The Kinky Opera Live Show Theatre?

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We’re very sad to be leaving our paradise here on the beach in Naxos, but it’s time to move on. Today we fly to Athens, so it’s an early start.

We’re sitting in the very front row of our propeller plane, so we get a close up view of the “Location of Emergency Equipment” plate on the wall right in front of us. And interesting reading it is too. It includes the location of the “Bomb Search Checklist”. I’m not sure whether this would be a list of places on the plane to check for bombs, or what to do if you find one. I suppose it’s good that they have this but I would have thought it might have been better to make really sure that there wasn’t a bomb on the plane in the first place; I’m not sure running around trying to find it mid flight or work out what you do when you have would be all that reassuring for the passengers. The plate also shows the location of the “Escape Rope”. The most worrying thing about this is that there only seems to be one of them, which wouldn’t quite seem enough given there’s somewhere approaching 100 passengers on board. And then there’s the “Fire Axe”. Huh? I wouldn’t have thought swinging an axe around inside a pressurised tube at 30,000 feet would be a great idea either, but I suppose it’s there for a reason. Anyway we land safely, so all this is a bit academic, for this flight at least.

Our taxi driver into Athens only speaks a few words of English, but no problem there it seems. He says a couple of sentences in Greek and we assume he’s on the radio to one of his colleagues. But no, a very polite if not slightly mechanical female English voice then tells us that “The weather is rainy today. But it will improve tomorrow”. It seems he’s got the Google translator going on his iPad. We then get a running commentary on the sights of Athens, culminating in “There are too many museums in Athens”.

We chose the Hyatt Hotel to stay at here because it was said to have a view of the Acropolis, which is technically true if you lean out of the balcony far enough. We assumed that meant it would be near the city centre, but no, and not only that but Mr Hyatt does seem to have chosen a slightly interesting district to plonk his five star hotel in the middle of. We stare straight out across the street at the “Kinky Opera Live Show Theatre”. A couple of doors along from that is the “Lido Dream Girls Bar” where you can “see, smell, taste, touch and hear everything you want right now”, and next to that is the “Girls Live Show at the Babylon Night Club”, and across from that “Alcatraz - The Erotic Stage of Athens”. Hmmm. Issy says she thinks that Athenians must be quite liberal, and it’s a bit hard to argue based on the evidence thus far.

We decide to walk into the centre of town. We certainly seem to be in the seedier part, but the sex shops eventually start to thin out a bit as we work our way north. We pass Hadrians Arch which we read was built to honour the arrival of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the city sometime around 130 AD. I wonder if he had to pass a bunch of sex shops to get here. Next to that is the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which was completed at about the same time, despite being started some six centuries earlier. Six centuries to build a temple. Really? … and we thought some of today’s construction projects were sometimes a bit on the slow side. We move on into Syntagma Square where we try hard not to get involved a noisy protest, choosing instead to watch the changing of the guard at the Temple of the Unknown Soldier in front of the Hellenic Parliament building.

Given its history, we’re starting to suspect that building anything here in Athens must be fraught with difficulty. We pass the ruins of an ancient bath house which was apparently only discovered when they started excavations for a metro tunnel. And another large building has clearly been built right on top of some other ancient ruins which we can see through glass panels in the footpath.

We dine in the very busy main business district. Athens is by far the biggest city we’ve been in since we left Toronto nearly two months ago. It’s certainly a far cry from the beaches of Naxos, Malta and Sicily, and I think it might take us a couple of days to adjust to this new pace of life. We’re clearly not in pure tourist land any more.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

The Beauty of Athens
Athens is a beautiful city by day and night.

[RENanDREW]

I thought your title was referring to Kinky Boots the musical!
I wonder if the Hyatt moved into that location before or after the XXX venues decided it was their district…I’m guessing after. Which makes it a very very odd choice! Ah you saw the changing of the guard in beautiful golden evening light :)