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I'm having great fun, weeeeeee! Today we spent the day visiting the ruins in greater detail. We started off the day by grabbing a Gyros - because they are amazingly tasty! And then we headed to the Acropolis complex. We have been a bit cheeky in Europe because if you are an EU citizen and a student many attractions give you a heavy discount or free entrance - we've seen this in many places included Paris, Budapest, Rome and here in Athens. Even though we gave our Polish student IDs back in Poland, we still have our ESN cards, which are like a European exchange student card, as well as our ISIC cards (International Student Cards). So that is usually enough to prove to gain free entry - if not I can prove I have British citizenship, and usually Matt's surname (Schroder) is convincing enough that he is an EU citizen haha!
The acropolis complex is pretty massive. I wish I could give you exact names of all the things we saw within it, but basically there were lots of ruins everywhere, remains of theatres, caves (I think one was for Zeus), the Parthenon, churches, etc, etc. It is all pretty spectacular and insane how it still stands after all this time. Matt absolutely loved it and really got in to it all - reading all the signs and making sure we didn't miss out on anything haha! The weather was relatively mild too which was good - I reckon it would be horrible doing any of this during the summer time when a) it's a lot hotter (at the moment is perfect sightseeing temperature) and b) when there are faarrrr more people around.
Once you get to the top of the Acropolis area you are really high up and can see most of the city. I took some nice photos which I will chuck up on Facebook! Including one of the Aegean Sea and so on.
This took us a few hours, I think around three or four. After we decided to go to the Acropolis Museum! At the moment there's a lot of reconstruction work going on with the complex so a lot of stuff has been relocated to the museum. It was really cool because on the ground floor a lot of it is made of glass so when you look down you see heaps of ruins and remains! Then of course there are hundreds of statues throughout the museum - many dating back to 500-700BC! It's so crazy how old this stuff is and it's still with us today. There is also a video on show talking about the Acropolis in detail. It talks about all the crazy architectural aspects (the Greeks were insanely advanced!), and also about the history and wars that the Acropolis had to endure. Yesterday Matt was wondering why these kind of buildings experienced neglect in the past, but this video explained to us how the Acropolis was effected by events such as an Ottoman invasion, attack by Christians who ripped down anything including statues that wasn't reflective of Christianity, looting from a particular lord, an explosion, earthquakes, and so on. It's pretty mind blowing that it is even there at all.
After all this sightseeing we were pretty hungry again and decided to get more gyros. Maybe soon we will turn in to one at this rate :) When we went to order the guy knew exactly what we wanted, even that I didn't want onions! Hahaha - definitely a sign we've had far too many already. We also treated ourselves to our favourite dessert of Greek yoghurt and fruit :) we are being piggies I know but the food is so delicious! We did however decided to spice our lives up a bit by getting something different for dinner - our hostel has a café attached and we got some good burgers. Mine was filled with grilled eggplant, zucchini, capsicum, tomato, lettuce and feta cheese with mayonnaise whilst Matt's had peppers, lettuce, tartar sauce and fish! It was super tastyyyy.
Tomorrow we plan on doing more sightseeing. We're going to go and check out the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Panathenaic Stadium, Zappeion and then places in the city centre such as a Syntagma Square, the Polytech and the National Library!
- comments
nan Sounds wonderful, I love Greek mythology. Glad you are both enjoying yourselves after the shaky start. Must say the gyros look delicious. Love you xxx
Mum Do you remember reading us the story of the Golden Fleece mum? I can't remember what book it was in but it was one of my favourite childhood stories - completely illustrated. Stephie - it's great that you are giving Athens a chance :) .... ancient Greek history is utterly fascinating!