Athens and Dephi!

Good evening all people!

We are living it up in Athens right now. After the hideously expensive world that is Italy, Athens in a shoppers paradise by comparison. This means that things DON'T cost three times as much as you'd normally expect, but are actually pretty close to expected, if not slightly cheaper.

Lets see, the highlight of our first day was that we did our laundry. I know, we were pretty excited too! On the plus side, doing our laundry ran us into a market, which closed off a main road for several hundred meters. About half of this length sold fresh food. Vegetables, fruit, olives, fish were the main features. Oddly enough, we didn't see a single meat vendor.

Anyways, give us a day or two to relax in Athens, and we started to go see some stuff. Here's what we came up with.
We found this pretty neat hill, that had some pretty awesome veiws. Yes, that's the acropolis and the parthenon in the background there.











A day or two later we actually decided to walk to the acropolis, and saw the parthenon up close and personal. Unfortunately there's currently scaffolding all over it, but you get the idea.














There was also a pretty theatre. This is the older, smaller one. The other one is possibly more impressive, but I liked this one, since it was old and had dogs sleeping all over it.
(btw, semi-feral dogs and cats seems a way of life for the greeks, they are bloody everywhere! Not visible, but lieing on the bench about 1m to johns left, is a stray dog sleeping. Evidently they don't need to pay for tickets)









Here's the temple of Zues, I couldn't find a picture I liked with us in it on my camera, so I just went with my artistic efforts.














And here we ran into a nice American lady who was handy with a camera. Here you can see the ancient Roman city of Agora in the front, working back up to the acropolis further back.



















Today we took a day trip to Delphi, the navel of the world, according to the greeks. All we know is it took 3.5 hours by bus, and 13 euro to get there, but it was worth it.
The town, both new and ancient, is situated right on the side of a mountain, and the scenery is pretty spectacular.
The ancient city itself is a lovely collection of ruins strewn up and down the mountain, thankfully around the corner from the new township.

Here's a nice collection of pillars!














And the ancient stadium.













Keep in mind that it really is up and down the
slope, so we needed to stop for a drink.
Here's the place we chose.











Anyways, things are going well. We're planning a day cruise to some of the islands, so we'll let you know how that goes.

Anyways, hope you guys are behaving yourselves. It's not long before we're off to Austria and the Czech Republic.

Byes!
Bob