couple years down the road once we get the debt from this vacation paid off.
Last night and today we've been in a lovely hotel in the Monastiraki district of Athens, right on the metro lines. I have to say that though this hotel also has an excellent view of the Acropolis from its roof top garden, I miss the Plaka district that our other hotel was in. It had many more authentic restaurants and lots of businesses geared for the tourists (laundry, food markets, souvenirs, etc). Monastiraki is louder, with busier streets and tons more bargain hunters at the large flea markets on either side of the tram entrance.
Today was our last day in Greece and we had a fabulous time. We went to Hadrian's Library, Roman ruins next to Ancient Agora, followed by the National Archeological Museum. Emperor Hadrian was a pretty cool fellow, even though he was the ruler of an occupying force (the Romans). Hadrian was keen to revive the Classical style from antiquity in art and sculpture as well as restore and even finish temples and ruins that were built hundreds of years before his time. In fact, had it not been for much of Hadrian's work, many of these temples would be in terrible shape nowadays or canabalised by later occupying forces. (On the other hand, he also took a bunch of the most beautiful statues in order to decorate Rome and took several of the best Greek sculptors to work for him in Rome.)
Anyway, Hadrian built a humongous library on the slopes of the Acropolis, which archeologists are still excavating and finding new pieces everyday. We watched them haul off the last bit of dirt that had been covering a mosaic floor of a church built on top of the library ruins. Neat! That's the weird thing about this town (well one of them anyway), all of central Athens is built on ruins that were built on top of other ruins and so on. Christians in the 4th century AD used toppled bits of columns to shore up their shoddy masonry when building the church walls; they looked like cavemen dwellings compared to the incredible library walls nearby built 400 years earlier.
As I recalled in a previous post, we tried visiting the Nat'l Museum on Sunday but managed to get lost. We got lost again today from horrible directions (oh sure, you'll see it when you walk straight out of the metro...) and also because there are no signs at all pointing the direction to the museum. Fortunately since today was a Friday, all of the shops were open so we bugged people about every block to point us in the direction of the museum and finally made it.
The museum was as awesome as everyone made it out to be, truly a world treasure. The museum is enormous and was arranged chronologically with markers for every period, explaining not only the artistic changes happening but the cultural, political, and geographical changes as well. There were some great maps showing the time periods different civilisations existed in which areas and it was very apparent that particular parts of Greece have always been favored by man and, indeed, the new culture built on top of the old several times; few sites were ever completely abandoned. Walking through the museum helped tie every site we visited on our tour together. I sort of wish we could have seen it the Sunday before we left but it was still awesome to say, "we've been there!" We spent a solid 5 hours in the museum and it felt like we breezed through it.
After we left, we took the metro back to Monastiraki and went to a restaurant outside of Ancient Agora. We'd actually been there before but didn't eat much and decided to go back because the dolmadas were incredible! The moussaka and the baklava were also the best we'd eaten during our whole stay in Greece. I'm glad we got to go back there for our last meal here. I should get a nap as our taxi picks us up at 2am to catch our 5am flight to Amsterdam then on to Dallas.
See you all soon!