Day 84 - Sunday, March 30th, 2025 – Athens Day 1

From a personal perspective this day went a lot better than the day before yesterday. It was the same temperature but there was no wind. That made the entire day more enjoyable right off the bat. I was wearing a T shirt and my blue sweatshirt. Because there was the threat of rain and 40° weather we took our big winter jackets with us. It didn't matter because we just put them in the van and they rode along for the day. I just did not want to be that cold again. Before I get ahead of myself, we had breakfast in the room. Mary got me up at 6:00. We were ready and out the door by 830. We worked our way to the gangplank on four and we were on the ground by about 8:45. We were supposed to meet the tour guide at 9:00 so we were a little early. We sat outside in the sun and all sudden this lady comes up to us with a sign with my name on it. Now, you are going to ask me what her name is and I'm gonna have to say I have no clue. Mary thinks it's something like Katrina. As it turns out, we have the same tour guide and driver for our Athens day 2 tour. We will do a better job on name gathering tomorrow. For now let's call our Katrina. She walks us to the back of the cruise terminal building where there's a big white van. A guy jumps out of it, let's call him Derek, he introduces himself and he starts to load me into the van. It is a big van with a more of an industrial type of lift than a typical wheelchair lift, not that it matters.

Again, getting a little bit ahead of myself, as I laid in bed last night, I came to the realization that there's a process going on when we visit these ports. Without exaggeration, the excursion may be 3, 5 or as many as 8 hours. And in this time period we are given facts, figures and other bits of information at about 10 items a minute. I'm not going to do the math, but my point is that we get somewhere near 14 million and 27 billion new items of knowledge in the average excursion. I don't know if I came up with it or if I heard it, but this is what I call drinking from a fire hose. After the tour, I come back to the cabin and jot notes down so I can write a full website entry. At this point I'm just going for high level ideas. I want to remember the things that were important to us. Think bullet points. Then, possibly days later, I sit down to write the actual log entry. Then for an hour or two I take those bullet points and turn them into someone near 1000, maybe 2000 words. This goes on for every tour or excursion. My point is that for every excursion, I might get 2 to 3% of the information presented in the tour. I told myself that even though it's 2 to 3%, it's 2 to 3% more than most people will remember. This is my way of remembering what is important to us. I think I've mentioned it before, but months, years or decades from now I can pick up this log and get a pretty good picture of what happened on that particular day. So with this in mind, I will continue as I have for the last 75,000 words - one word at a time.

Both Katrina and Derek speak English. With that said, it is not easy to understand either of them. I actually think Derek is better, but he does less of the talking. My point is that I understand about 75% of what Katrina says. Mary says she has an accent which impacts our ability to understand her. None of this is criticism. It's just an observation.

The van pulls away. Despite the log entry being called Athens, the ship is actually in a port town called Piraeus. Athens itself is about 15 minutes away by car. So that's the way we head. Before long we pull into a parking lot. We were at the base of the Acropolis. Off in the distance you can see the Parthenon. We get out of the van and we start up the slopes towards the ticket office. The going is not easy. It's a pretty steep uphill with broken rock surface so it's very bumpy. We go about 150 feet to the ticket office. The thinking is that Katrina, Mary and I will go to the top right near the Parthenon. At the ticket office though we learned that the elevator from the walkway to the Parthenon is broken so I can only go so far. It is decided that I will stay down near the ticket office and Mary and Katrina will go to the Parthenon.

A little education here might be helpful because it is what I learned the same day. The Acropolis is a huge flat top mountain in the middle of Attica section of Greece, near Athens. If my math is right, the surface of the Acropolis is only about 8 acres. The Parthenon is the huge building that sits on top of the Acropolis. There are other monuments and buildings that sit atop the Acropolis.

I go back down by the van. I sit in the sun and watch the people. Derek takes a seat next to me on the bench. For the next hour or more we sit there and watch people. Mary and Katrina head up the hill or should I say mountain. Quite a while later, here come Mary and Katrina back down the hill. They made it to the top. They stood within feet of the columns of the Parthenon. Mary explains that the traveling up the side of the hill was very difficult for her and that it would be near impossible for her to have taken me up that far even if the elevator was not broken. So, maybe having a broken elevator was a good thing. Mary has countless pictures of her being up there. She said her watch calculated 16,000 steps. Apparently there was one section that were actual stairs and she counted 303 of them. She got a workout and a half. She will probably feel it for days to come because that's a lot of walking, especially uphill and stairs. Thankfully the weather was decent so that helped. They rest for a while before we take off again.

Our next stop is the Acropolis Museum. It's right there on the same area, So we just walked towards it. For the next two hours we wander around the museum that discusses the history of the Acropolis and the various buildings and temples that are on the Acropolis. The museum also covers a lot of discussion on the various gods that were depicted on the Parthenon. The whole history of the Parthenon is presented.

Probably the coolest thing was the fact that the museum was laid out almost exactly as the Parthenon itself. When you walked into the museum you were in fact walking into the same end of the Parthenon that had the entrance. You walked about 20 feet before you passed the columns. The columns at the museum were laid out exactly as the columns were laid out in the original Parthenon. The doorways match the doorways that would have been on the original Parthenon. When you walk through the doorways you are walking into rooms that were very similar to what was in the Parthenon. The inside of the Parthenon changed several times over its history so the inside was not exact. The whole layout gave you the idea that you were in fact walking into the real Parthenon. You had to use your imagination a little bit, but it's one thing to look at it from half a mile away to actually being able to imagine yourself walking into it between the columns and into the doorway. You might think I'm nuts but this was cool to me.

There was one section where you could look out the windows up at the real Acropolis and Parthenon. We took some decent pictures here.

There are 12 Greek gods and goddesses. They're depicted on the top of each end of the Parthenon. They are depicted in different poses and in different orders on either end. The poses and the order in which they are presented depicted specific stories. Katrina tried to explain these stories to us but it became evident quickly that we were again drinking from a fire hose, for lack of a better term.

The first civilizations that called the Acropolis home started around 1200 BCE. The Parthenon itself was built around 500 BCE. During the Greco-Persian wars, parts of the Acropolis were destroyed. After the Greeks won, certain buildings on the Acropolis were reconstructed and this is when the Parthenon was built.

We decided to grab a quick lunch at the museum. We both had tuna fish sandwiches which were very good. It was a good place to recharge.

As with many museums and if you had a real reason to get a ton of information you could spend a week in this museum and only begin to understand half of it. When you went for tickets you could get a 5 day pass so I guess there are folks that spend at least five days wandering around this museum trying to capture what it presents. I thought it was a very cool stop.

We loaded back up into the van. We were going to do an hour or so of what they called sightseeing. That's what we did. Derek drove the van from this street and up that street and pointed out this building or that building. I got next to none of it because I was spacing out. I was watching everything but what they were pointing out. When I found was interesting was there were these super old buildings with just old buildings with new buildings all within the same block. The other thing I noticed was the amount of graffiti on the walls. There were areas where every wall had graffiti on it or some sort. There were other places where it was every 3rd wall. And then there were some walls that had none on it. I'm sure there's some logic here that is beyond my observation. I imagine some of it legal and encouraged. And then of course you just had the people who did it to do it.

Further with this idea - a lot of the signs were Greek, then English and then they had graffiti underneath it. Because I don't read Greek, the graffiti and the Greek often look the same with English being the one off. When in Greece on different islands coming up, I'm going to ask our tour guide to try to say some of these Greek words.

For example, in English I typed “we had a good time in Greece”. This is the Greek translation:  Περάσαμε καλά στην Ελλάδα.

Our last stop was to Athens flea market. As with all flea markets, it is huge with a countless number of stalls. We walked down one aisle, Mary found a T-shirt and souvenir shop. She was able to buy all the essentials there. Even after that, we want for another 30 minutes or so looking at this and that. We aisles were narrow and there were hundreds of people in the aisle. It was a Sunday afternoon, so everyone was out. By time we headed back to the van, it was almost 4:00.

The acupuncturist Mary works with suggested she try the gyros right outside of the cruise terminal. For our last stop, before getting to the cruise terminal, was to pick up two gyros. We made it back to the ship by 5:00. We said our goodbyes for the evening. Mary and I went to the ship. It was an amazing tour.

Back in the room, we ate our gyros. We are used to gyro meat being veal and pork mixed, I believe. The euros in Athens were either all pork or all chicken. I’d tend to think that the ones in Athens were more authentic, but who knows. They were good. Definitely nap time.  We both slept for a good hour. We got up for a couple of hours before going back to bed. It had been a very successful day. We learned more about the Acropolis than I could ever imagine. We learned a lot about city life in Athens. Again, we learned more than I could ever imagine. The thing is, this was only day one in Athens. We had a whole other day to spend.