Not So Seedy After All?

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We can’t quite believe that today’s the last full day of our nearly three month jaunt. Half of me wants to stay here in the heat of Europe. The other half wants to go home and see our loved ones, but only if someone’s remembered to turn up Melbourne’s thermostat.

Issy wants to sit on a rug in a green park. We haven’t got a rug so we settle for a thin towel and head off for the National Garden which is a couple of kilometres north of the hotel, on the edge of the CBD. We think there may well be more stray cats here in Athens than people (ordinary people not stray people) and we come across yet another flock/herd/group next to a church at the south end of the Garden. We see a lady feeding them and get talking to her. She’s English, which gets us feeling good that at least some of the tourists are thinking about the welfare of the local feline population … but no, she tells us that she’s lived here in Athens for twenty years now and has been doing this every morning for all of that time. She says that the cats have watches and they always know if she’s even five minutes late.

The Garden is massive. It’s Sunday so it’s crawling with people. We stop to admire the Zappeion Hall conference and exhibition centre, which is apparently one of the city’s most significant landmarks. It was opened in 1888. It was built specifically for the revival of the modern Olympic Games, and was used as the main fencing hall for the inaugural Games back in 1896. A number of significant events have been held here over the years including the signing of documents formalising Greece’s entry to the European Union in 1979.

Two of the Garden’s ponds are filled with large populations of turtles. A bit further on we pass a stray sitting under a park bench. It looks a bit lonely as it waddles hopefully towards my foot before realising that it’s not… well we’re not sure what it was hoping for …. I don’t think a foot would look like water no matter how bad your eyesight was. Issy says I should tickle its shell. I think this would be like tickling the bottom of someone’s foot while they were wearing shoes. It’s a long way from any of the ponds, so we’re tempted to pick it up and take it to one of them. It does however look just slightly different to all the other turtles we’ve seen so we decide to leave it be. We wouldn’t want to dump it and then find it can’t swim. We try to find a flat piece of grass to sit on, but it’s been very wet and the first patch of green we find turns out to be a swamp. None of the other patches seem to be much better, so we end up settling for a park bench, without a rug, or even a thin towel…. it’s not quite what we were hoping for but it’s very pleasant and peaceful just the same.

We get a bite of lunch at a rooftop terrace in the Plaka. Issy then heads back to the hotel while I go wandering. First stop is the Academy of Athens, one of the city’s other landmark structures. It was built in the late 1800s in the neoclassical style and I read that it houses the country’s premier research institution. Next door is the similarly neoclassical National Library which was built in 1832. Other than looking perhaps just a tad pristine, I wouldn’t have had too much trouble believing that both buildings were constructed in ancient times.

I’m keen for a climb so head for Philopappos Hill which is just to the south of the Acropolis. The supposed prison of Socrates sits near the base of the hill, although whether or not this is really where the great philosopher was imprisoned prior to his execution is apparently open to debate. It looks a bit grim. He was sentenced to death in 399 BC for corrupting the youth of Athens and not worshipping the Greek gods. He could have chosen to live out his life in exile, but was in his seventies and getting a bit tired of being sick all the time, so instead accepted the death penalty, which he then carried out himself by drinking the poison hemlock. On top of the hill is the ancient mausoleum of Philopappos who was a prince from the kingdom of Commagene in the south east of modern day Turkey. He died in 116 AD and was apparently a very revered figure in Athens, hence the mausoleum. The views from up here all over Athens are excellent, particularly of the Acropolis.

We head out to Plaka for our final Athens evening meal. There’s a massively busy eight lane road outside our hotel with a large barrier down the middle between the two lots of four lanes. We’ve been here for three days now and we still haven’t been able to work out how to get across it. We can’t see any pedestrian crossings for about a kilometre in either direction, so that’s no help. The alternative would seem to be to wait for a break in the traffic, which in our experience could take several hours, and then sprint across the first set of lanes to the barrier, and try to vault across it. We’d then need to hope that when we landed we didn’t get cleaned up by a truck coming the other way. And if we survived that we’d then need to wait for another break in the traffic before sprinting across the remaining lanes to safety. Perhaps unsurprisingly we haven’t seen anyone try this. And why? Well it seems there’s an underpass. It’s probably (well certainly) been there all the time, and now that we’ve found it it looks really obvious, and it is. The real upside is that all the hotels and respectable looking buildings are on the side we’d been walking on up until now, and it’s been a bit hard to appreciate this when we’ve been right next to them. They’re a lot more visible and impressive when viewed from the other side, and the strip clubs and sex shops that we were opposite before are now much less obvious. If this keeps up we might even start to kid ourselves that this part of town isn’t quite so seedy after all….

And another random observation about life here. It seems to be a legal requirement in all local shops to display a sign saying that you have no obligation to pay for anything unless the shopkeeper gives you a receipt. Now surely he’s only going to give you the receipt after you’ve paid, so wouldn’t that mean that no one would ever have to pay for anything. No wonder the Greek economy nearly went down the gurgler in 2015….

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

We've enjoyed your travels
Enjoy home and family.

[RENanDREW]

Zappeion Hall
I think we did the National Gardens a major disservice by merely walking through it and not visiting it as a site in itself. I've since seen photos of the Zappeion Hall and have been kicking myself that we missed it. So many beautiful treasures in Athens :)