A stop in Athens for souvlaki

Our flight out of Paris was just an hour after Mums, so we were all able to head to the airport at the same time - which was handy. So while she climbed aboard a 13 hour flight destined for Singapore we got on a 2.5 hour flight to the ancient city of Athens. We arrived at around 4pm and took the train to the city where we met up with our latest AirBnb host. She showed us around the apartment we were renting and gave us an overview of what was around the area and what we should get up too over the coming days. Afterwards, we popped out for a quick dinner of souvlaki.- which here apparently is served with french fries inside the bread with the meat and salad. We were going to head out for a bit more of an explore but it was Sunday night and the city was pretty much shut down.

Yesterday morning we got up and tried to get a jump start on the day as we had quite a bit of admin we needed to take care of. Truth is as far as this leg of the trip goes we only have a couple of days of accommodation booked in Athens and after that we don't have anything concrete planned until we fly back to NZ (from Athens again). It was actually an interesting morning, everything around our apartment was closed and the streets were really quiet, we figured that we were just in a pretty quiet area of town and jumped on the metro station to the downtown area. We ended up having to go to a different stop than the one we were aiming for, as the central station was closed for "Safety Reasons" - we figured that they were doing repairs. However when we got out at the next stop we were greeted by a mass of crowd, people handing out Greek flags, riot police and fully armed military personal. For a split second we wondered if we had walked into some massive political demonstration that was about to turn nasty but everything was alright. We spotted a younger guy (the younger ones are more likely to speak English) and he told us that it was OXI day which commemorates the Italo-Greek War from 1941. It was all fairly exciting and we took some time to soak up the atmosphere for a while before we clicked that it was a public holiday and that we would have to leave our plan making for another day.

Since there wasn't much else we could do to get anything booked for the coming days we made the most of Athens. What was great about the public holiday was that all the historic sites were free for the day so we had a great time exploring the Acropolis and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Sam and I had a bit of fun trying to take photo's of the sites without other tourists in the way.

Odeon of Herodes Atticus

The Erechtheion 

The Temple of Olympian Zeus with the Acropolis in the background.

After we explored the ruins for a few hours we did the next best thing to do in Athens... we hit the beach. Conveniently the nearest public beach was only a few stops away from our apartment on the train and while it was largely occupied by leather-skinned old men and women with an advance bodily confidence it was still a nice place to lie in the sun - something we hadn't been able to do since we were in Barcelona, which seems an eternity ago. We spent pretty much the rest of the day there as there was literally nothing else for us to do - everything else was closed.

Today we got up and headed down to Port Piraeus and spent a good chunk of the morning trying to plan out what islands we were going to visit and when. This turned out to be a bit harder than we expected due to the off peak schedule and the fact that some of the ferry companies had not released a time table for November yet. So after trying a few different scenarios we opted simply to book a one way ticket to Santorini, the number one island on my bucket list, where we will simply retire and live for the rest of our days... no just kidding. We just booked the first leg and figured that we'll wing it from there.

So we planned things out the best we could and then decided we'd worked so hard we should probably take it easy and spend the rest of the day at the beach - so we did.

Me at the beach - Sam did we'll to ensure the old people weren't in the photo.