Saturday, July 10, 2010

Really Athens?

After Paradise, we were on our way to Athens. Luckily our flight and everything went smoothly (accept we were all hating life because we didn't sleep). We got to Athens and the there were no five person taxis so we decided to try the metro- keep in mind we were exhausted! Well we figured it out just fine and it took us directly to our hotel. Perfect! We check in and Drew, Dan and I were upgraded to a suite room so that was awesome and the staff was very kind. Everything was going great :) Aunt Tracy and Uncle Doug went down to a restaurant right outside the hotel and Uncle Doug went to pay for dinner- turns out he had been pick-pocked! Then Aunt Tracy says "don't worry I just pulled out money out of the ATM" and she goes to get her money and she was pick pocked too! Those bastards!!! I guess two taxis would have been cheaper than the metro! Ugh, that was awful, I guess that's what happens when a country is in an economic crisis! But at least no one was hurt.

That was a bad way to start our trip to Athens for sure! But after eating we went outside to walk around the Plaka, which is just the big shopping center, and we found the Temple of Zeus which was awesome! There used to be over a hundred columns. One fell during a terrible storm and it still remained laying there which I just thought was the coolest thing ever! Athens was starting to get better. After all that, we started to learn about a huge strike that was going to happen on one of our full days in Athens and everyone was advising tourists to leave the city- it sounded super serious. So we talked about our options and decided to book an all day tour to 3 Greek Islands during the day of the strike. We were forced to cancel our other tour to Delphi because it was too expensive to do both which sucked! But the cruise was going to be amazing!

First thing in the morning- we had to wake up at 5:30 and get outside to wait for the shuttle by 5:45. We were waiting outside the hotel when all the sudden these two boys were walking toward us and split to go around us- all we heard was a snap. It took probably about 10 seconds to figure out what had happened- one of the boys tore Andrew's camera right off of his arm!! Dan and Aunt Tracy ran after them but decided to stop after a little bit because Dan was running with his I-Pad and didn't want them to come after him. What a terrible start to our morning! The camera wouldn't have been that big of a deal but he hadn't uploaded any of the pictures onto the computer since he got here :( That was a big bummer!

The cruise made things better but we were all still surprised and annoyed by the whole incident! It was a very nice cruise and we met this very nice couple that hung out with us while we were on the boat- it was a lot of fun and helped us forget about everything bad about Athens. Obviously so, we were not too excited about returning to Athens for the evening and for the entire next day. But we went to get a delicious dinner and went to bed early to get up fresh for the next day.

We were all too scared to bring anything with us the next day so Uncle Doug was in charge of the money and I didn't even bring my camera (lucky for me Aunt Tracy was brave enough to bring hers, so I stole a lot of her pictures). On our one day in Athens we went up to Acropolis, and let me tell you it was amazing! That was the moment that we started to fall in love with Athens again. We had a few unfortunate incidents for sure but at that moment we loved the city as a whole again! We climbed up and saw the Parthenon, ruins, Athena's Temple and a fantastic view of the entire city! We stayed up there for about 6 hours without even noticing how long we were there- it was gorgeous! After visiting Acropolis, we went to see the museum and learn a little bit about what we had just experienced.

Later we did some more shopping on the Plaka and went back to the restaurant for more delicious food- gyros, dolmades, soulvaki, and tsaziki. After dinner we went up on the ninth floor of our hotel which had an amazing view of the Acropolis and celebrated Aunt Tracy's 49th Birthday starting at midnight! What a great way to start her birthday :) The next day we would continue it by traveling to Barcelona!!

(Pictures need to come from Aunt Tracy's camera still so check back here within the next few days!)

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