Greece Part III: the Acropolis and the Agora

Friday was my first full day in Athens and decided to get the biggest historical sights (the ancient Acropolis and the Agora) out of the way first to make sure that I got to see them. Because winter is the off-season for Greek tourism, most of the sights to see were only open from 8:30 am to 3 pm, so I had to wake up at 7am (which was like 6am France time). Thanks to having a student card for a school within the European Union, I got into all of the sights and museums for free.

To get up to the Acropolis, I had to walk a path that wound around the hill past some ruins.

The first thing I saw on the way up was the Theatre of Dionysus.

the view from ground level

the view from above the theatre

We learned about its structure and purpose when we studied the play Oedipus Rex in high school and I must admit I was a little disappointed. I expected a bit more grandeur (even though I knew there were only ruins). This theatre was a bit of a let-down compared to the Odeon of Herodes which I passed by later on.

The farther up I got on the hill, the better and better the view of the city got.

At the top, I had to walk through the entrance to the ancient city which was a columned building called the Propylaea. They let people walk right through this structure which is kind of cool considering how at most of the sights you couldn't get within 5 feet of the buildings, let alone walk through them.

the Propylaea

The most disappointing part of the Acropolis in general was all of the restoration that was going on and the obvious technologies added by the modern world. Compared to Delphi where everything seemed very natural (and except for a few slight restorations, almost untouched), the Acropolis had lights and power cords everywhere and the buildings had metal construction structures covering them.

After I walked through the Propylaea, I had a clear view of the Parthenon.

It was very large and impressive but like I said, under restoration. The Parthenon was the temple of worship for the goddess Athena who the Athenians thought of as their protector, hence the town's name.

On the other side of the Acropolis, there was the Erechtheion which was a cool building.

It had a porch with statues of women as the pillars called the Porch of the Caryatids. The women-pillars on the Erechtheion weren't the actual ones that were originally there; the original ones were moved to the Acropolis Museum so I saw them later.

According to Greek mythology, Athena and Poseidon competed for the patronage of this city and in the end Athena was victorious, but this Erechtheion was still built and dedicated to Poseidon.

On my way down from the Acropolis, I saw the Odeon of Herodes which, as I said, was a lot more impressive than the Theatre of Dionysus. I don't know what the Odeon was used for because I couldn't find a sign but it looked like something theatrical.

Further down from the Acropolis, I saw what looked like a large rock with stairs carved into it so I went over to check it out. It was called Areopagus Hill.

According to the sign, it was where some of the first teachings of Christianity (or something like that) happened in Greece. Anyway I really liked it, it seemed like a nice place to relax and hang out.

It had a nice view of the city and was cool and smooth to the touch, having been worn down by thousands of years of people walking all over it

After that, I relaxed and had lunch at the Monastiraki market (another gyro).

the tail end of the market where there were a lot less people

The market was kind of cool and had a huge variety of different things but it probably would have been cooler for someone who spoke Greek, otherwise it was mostly just overwhelming.

After lunch, I went to check out the Agora. The first thing I saw was the completely reconstructed Stoa of Attalos which served as a museum for some of the relics found there. That was kind of neat to see how they lived back then.

Then I mostly just wandered around. In the middle, there was a cute little church called Church of the Holy Apostles which was from the year (approximately) 1000. I went inside and it was nice and cool and had some interesting ceiling artwork.

The problem with ruins is that, after awhile, they all just kind of start to look like rocks on the ground and you don't appreciate them as much, which, I think, is what started to happen to me here. It was still kind of interesting though.

I actually liked the temple here a lot. It was the temple of Hephaistos and according to the sign, it's the most well preserved temple from Ancient Greece. If memory serves me correctly, Hephaistos was the blacksmith god and he was married to Aphrodite (this being what I learned from the disney channel show based off of the movie Hercules, see TV can teach kids useful stuff :-p ).

Anyway after the agora, I went to the Acropolis Museum which had a lot of stuff found from the Acropolis. It was really amazing to see the kinds of things that the Ancient Greeks could sculpt out of marble or weld out of copper. They didn't allow cameras in there so I don't have any pictures from it, but by that time I was completely exhausted from being on my feet all day so I didn't spend too long there before I hobbled home.

Greece Part II: Delphi

Early on Thursday morning I woke up to meet the 6 girls that I had met the night before in order to go to go to the bus station and get on the bus that would take us to Delphi. It was a three hour bus ride to get there, which is a lot of hours on a bus but I had heard that it was worth it and I really wanted to see it. The bus left at 7:30 am and we had to walk to the bus station. Unfortunately, we didn't really think and got to the station at 7:25 only to find that all of the seats had been filled. The guy at the bus station told us that we could still go; it would just be standing-room only. We stood there for a second and debated but in the end all of us but one of the girls decided to go. We figured that we could just sit down in the aisle. It was kind of an awkward, squished ride and after three hours of fidgeting and changing positions and standing up and sitting down, we finally got there. On the bus we met a nice philosophy teacher from England who was there with a group of students and he told us that we should buy our tickets back right when we got there so that we could have seats on the way back and he kept telling us all this information about Delphi.

Anyway, when we got off the bus, it was obvious that it was well worth the long bus ride. It was beautiful. Apparently the Ancient Greeks believed Delphi to be the center of the Earth, or the navel of the Earth as I've heard it called. We walked through and saw the ruins of the treasuries where the offerings to the god Apollo were placed and we saw the temple of Apollo where the Oracle at Delphi stood. We also saw the gymnasium and the Tholos as well as the Delphi archaeological museum. Delphi was indescribably beautiful so I will be letting my pictures do most of the talking:

Our first view of the valley below from the modern city of Delphi when we got off the bus. In the far back, you can see the Mediterranean Sea.

The other direction looking out over groves of olive trees

Posing in front of the beautiful scenery

Pausing behind the group of girls I was with to take a picture. We had to walk down a hill to get to the ancient city of Delphi from the modern city.

The view from a little lower down in the ruins

Sitting on a stone semicircle, I can't remember what it was...

The Athenian treasury which was the only one still standing out of all of them. It is where the offerings to the god Apollo were kept. The light parts are where it has been partially restored.

More of the view. I was completely in love with it so I kept taking pictures.

The remains of the temple of Apollo itself. The philosophy teacher told us that the oracle, usually an old peasant woman, would stand at the back of it inhaling fumes from a chasm in the Earth and speaking gibberish while a priest "translated" what she was saying. In ancient times, they believed that Apollo spoke through the oracle.

Closer to the temple, the big temples in front of the amazing view.

Standing in front of the Temple of Apollo to give perspective to its size.

I was so busy taking pictures of the valley that I realized I hadn't taken many pictures of where we were. This is looking up towards the ruins in the last couple photos as we walked down to see the Tholos and gymnasium.

This is a picture of me trying my first ever olive. It was a Greek olive that Bre (the girl from UW Madison) had bought the day before at an Athenian market and let me try. It turns out that I still don't like olives...

This is the Tholos. I'm not sure exactly what it was used for but I've heard that it is the most popularly photographed site at Delphi. It amuses me that the restored columns have cow spots. It reminded me of Wisconsin.

This is the very last photo that I took as it was starting to get a bit later and we were waiting for the bus. I think it's very beautiful. In Greece, most of the time I was there, it was sunny but the air often seemed very clouded, almost foggy. At first I attributed this to the smog of the city, but even out here away from the big city it was foggy. One of the people at the hostel told me that when they asked a Greek person, they said they were sand clouds from the Saharan Desert.

Although there aren't any pictures of it, we also saw the archaeological museum there. It was pretty cool. There were a lot of statues and bronze items that were found in the Delphi ruins. It just makes you wonder what ordinary things of ours will be sitting in a museum 2000 years from now. We got seats on the bus ride back and mostly slept because we were all totally exhausted. Overall, I was very happy that I got to see Delphi :) .

End of Part II, tune in next time for Part III.

Greece Part I: Getting There

So as a lot of people know I had a week-long "winter break" this past week from school and I decided to use it to take a trip to Athens, Greece. It was a difficult decision to make. I looked at Dublin, London, Spain, Belgium, and other places. In the end, I wanted to go somewhere warm with good weather for the week. Also, I didn't think that I'd really have another opportunity to get to Greece this semester. So anyway here is the start of my adventure. I'm doing the posts in a couple parts.

On Tuesday afternoon I left for Geneva. I was to fly out early on Wednesday morning and because there was no train early enough that day, I came in on Tuesday and spent the night at the youth hostel there. It was my first European train experience and it was actually cool. The trains (or at least the one I was on) seemed quite fancy, even in second class. It had little tables for the seats with outlets to plug electronics in to. On the train, I met an asian boy from Montreal, Canada, who's name I think was Valentine but it was hard for me to understand his accent. Anyway, we figured out that we were headed to the same hostel for the night. He was on his way to Portugal but was spending a day in Geneva first. Since the Jet d'eau stops going at 4pm, we went there straight away to see it before heading to the hostel.

Geneva, during the day, doesn't really seem like a very interesting city, but its beautiful at night. After grabbing some dinner, Valentine and I walked around town just to see it. Everything there gets lit up at night and reflects in the water. I loved it.

Geneva during the day

Geneva all lit up at night

The hostel in Geneva was my first hostel experience and it was interesting. It was very impersonal and basically like staying in a dorm room. I went to bed very early and woke up very early so I didn't meet the two girls that were also staying in my room. It wasn't bad a bad experience, I was just kind of indifferent to it.

The next morning I woke up at 6 am and walked to the train station to go to the airport. I flew through Vienna which was a very easy layover. The flights actually had decent food on them too. I got in to Athens around 2:30 pm. When I had booked my hostel, they gave me directions to get there from the airport. I figured that, based on the directions, I could probably be there shortly after three. Wrong! The Athens airport is about an hour out of the city center by bus and then from there I had to find one of the many city trams which took another twenty minutes to get to my stop.

Riding the bus into and around town, I could really get a good feel for Athens. The day that I got there, it was about 70 degrees and sunny. The windows were open and there was the perfect amount of humidity in the air. Everything there seemed very relaxed and nobody really seemed too worried about anything. What did amuse me though was watching the Greek people walk down the street in this weather wearing down jackets and fur coats, thinking it was cold outside while I was stripping down to my t-shirt.

A lot of the buildings looked like this with plants growing off of them everywhere.

Everywhere in Athens, the streets were lined with orange trees.

One of the biggest challenges I faced in going to Greece was not only the language barrier, but the alphabet barrier. I am so grateful that I am in a sorority at ISU, because otherwise I would have never learned some of the Greek alphabet and been far worse off. All of the street signs there are translated into English, but the bus-stops aren't. In my directions to the hostel, it told me to get off at the stop called Filoloau. Every stop we came to, I looked at the sign to see if I could pick out a phi and some lambdas to at least give me a good guess of where I was. In the end I asked the bus drivers help (because most people there speak enough English to get by), but when I got there, I saw that, had I waited longer, the sign would have been exactly what I was looking for with those letters.

The entrance to the hostel

My hostel here was completely different from the one in Geneva. It was much more personal, run by one lady, and it just seemed more homey. My room had five beds in it, four of which were made into two bunk-beds. I chose the single bed. It had high ceilings and french doors that opened up onto a balcony.

My bed

The doors out to the balcony

The street view from my balcony

The first people I roomed with were two girls from Canada and one girl from Argentina. By the time I got all situated, it was about 4:30 and I didn't want to be out too late since I was by myself. I asked the lady who ran the hostel where the nearest cheap, good food was. She pointed me to a little gyro shop. I have actually never had a gyro before but I got a chicken one and it was so good!

My delicious gyro

Then I just wandered to kind of scope out the close part of town. I found out I was staying right near the olympic arena so I got a few pictures of that and I even got my first view of the Acropolis which sits above the city.

The Olympic Stadium with the olympic rings at the back.

My very first, distant, view of the acropolis

It started to get dark so I went back. When I got there, I met a group of 6 girls staying there on break from study abroad in France. Two of the girls went to UW Madison and one of them was friends with a girl I went to high school with. It really is a small world sometimes. Anyway, we just hung out and chatted for the rest of the night. They invited me to go to Delphi with them the next day and I had wanted to go there anyway so I decided that I would.

The End of Part I