Day 4 Athens, Greece

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Athens on my birthday! It will be hard to ever top this birthday!

We rise early and have breakfast in the Windjammer buffet. It is busy but not overwhelming. We find plenty of healthy foods to take us through to lunch. Take some coffee to go at the Café Promenade, then to the Ice Rink to wait for our tour. Yes the Ice Rink is cold and especially in the early morning! We took a ship tour, "Taste of Greece". There are several times to leave and about 4 bus loads of people. We are fortunate to be on an early tour. We finally head to the parking area, load on the bus and we are off. Then our bus winds through the country side into town and up to the Parthenon, a temple on the Athenian Acropolis. Our bus was among some of the first ones there and there were lots of empty places in the parking lot which was nice.

We were provided with "Walkman" like devices to be able to hear the tour guide. This works amazingly well. Our guide was very knowledgeable and spoke very good English. We took lots of pictures and were intrigued by the history and how these great buildings were built so long ago without the assistance of many of our modern equipment.

If you are interested about Acropolis, I suggest you take time to read about it online. Rick Steves book is very good also with his iPhone app and the TripAdvisor app. There are restrooms at this site. There is no water that I found. We carried our Brita reusable water bottles. This tour lasted several hours. By the time we are leaving we had mist to sprinkles to rain coming down. Also the place was filling up and it was very busy with lots of people!

The bus took us to a Market area, driving around and the tour guide giving an overview. The bus let us off with strict instructions about being back at exactly the right local time or we would have to find our own way back to the port. This is a very safe shopping area with lots of eating establishments and shopping. We didn't walk far before finding all sorts of places to eat. I had read where you needed to be sure the price was exactly what they meant. We found a place that had prices posted on their menu for view. They said it included the meal, tax and gratuity. We sat at a table (sometimes this is costlier but wasn't) and each had a gyro with chicken. Each dish also came with fries which were potatoes cut very thin like what we used to call shoestring potatoes. We truly enjoyed this lunch with our coke lite! We highly recommend "Giouvetsakia" Greek Tavern. The food was good and the prices are what was on the menu. They have been in business for over 50 years!

The shopping was a market area of MANY shops and everyone vying for your business. If you even slowed down the shop people were trying to lure you in to their stores. Be advised many of the store owners/workers smoke. You can only image what that does to items you wish to buy like scarves, shirts, hats, etc. If you aren't a smoker, beware. We managed to get by what we didn't want. We did stop at stores recommended by Royal Caribbean and bought a few things from them.

We made our way around the area to a art studio/store like building. We had difficulty getting the one person there to answer a quick question as he was with another couple. Finally he did ask what we wanted. We felt the prices were high for faded or light changed borders on photos so we did not buy.

We did find a place where we could buy paintings by students and brought home items we liked just as well for a much better price. We had gelato and then went to wait for the trip back to the ship. As we were waiting a group of ladies came along asking for us to take their pictures. Then found they were from the ship! They in turn took our pictures. We then headed closer to where the bus would pick us up.

Back to the ship to clean up, meet up with friends and enjoy the evening.

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