Advertisement
Published: December 31st 2009
Edit Blog Post
Ermou St
Ermou Street - the main shopping street in the Plaka area Unsurprisingly we all slept in until about 11am this morning! We raced upstairs to get breakfast before they finished serving. Alice had a huge headache and wasn’t feeling all that great today and decided to stay in bed for a while and rest. Not sure how we ended up with so much dirty laundry already, but it was really hot and humid and we were changing clothes often. Someone told us that the high humidity was really unusual. So anyway Steve and I took our laundry to a drop off laundry in the Plaka. Then we walked all the way up Ermou Street to Syntagma Square . There were some kids trying to do tricks on the stairs, handrails and other structures around the square, but they weren’t all that good. We sat on a bench and relaxed for a while and people watched and then headed back down Ermou Street to window shop for a while. Along Ermou Street, and in most other places that people are shopping, are street vendors with knock off purses, shoes, sunglasses, CDs, DVD’s and more. They are pains in the ass. We headed back to the hotel to check on Alice . Alice got
Street Performer
Street performer in the Plaka up and came with us to go get the laundry and we all had yummy gyros on the way back to the hotel.
We were invited to dinner at Steve and Alice’s Aunt Lena and Uncle Taki’s apartment. Their kids Ana and Steve were there also. We took the Metro to the Ano Patissia station. Uncle Theo met us at the station and we walked a few blocks to their apartment. Aunt Lena made us awesome Pastitchio for dinner. We visited for a few hours and took some family pictures.
We went back on the Metro to Monastiraki station. Steve found the archaeological site in the station which was over by the stairs that came out on the other side of the street in Monastiraki Square . Duh, after we saw the glass ceiling (which sticks up into the square) it was obvious, but we had looked for it earlier and couldn’t figure it out. Well it wasn’t the big fancy exhibit in Syntagma, but it was very, very cool anyway. They made a glass walkway over the excavation and you could see the roman foundations and ancient the sewer pipes and river also.
We walked around the Monastiraki square area for a while and down Ermou Street a ways looking for souvenirs and such. I wanted to get some frozen yogurt so we stopped at a place near the square called Ice Dog. They sell ice cream and hot dogs, which I think are a weird combination, but they had fabulous frozen yogurt so who cares! There was a street performer just down the street from Ice Dog who was a human flame thrower, he was taking a mouthful of something flammable (gasoline?) and then lighting the exhaled fumes. Yikes! He also juggled flaming batons, which was very cool.
Went back to Hotel Attalos and packed up to leave for Ios in the morning. Got to bed around 1am, I felt tired and a bit cranky and got angry out of proportion to the situation at Steve for watching some creepy movie and Alice for packing before showering.
Something I have found to be shocking is the proliferation of graffiti in Athens . It’s just amazing; people have tagged every available surface. The only places that aren’t tagged seem to have surveillance cameras or alarms or guards. It seems to me to be mostly well tolerated, which I find a bit baffling. The graffiti is widely varying too, we saw some that was political, some social, but a lot was random nonsense. Some of it was artistic and very well done, but a lot was just plain ugly and really took away from the cityscape.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.133s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 18; qc: 78; dbt: 0.0819s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb