Day 10 - Athens, Greece

Kim: After a long-lasting love affair with Egypt (note sarcasm), today we were thankful to fly to Athens, Greece. First sign that we were no longer in Egypt: no one was smoking in the airport. Second sign: traffic lanes on the roads (that cars actually stayed in). However, one thing that did not change was the temperature. Athens is in the middle of a heat wave, and it was close to 100 degrees today. Nevertheless, we settled in at our hotel (after a minor bus hiccup), and set out to enjoy the city.

Since hosting the Olympics, Athens has cleaned up and improved its public transportation system, and we took full advantage of it while we were here. We took the metro down to near the Acropolis and took a nice stroll on a pedestrian walkway that encircles the Acropolis for 3km. Then, around dusk, we hiked up to the top of Fillapapou Hill (we were more fit for this hill than the one in Istanbul). The views of the city were amazing, and the hill provided a great vantage point for seeing the Parthenon from a distance at eye-level.


Click the parorama thumbnail below for a larger picture:


After soaking in the views, we hiked down and strolled through the shops in Monastiraki to kill time before dinner (which doesn’t happen until 9 or 10pm in Greece). We had some delicious meze in Plaka, including our new favorite, Saganaki, a kind of hard cheese that is fried. After dinner, we leisurely walked back to our hotel and finally got a good night’s sleep to prepare us for our full day of sightseeing tomorrow.