Advertisement
Published: December 19th 2009
Athens was interesting. The Acropolis was obviously impressive. There is also a new Acropolis museum which is very cool. They discovered fairly extensive ruins when they were building it and they have built the museum above them with see-through floors. It is pretty neat. I went to several other museums and saw enough Greek pots to last me a good long while. If you ever want to see Greek pottery or sculpture for that matter, this is the place to come!
Perhaps what struck me most (and this is kind of sad) is how dirty the city was. There were piles of trash everywhere. I had heard that they had landfill issues, and was afraid their solution to this was just to not pick up trash anymore. I learned a couple of days ago that apparently there is some kind of trash person strike occurring right now. That would make sense. Based on the results (not pretty or pretty smelling—at least it wasn’t in summer) we should all hope that our trash people never go on strike. It was surprisingly hard to find cafes to sit outside where you weren’t staring a big pile of trash in the face.
I spent a lot of time trying to get above the city and the trash and the chaos. I must say though, it is definitely a very English friendly city. You can get by with pretty much no greek at all, or so I’ve found. On the metro they even announce the names of the stops in English, which is very helpful. Most signs are written in both Greek and English. However, EVERYONE smokes. It’s really gross. Worse than anywhere else I’ve been. I think I’ve probably had as much second hand smoke inhalation in the last few months as I have in the whole rest of my life. You can’t even give the Greek smokers death stares. They don’t know what you’re doing. I am definitely going to have to wash all of my clothes and air out my stuff immediately when I get back. Nothing like marinating yourself in cigarette smoke for a week and a half. I am also not quite sure when the Greeks go to work. There always seemed to be a large number of people just hanging out at cafes in the middle of the day. Never did figure out when they earn the
money to buy those expensive designer clothes they were wearing.
Overall, I couldn't complain though. The weather was pretty nice (around 60 degrees) and sunny for two of the three days I was there. Also the sun didn't set until between 5 and 5:30pm, which was a big improvement over the 3:30 thing England has going on. More daylight is a good thing!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.226s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 59; dbt: 0.1041s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
