A Beautiful Day in Athens

We were off the ship early this morning to meet our driver for the day. I had booked a tour from home with Pauls’ Taxis and we were collected by Pauls’ son, Jim who took us all over Athens for the day for 200 Euro. This turned out to be fantastic, because not only did we escape our 3900 friends, Jim was able to negotiate the Athens traffic and get us to all the sights quickly and well before the tour buses. The traffic in Athens in horrendous - as you can imagine in a city of 5 million people and 7 million cars - and as Jim says, the stop signs and traffic lights are just suggestions. That doesn’t seem to stop the multitudes of motorcyclists from running the gauntlet, a lot of them without helmets – we saw a lot of near misses. We also saw the Acropolis, Temple of Zeus, the Greek and Roman Agoras (ancient markets), the modern Olympic stadium, the Acropolis Museum, the top of the highest hill and the changing of the guards at Parliament. Whew, no wonder we were knackered! Liam was quite blown away by the fact that the guards have to stand completely still and barely blink – something he obviously was thinking was impossible. One of the guards had some allergies or something and his nose and eyes were streaming down his face and he couldn’t do anything about it. Poor bugger. Jim also took us to the Plaka for lunch – gyros, baklava and donuts. We looked around the shops and then visited the marina to see some amazing superyachts. All in all it was a great day – the sun was shining and Athens is a pretty cool place. Greece certainly seems like a place it would be worth spending more time. As you can see, I haven’t added any photos for the last couple of days. The internet access on the ship is horrendously expensive and painfully slow, so by the time I upload a photo I have chewed through 10 euro worth of internet access. I’ll add some more photos maybe tomorrow in Rhodes if I can find some free wifi somewhere! X