Athens

Despite the fact that I didn't really sleep on the Athens bus, I wasn't too tired the morning it arrived in Athens. I checked into the hostel at which we were dropped off, took a quick shower, and walked all the way down to the Acropolis. There actually a few sites to see in Athens: The Acropolis, The Agora, the Roman Forum, The Theater of Dyonius, the Temple of Olympian Zues, and one or two I can't remember. I did them all by midafternoon, but only because they aren't really all that impressive. Despite the swarm of tourists at The Acropolis, it had a magnificent view of the city. Yet the Parthenon was under reconstruction (Yes, they're rebuilding it but with whatever pieces of the original they can salvage). The theater, the temple to zues, and the agora, though, were really just collections of marble building fragments that had be set up along some paths. I didn't really get a sense for the culture that once inhabited the sites like I did in Rome or Pompeii. I would have liked to see ruins where they lie. That would have sparked my imagination as to what the building was like, why it fell, and how did it relate to its surroundings.

I eventually headed back to the hostel to find that most of the people who had gotten off the bus with me were still there and hadn't really gone out at all. It was generally accepted that there wasn't anything to do in Athens, and I couldn't find anyone who wanted to get into some trouble. So I starting scheming to steal Internet access from the hostel with my laptop. Two girls in my dorm room got the idea to go see a movie. So we made the trek out to a theater that showed original language movies. I wanted to see the ten minutes of Star Wars that I had missed in Rome, and I could had pulled them in with me, but one of them preferred to see Monster In Law. It had a couple moments of hilarity.

And that was Athens. My original goal was to make it out to an island in the Aegean, like Mykonos or Ios, but given ferry times (night boats only), the possibility of finding a cheap place to stay (apparently little to none), and costs, I've decided to head back to Italy instead. I'll leave island hopping to a few years from now.