Athens

First of all, I have to say that Athens Backpacker hostel is soo savy! It's right smack in the middle of a good end of town, including within walking distance from a lot of cool sites & the metro. Like many places in central Athens you can see the Acropolis from the rooftop bar.

Yesterday, I arrived at the hostel before Jenny & before checkin. I was so tired I crashed on the couch for 2 1/2 hours. After settling in we went out to walk around & get our berrings. We ended up getting into a couple of monument places free, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Arch of Hadrian, & Acroplolis. It was Global Environmental day so they were letting people in for free all day. We ate great food & heard some great live Greek music. Nevermind that it took us 1 1/2 hours of looking for a particular place to eat because we were turned around with our map. Once we knew we were reading the map correctly, we decided to eat elsewhere. :-) Today, we went with a group from the hostel to walk about for a couple of hours & ate our first real Gyros, lamb.



It's interesting how familiar some things seem & how foreign the language feels & looks. I'm usually pretty good with new languages, but I'm having a hard time with this one. I know how to say thank you though (phonetically, a-FAR-east-ro). There are tons of stray dogs |& cats. We were told that if the dogs have a tag then they have been nuttered & deemed safe & released. The cats come around a lot, even at the outside restaurants, but none so far have been bothersome, just quiet eyed begging. There were some boys biking around on the streets & it felt very familiar to me. It seem like village standards where the kids bacially roam around where they please. Although, here there are very narrow streets & motorcycles, mopeds, scooters, cars, buses (electirc & gas). Seeing these ancient century upon centry old ruins juxtaposed among clay tiled roofs, cars |& glass buildings has been interesting at every glance.



Tomorrow we're going to Delphi, the navel of the world. It'll be a 3 hour bus ride each way. We'll spend another night here & then head down to Napfilo the next day. Napfilo was actually the original capital of Greece until it's Independance (from Turkey, i'm guessing-I'll find out).