Today, life, laughing, said, “Close enough” and dumped in Tokyo instead of Taipei. Having always wanted to visit Japan, I laughed back and welcomed the opportunity to get a small taste of Tokyo before I return in 2 weeks.

I got back to San Diego from Greece around 11pm on 7/8. I left for the airport again around 4:30am in order to catch a flight to Los Angeles which then connected to Narita International Airport in Japan. I was supposed to fly from Narita to Taipei on a Singaporean airline called Scoot. When I boarded my flight to Narita, I was already a bit flustered, realizing that I’d only have about 15 minutes after landing to run through the airport and check-in to my flight before they close check-ins. Much to my surprise, when I landed in Narida after a 10 hour flight, I got a message telling me that flight to Taipei was cancelled due to bad weather conditions caused by typhoons. Rushed check-in problem: solved. New problem: how the hell am I getting to Taipei now?

After calling Scoot, it became apparent that my options were to: 1) fly out to Taipei on a Scoot flight the following morning or 2) swap my plans and spend the week in Japan and then circle back to spend my last week in Asia in Taiwan instead of Japan. I opted for the former, and since I my plane landed in Japan around 3:30pm, I decided it would be worth taking the train from Narita into Tokyo (takes about an hour on a high-speed train). I booked myself a stay at the Sauna and Capsule Hotel in Hokuo (I keep hearing that it’s a fairly uniquely Japanese experience to stay in a capsule hotel), and after an hour going through customs and immigration, I found myself on the Keisei Skyliner, a high-speed railway which take me to Ueno. I chose this in part because the first major name I recognized on Google Maps that was anywhere near one of the rail lines was Akihabara, a section of Tokyo that is very well known for anime and gaming. Since I love both anime and gaming, I knew I’d be making a stop to Akihabara at some point anyway so why not now?

When I got to the capsule hotel, I was asked to take off my shoes and place them in a locker. I then took the locker key up to the front desk where they fulfilled my reservation, and traded my foot locker key for a capsule locker key. The idea is that I trade my capsule locker key back for the foot locker key whenever I want to leave the building. This ensures that I don’t track dirt into the building. Makes sense—one of the first things that struck me about Japan is how clean everything is. Outside, the buildings and roads are very well-kept. Inside, you can almost always find some maid or janitor meticulously cleaning every little scrap of dirt or trash in sight.

 

Anyway, I went downstairs and found my capsule. The capsules are each about 3 feet high, 3 feet wide, and 8 feet deep. They basically contain a bed, a control for the light, an outlet for power, a small TV, and a screen that I can pull down over the entrance. I couldn’t find a good large place to keep my luggage, so I threw it into the capsule and pulled down the screen.

Having gotten myself settled into the capsule, I decided it was time to go exploring. I found my way to the MRT and followed Google Maps’ instructions for getting to Akihabara. Unfortunately, Google Maps had a very different of where Akihabara is than it should and I ended up walking 10 blocks to get to the actual Akihabara.

Looking at a map, you might expect to see more nature in Tokyo. The city has several rivers flowing through it, and I expected interesting views as I crossed those rivers (I suppose this expectation comes from the amazing bridges and river crossings I saw in Paris). Instead, however, it’s incredibly easy to miss many of the rivers in Tokyo, at least the ones that I walked past. It’s an extremely urban environment, and the scenery doesn’t seem to change very much even as you walk by. The river itself is closely surrounded by buildings such that there isn’t really a way to walk along the river so you only ever really notice it if you pick a particularly good place to cross.

After a little bit of walking, I found my way to Akihabara. As promised, there were pictures of anime characters everywhere. Walking down the street, the music made me feel like I was trapped in the ending credits scenes of all my favorite anime shows. I made one pass around the entire area without going into any of the stores. The area wasn’t nearly as large as I thought it would be. As I walked around, I passed by a cafe called Maidreamin, which had a Japanese woman dressed in a maid costume standing outside of it. I instantly recognized this as one of the maid cafes that some of my friends mentioned I should look into. My immediate first thought was, “holy crap that’s got to be the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” And yet, as I walked around considering where to eat I became more and more convinced that the most unique dining experience was going to be at that maid cafe. I half knew what to expect just from taking one look at the place and I was incredibly embarrassed by the idea of walking in, but I summoned up the gumption to do it.

The maid cafe did not disappoint. It was absolutely one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Once I was seated, a Japanese woman in a maid costume came over, calling me “master,” gave me an overview of my dining options, then gave me a pink cat ears headband and told me to say “meow meow” while holding up my arms as if to imitate a cat whenever I was ready to place my order. I don’t know about any of you who are reading this, but I personally have never had the perverse fantasy of having an attractive Japanese woman dress up in a maid costume and call me master while I pretend to be a cat. In fact, I’m not even sure how they came up with the idea. At least I have to give them points for originality? Well, so long as I was sitting in that cafe and paying for the experience, I wasn’t going to cut any corner. I put the headband on.

A “meow meow” and a shake of my arms later, my order was placed. First they brought me a melon soda and I was told to repeat after the maid and make some hand motions. I’m pretty sure we blessed the drink by saying “delicious delicious” and making a hard shape with our hands. The maid looked at me and matter of factly said, “now it is delicious” and walked away to let me enjoy my soda in slight embarrassed horror.

Not too long after, another maid brought me the cutest meal I have received. I ordered a curry rice which came to me in the likeness of a bear with a piece of chicken katsu on top of it. The maid walked me through yet another ritual of making hand gestures and repeating after her, then she drew a cat face on my katsu using sauce. Sure, why not?

The food was pretty decent. The chicken katsu was super moist. When I made chicken katsu, it was absolutely nothing like this. At this point, I’m fairly certain that I’m actually terrible at cooking food and my friends are all either lying to me or have just eaten entirely too much Stanford dining hall food and are completely sick of it. Whatever, I enjoy cooking so I’ll keep at it.

When I was done with my meal, I decided to walk around Akihabara a little bit and explore some more of the shops and buildings. As I walked around it became clear that I had evaluated the size of Akihabara completely incorrectly. For whatever reason, I just assumed that only the first floor of every building I walked by was in use for shops when in fact pretty much every building was a multi-storied department store with more and different wares on each floor. I explored one building which was full of plastic models of anime figures and gundam models.

They also had a floor full of trading cards, which contained a whole bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I remember playing with those back in elementary school…

I chose another building at random and this one turned out to be something of an arcade. I was very impressed by the sophistication of the games in the arcade and equally impressed by the dedication of the gamers manning each game. Even if I could read the Japanese well enough to play the games, I probably wouldn’t have gotten a turn. Some of these games involved trading cards which you place onto a mat so that the game can recognize them and introduce digital elements in the game that correspond to them. One particularly interesting game made it look like you press a card down onto the mat to create an army (presumably the type of army depends on the trading card that you’ve used), then the game tracks the location of the card on the mat so you can move the card around to control the positioning of the army. Seemed like an interesting way to control a real time strategy game.

Once I was done with the arcade building, I walked around a little bit, trying to get to a nearby shrine. However, since it was late and everything was pretty much closed I only succeeded in getting enough exercise that my feet started to hurt so I made my way back to the capsule hotel.

Back at the capsule hotel, I realized that the bathrooms didn’t have any showers in them. Then I realized that this was because the sauna and public baths on the top floor of the hotel were included in the price of my capsule. So after reading a little bit about etiquette for public baths on the Internet, I decided to go take a dip (read: went to go get naked with old men). The baths were nice! Hot and very relaxing. I did something funny to one of my shoulders and the heat and the jets really helped to release tension. I also tried the sauna which was so hot that I literally couldn’t breath heavily through my nose without a sensation that I could only describe as “burning my nostrils.” I didn’t stay too long :P.

After all this, I was pretty satisfied that I made the most of my unexpected half day in Japan, so I hit the sack early in the hopes of being well-rested for an early-morning train ride back to the airport. Life lesson learned: when life throws you a curve ball, make an adventure out of it :).

Today we spent most of the day in Delphi before jumping on a bus back to Athens. In my opinion, we spent just about the right amount of time in Delphi.

Delphi is a small, but beautiful town nestled in the mountains. The town is built almost like layers on a terrace, with long parallel streets and alleyways with tall staircases that wind ever upward. Delphi is famous for its ruins. It’s marked as a World Heritage Site and is home to Apollo’s famous Oracle at Delphi, as well as a number of shrines to other gods like Athena.

We spent the morning at the Sanctuary of Apollo, which included ruins of a large amphitheater, a temple, a bank (?), and a stadium. For the most part, it was very hard to make anything of the ruins and I’ll admit I didn’t spend very much time reading the various placards in the sanctuary (nor did I do very much research beforehand). Mostly we saw stones marking where the foundations of buildings used to be. Occasionally we’d see a large column still intact from a temple or a building that used to stand here thousands of years ago.

As we climbed the many stairs to the stadium situated at the top of the hill, Mom stayed behind to meditate near the ruins of the temple. When we returned she claimed that she had been given a message by the Oracle and that she now thinks one of her purposes in life is to give voice to her mother. Mom is a little insane like that sometimes (I guess I don’t really believe in higher powers giving higher callings), but it’s a charming goal nonetheless.

After we were done with the Sanctuary of Apollo, we walked further down the road to another ruins site, this time ruins of a shrine to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. These ruins featured, mostly, a bunch of rocks in a loose grid-like pattern and a few columns in a large circular pattern. Some pictures on the plaques showed us what the shrine looked like many thousands of years ago. One can almost tell?

Having had our fill of ruins for the day, we walked back toward the museum associated with the Shrine of Apollo. On our way, we came across a little fountain and we all washed our faces in it just for kicks.

At the museum, we saw various artifacts and relics leftover from a time when the shrines were a little more whole. Again, I didn’t spend too much time reading the information in the museum, but I was struck by the choice of languages for translation. In delphi, some signs seem to translate into German, others into French, others into English. It’s as if they couldn’t make up their minds so they thought they’d just do a few for everyone :P.

The leftovers of a hollow silver-gilded bronze statue of a bull caught my eye at the museum. Bronze nails were tacked in to the top to seal the plates together. The plaque on the wall said that this statue was likely much larger than reconstructed here in the museum. The top of an ornate, Corinthian (?) column with some figures on top of it also caught my eye. I stopped to imagine what this would look like attached to a building or monument somewhere. Most interesting to me, though, was a 3D model of what the entire Sanctuary of Apollo would have looked like before it turned to ruins. It would have been quite a place to walk through!

After the museum, we walked back into town for lunch. Delphi has a whole bunch of hotels with restaurants that line the side of the cliff. We quickly learned that in Delphi you pay for the view, not so much for the dining experience—the food wasn’t very impressive anywhere we ate. While we were sitting, though, a lightning storm rolled over the valley and we saw giant lightning bolts streak down from the sky to touch the ground below. I thought this was super cool because I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a full lightning bolt before!

Once we paid for the bill, we spent some time walking around Delphi and browsing in the various shops. Just like in Athens, many of the shops were pretty standard and replicated over and over again, but one of the shops we stopped in had some interesting and unique wares. The shopkeep was a very nice and knowledgable man who tried to guess our interests, and then told us fun stories about interesting products he was selling. In this shop, I found to-scale models of ancient Greek ships, decorated circular chess boards with figures of greek temples in the center of the board, Spartan armor and helmets (Dad tried a helmet on for the laughs). The shopkeep also played a number game with us: he showed us a table of numbers created by Pythagoras and asked me to pick a number, then tell him how many boxes my number showed up in. Once I told him which boxes my number was in, he thought about it for a little while and then told me my number! Apparently the table is structured such that if you sum the first number in each box that a number appears, you get that number. Kind of fun :).

The shopkeep also showed me an interesting cup called a Pythagorean Cup. The cup is designed with a little hole in the bottom. The idea is that you can fill this cup up to a certain line marked on the inside of the cup, but if you fill any higher than that the liquid will spill out. I think the hole is created to produce a very specific amount of pressure which resists the pull of gravity on the liquid up to a certain volume.

When we were done shopping, we returned to our hotel, got our luggage, and went to be picked up by the bus taking us to Athens. On our way back to the hotel, the storm that we had seen crossing the valley came upon us and we were hit by deluge of rain. Our bus was nearly an hour late, but once we on, we were treated to the sight of rainbows on the road back to Athens. We even saw a double rainbow! Mostly I passed time on the bus by reading. Kristen and I watched The Mockingjay: Part 1.

We stayed in a little hotel in Piraeus, the section of Athens which houses the port where ferries and cruise liners come to dock. Tomorrow morning we’ll be boarding a ferry which will take us to Santorini in the Greek Isles!

For whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep this morning. I woke up at 3am and passed the time by reading and exercising. Around 5:50am, my parents woke up as well to find a good place to watch the sunrise at 6:05am, and I decided to go for an early morning run in a foreign place.

I ran straight down the road, being careful not to take too many turns lest I get hopelessly lost and not be able to trace my way back. The road forward turned into a dirt path which looked a lot like a hiking trail. I followed it for a little while, curious about where it led, until I remembered a passing warning from yesterday’s tour guide regarding wildlife (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!) and decided to turn back since exploring the trail alone seemed imprudent. On my way back, however, I ran into my parents who had decided to walk in the same direction. Feeling more confidence in numbers (and recognizing that I’d only have to outrun the slowest member of our group, not a bear :P), I turned around and hiked with them up the trail.

The trail took us up to an old road then across that old road to another trail, this one a little less well-kept. At this point, my parents wanted to turn around, but I urged them on to go just 10 minutes further. As we walked, we crossed an interesting stone staircase/bridge and continued to wind our way up into the mountains. I imagined that maybe this path would lead us to one of the monasteries we had been to yesterday—I half joking thought since I had been under the impression that those were quite a ways up and not so close to the town. Yet as we walked, and the view got higher and higher and we approached the tops of the lowest rock formations, my excitement grew.

Again, my parents wanted to go back but I convinced them to keep going. A little further and we looked up and, lo and behold, not more than 200 meters above us, was one of the monasteries. At this point I could not be convinced to turn around until I saw what was at the end of this path. As we kept walking the path began to be better and better kept, and I realized that we must be close to the end. As we grew closer to the monasteries, we also started hearing a low humming noise. It took us a little while to recognize that this was actually the chantings of the monks high above us!

When we finally made it to the top, we found ourselves on a little landing below one of the monasteries. We had visited this exact same landing the day before and I recognized it as the area where they brought building materials to be hoisted up into the monastery via a great net connected to a rope. Now satisfied with my pre-breakfast adventure, we turned around and started the hike back down the mountain. Kristen was still soundly asleep when we returned.

A tour guide drove us once again up the winding mountain roads to the monasteries, this time giving us a chance to stop and look inside. We visited several monasteries today. The insides are typically rather austere—wooden floors, stone walls, minimal decoration except in the chapel, which is covered in paintings—but with beautiful and well-kept gardens. Though the exteriors are extraordinarily grand and their placement in the mountains is spectacular to behold, the insides of the monasteries felt very monotone after the first couple we visited. Some monasteries had winding stairways with many steps to their entrances. Other monasteries had museums (one had a war museum featuring soldier’s uniforms, swords, and pistols). One monastery had an ostiary—a room full of skulls and bones. When we asked our tour guide about this he said that it is tradition to exhume the bones of the monks after a few years, once the decay is complete. Greek Orthodox Christians believe that when Christ comes and resurrects the dead, there must be something of them still remaining to be resurrected. Thus, Greek Orthodox Christians don’t believe in cremation and, presumably, the monasteries keep the haunting remains of their dead in a small room. With the exception of a nun here or there manning (womaning?) the gift shop register, we hardly ran into a single monk or nun during our visits to the monasteries.

Feeling like we had seen everything to be seen in the mountains, we descended to the town to rest before our train to Delphi. We stopped for coffee and I ordered a freddo cappuccino, a cold coffee drink with a large cream foam head that Kristen and I had kept seeing at other cafes and restaurants.

Rested a little more, we departed for the train station where we boarded the same train that had taken us to Meteora and pushed away to Delphi.

When we finally arrived in Meteora, we took a cab to Saint Georgio’s Villa, a small bed-and-breakfast-like establishment on the edge of a village called Kastraki, which lies at the bottom of the mountains in Meteora. Kastraki is the smaller of two villages at the base of the mountains; the other is called Kalambaka.

Last minute, we were able to get ourselves a couple of spots on a sunset tour of Meteora. In fact, we turned out to be the only people on the tour and, since it was a very cloudy day, viewing the sunset was unlikely.

As I learned on the tour, Meteora, which roughly translates to “floating in the air,” is famous for its mountainous rock formations and for the Greek Orthodox Christian monasteries that sit atop them. The best modern theories say that the entirety of Meteora was under water, the bottom of a sea. The mountains stand where the delta of a river used to be, as evidenced by the composite of materials in the sandstone deposits that form the mountains. Of course, the Greeks have their own mythological tale of how these mountains came to be: long ago, the Gods of Mount Olympus fought a terrible war against their forebears, the Titans. The fight flattened the earth, creating the large level plane that is the valley in which Kastraki and Kalambaka sit. As is written in the mythology, the Titans lost the battle and many of the fallen Titans turned into stone. The mountains at Meteora are thus the fossils of ancient Titans.

Our tour took us high into mountains to view the monasteries and nunneries built there. There are 6 of them that can be visited, and one of them has as few as 3 monks inside. The view from the top of the mountains is incredible—you can see out for many, many miles and here, unlike, Athens, the rooftops are quite beautiful. There seems to be some sort of village ordinance requiring people to build their houses only so high and to have a distinct red roof that looks very Spanish, but which must be Greek. The monasteries and nunneries themselves are made of course stone, but are build almost as extensions of the mountains themselves. The tour guide told informed us that building materials for the monasteries used to be carried by mule or on foot from across the valley. Some of these monasteries took more than a hundred years to build.

Since we got into Meteora so late, only one nunnery was still open for visiting hours. Unfortunately I cannot remember its name. Upon entering a monastery or nunnery, women are expected to dress modestly so they give out shawls and skirts at the entrance. Women must wear a skirt even if they are wearing long pants. Men, on the other hand, can walk in wearing a T-shirt and shorts… rather sexist and nonsensical if you ask me, but I don’t make the rules.

One of the monasteries, which we didn’t get to visit the inside of today, is called The Holy Trinity. Apparently this monastery was used to film parts of James Bond For Your Eyes Only (which, I can’t remember having seen before). This monastery sits out alone on a rock that looks very much like an island. Apparently there are steps that snake down the side of one rock several stories and back up the other. The entire climb just to get to the monastery is supposed to take over an hour.

We stopped for many photos along the way, and had a chance to see most of the monasteries from the outside. Tomorrow, when they’re open, we’ll likely see many of them from the inside as well. As expected, there was no real sunset because of the clouds, but we nevertheless hung out on a nice rocky outcrop which would have had a nice view of the sunset. Mom got it in her head that she was on top of the world, and wanted to stop and meditate for a little while.

Having given up on the sunset, we went to dinner in the town at a quaint little restaurant called Restaurant Meteora which was recommended by our tour guide. “It’s been owned and run by the same family for 4 generations!” he had said, proudly. The food wasn’t half bad, either! I ordered some sort of lamb roast that came with baked potatoes. I also asked our waiter what his favorite Greek beer on the menu was and ordered an Alfa beer. Lamb was tasty, beer was just alright—kind of like the Greek version of Heineken.

Off to an early bed tonight, and on to the insides of the monasteries tomorrow before we take the train to Delphi!

Today started bright and early at 9am with healthy servings of jet lag and groans. A shot of espresso as we walked through the streets of early morning Athens helped take the edge off.

First order of business for our first full day in Greece was visiting a travel agency to finish booking a few things that we couldn’t do online like getting tickets for the ferry to San Torini. This unfortunately meant a few hours in a travel agent’s office, but Kristen and I got to wander around and walk while our parents took care of business.

The first thing that struck me about daytime Greece was the prevalence of motorcycles! Everywhere we walked the sidewalk would be lined with parked motorcycles. On the roads, we mostly saw buses, taxis, and motorcycles with the occasional ordinary car.

The next thing that struck me about walking around in Greece was how many shops were closed. I hadn’t heard much about the financial crisis in Greece before coming to the country, but apparently Greece needs to negotiate terms with the EU by Monday or declare bankruptcy (or something like that, I haven’t been paying full attention). As if to emphasize the economic hardship Greece is feeling, we would walk entire city blocks that had nothing but closed down stores.

Another thing I found interesting was that Athens is fairly clean and litter free despite not having very many public trashcans for people to throw things away in. Maybe cleanliness and order is somehow ingrained in the culture?

Anyway, as we walked along just trying to get lost and explore I learned that people in Greece have no fear. Navigating the city streets can thus be a bit terrifying as cars whiz by and pedestrians waltz through the streets as if the timing were choreographed to fit between traffic. At one point, Kristen and I needed to cross the street and there was an old Greek man getting ready to cross at the same point. We figured we’d be able to follow the old Greek man and just cross when he crossed. Nope. Old Greek man strolls out into the street perfectly in time to walk behind a taxi that had just passed and skip in front of an oncoming bus before reaching the other side. We didn’t have the guts to follow where he led and instead just looked on in surprise as we tried to locate the nearest cross walk.

Roaming around Athens was amazing! I think one of my favorite things about Europe is being able to walk through a seemingly normal city street then turn a random corner and be wowed by history or culture or architecture. In Greece, walking around randomly had us running into old greek ruins thousands of years old or beautifully architected buildings made in their image.

I think one of my other favorite things about traveling is immersing myself in a culture. For me, this usually means getting lost a little bit to experience things that are off the beaten path. It usually means trying something new at every meal–either something I’ve never seen before, something I can only get in this country, or something uniquely done very well in this country. (I am honestly terrified that I will gain a ridiculous amount of weight while abroad because I absolutely love trying new foods.) It also means learning a new language. (I love learning languages! I’m still disappointed I haven’t mastered a second language to fluency, but that’s probably because I keep getting distracted by new ones to learn!)

Usually before every trip I spend some time teaching myself the language of the country I am about to visit. Most of the time I’m starting from scratch, so I don’t even come close to being conversational in the language let alone fluent. But usually I’m able to learn just enough to start picking up little tidbits of people’s conversations and understanding street signs. The real fun comes when I’ve learned enough to start passively learning more as I wander the streets of a new city :).

Unfortunately, since I’m also visiting Taiwan and Japan very soon and I have studied Chinese and Japanese before, I spent most of my time before this Greece trip learning Asian languages. I figured learning 3 languages at the same time might be a bit too much. Since Greek uses a fairly different alphabet, I realized today just how much I take for granted being able to read and pronounce the words I’m seeing even if I don’t know what they mean. In fact, for learning new languages I think the ability to even just pronounce a language is more empowering than one would think.

So today I set myself to learning the Greek alphabet so that I could pronounce the words on street signs and restaurant menus. Greek pronunciation is very similar to what you might expect based on the names of the letters in its alphabet. There are, however, a few letters which are pronounced very differently in Greek than we have been taught in math classes in the States. For example, we typically pronounce “H” as “eta” (eight-a) back home, but in Greek this letter is pronounced “ita” (eat-a). My pronunciation still isn’t perfect–there are some vowel combinations I still don’t get and I always forget that “P” is pronounced with an “r” sound (for “rho”)–but now that I can sound out words I’m realizing that Greek isn’t a particularly hard language! There is a large psychological barrier in needing to learn a new alphabet just to pronounce a language, but many Greek words are very, very similar to their English counterparts. For example, tomato is ντοματα (pronounced ntomata) in Greek. In fact, now that I can pronounce it and am developing an ear for it, Greek actually sounds and works like a lot of other romance languages (in particular, I feel like Greek sounds a little bit like Spanish).

Anyway, after a few excursions from the travel agency (we checked back every so often to see if the parents were done), many newly picked up words, and a couple of snacks, we were finally ready to head to lunch as a family. My parents found this vegetarian/vegan place called Avocado about a half mile away from the Acropolis. Much to my chagrin this place featured no traditional Greek foods, and nothing that I couldn’t particularly find in other countries :(. Lunch was therefore not particularly memorable or worth talking about today. I’m realizing now that if my parents have their way, I won’t get to enjoy any of the amazing foods in Greece!

After lunch at Avocado, we slowly made our way up to the Acropolis, our main point of interest for the day. Along the way, we stopped at a shop selling baklava and bought a few different pieces. This baklava was literally to die for. I tried making baklava a few months ago and many of friends said they thought it was very good except that the layers needed to stick together better. Today I learned that they have all lied to me. My baklava was nothing, nothing compared to this baklava. I’m not even sure where to start putting my finger on the differences… perfect texture, explosion of sweet honey-filled flavor, and just a hint of… feta? Anyway, this shop also sold chocolate baklava which is also friggin’ amazing.

There’s a surprising amount of graffiti in Athens and, as we made our way upwards through cute narrow alleyways, we often found ourselves confronted with colorful displays of a more modern kind of art. I wish my ability to read Greek were a bit better so I could actually understand what some of these things say.

When we finally reached the Acropolis, we found that it was quite a hike to reach the top of the hill where the Parthenon, the Propylaia, and the other buildings lie.

I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t walk through the columns of the Parthenon, but was nevertheless in awe of its great figure.

The view from the top of the Acropolis was breathtaking–a complete panoramic view of Athens. Remembering similar scenes from my time in Paris last winter, I have to say that the city skyline in Paris is made even more beautiful by having a fairly uniform and kind of antiquated architecture about it.

Modern buildings in Athens by contrast give the viewer very little sense that this is a city that has stood for thousands and thousands of years.

After the Acropolis, we visited the Acropolis museum. Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed and we were all also hitting a low from sleep deprivation. We walked through the museum, but didn’t linger for very long at the exhibits. I’ve never quite enjoyed seeing Greek statues and engravings in a museum setting as much as seeing them in their natural context.

Finally, we returned to Voula, the district on the outskirts of Athens where we are staying. We quickly changed into swimsuits and walked down to the nearest beach, hoping to catch the sunset on the water. Regrettably, the sun was already lost behind the clouds by the time we reached the beach. Kristen and I nevertheless tested the waters. They were warm and the water was shallow quite a ways out. Even without the sun, we could see that the water was a beautiful light turquoise blue!

After the beach, we walked to a nearby Greek food stop called SouvlaKing. It wasn’t a particularly grand or memorable place, but we chose it because they had a decent website which featured a menu entirely in Greek with no English translation (I took this as a good sign of authenticity :P). The food was decent–I ordered some kababs stuffed with yogurt–but it was a fairly ordinary food operation which didn’t quite qualify for the label of “sit-down restaurant.” Maybe not the best choice of food.

Dad was still hungry after SouvlaKing, so we headed to a second dinner in a much nicer location.

This restaurant was situated on the side of a beautiful lake right beneath a sheer cliffside which reflected itself very clearly in the still water. It was quite a sight! At this restaurant, I had my first “red beer.” (I’m still not sure what makes it special, but it wasn’t terrible by any means.)

Quite an eventful day! We’re staying in Athens through tomorrow before taking traveling to other places in Greece early Sunday morning. Looking forward to what’s in store!