Roaming Athens

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Arrived in Athens at around 530 am at the pireaus port. The sleep on the ferry was actually pretty decent but rather short. We hopped on the metro and headed over to the area of the acropolis to do a bit of sight seeing. We stopped at a little coffee shop nearby and sat down to watch cats trying to pounce on a big group of pigeons while having a bit of breakfast on the sidewalk (no place to sit at the coffee shop). Next we headed over to the acropolis area and were actually some of the first people there as it didnt open for another half hour or so. We screwed around for a bit with two stray dogs following us around making our group 4 for a short while. The dogs attacked any nearby cats they saw along with each other as we roamed for another half hour or so. We snuck in the gates to the acropolis just as it opened and took some nice pictures while walking around the place. It was pretty amazing but I felt like it would be far better without the huge amounts of construction being done throughout. Continued to walk around for a while longer and eventually made our way over to the plaka area of the city. Athens is quite the city. It has some of the most ridiculous traffic ive encountered, mass amounts of tourist shops everywhere, and for some odd reason heaps of hardware shops as well. The market section of the city was extremely authentic and cool feeling though, it was filled with huge amounts of raw meat for amazingly low prices. There were also big rough looking dudes at each shop trying to sell off their hunks of meat each (probably) saying theirs was the best. We also found a fish and seafood area connected to the red meat section which was pretty nice and had a large assortment of squid and other fishes. The last market we encountered was fruits and vegetables which had a huge array of delicious olives that the merchants were happy to let one try along with very cheap fruits of all kinds. After we made a stop at the national archeological museum which was full of unbelievably old artifacts from various greek islands and elsewhere. The museum was nice but we probably didnt apprieciate it as much as we could have being exhausted after waking so early. We continued to cruise around and get a feel for the city until around 7pm at which time we headed to the train station to make our way to Thessaloniki. After waiting until around 930 as the train was an hour late we jumped on and headed to our next destination.

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Photos

meat men
One of my favorite pics