Weekly Photo Challenge: Urban

We had been sailing for nearly four hours now and the time had begun to drag but then we could see Athens, a gleaming mantle of white urban concrete filling the valley, spilling down to the sea and creeping up the sides of the mountains that surround it and soon we were docked and in contrast to the slow pace of the islands pitched back into the madness of Piraeus.

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My Personal Greek A to Ω – B (Beta) is for Βύρων or Byron

After four years of waiting I was actually going to see the new Acropolis Museum.  It was originally planned to be completed in 2004 to accompany the symbolic return of the Olympic Games to their spiritual Athenian home but construction setbacks and various outbreaks of controversy along the way meant that it did not finally open to an expectant public until June 2009.

I purchased tickets on line and arrived at my allocated visit time of ten o’clock.

I had feared that the place would be crowded and uncomfortable but this was not the case at all and without the lines of visitors that I had anticipated it was easy to cruise effortlessly past the ticket desks and into the museum.  I had a gigantic sense of anticipation because I was genuinely looking forward to seeing this magnificent replacement for the hopelessly inadequate museum at the top of the Acropolis that I had visited before and which it had replaced.

I have to say that anticipation was mixed with some trepidation because having followed the saga of the open wound debate about the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles I wondered how I was going to feel because the long awaited €130m Acropolis Museum is a modern glass and concrete building at the foot of the ancient Acropolis and home to sculptures from the golden age of Athenian history but unlike any other museum in the world this one has been designed to exhibit something it doesn’t own and can’t yet exhibit but all of Greece hopes that it will be the catalyst for the return of the disputed Marbles from the British Museum in London.

Outside the museum and in the cavernous entrance hall there were glass floors with sub-level views of the excavations that were discovered during the construction of the building and contributed to the delays and then there was a steady incline cruising through seven centuries of history and impressive and well set out displays along a generously wide gallery that provided sufficient space for everyone to stop and enjoy the exhibits without feeling hurried or under pressure to rush through this timeline of ancient treasures.  Moving on to the second floor there are two galleries that I have to say I did not find so well set out and involved a rambling walk through a succession of exhibits that was not helped by the absence of a simple floor plan to help guide the visitor through and having finished with the second floor I then had to double back to get to the third and the Parthenon Gallery skilfully avoiding the café terrace and the inevitable gift shop along the way to make sure I wasn’t parted from my cash.

After an hour passing through various centuries of ancient Greece I finally arrived at the top floor Gallery, which is designed to eventually hold and display all of the Parthenon sculptures but for the time being has only about half of the originals.  The remainder are plaster casts made from (and controversially paid for by the Greek Museum) of the remaining treasures temporarily remaining in London.  It is truly impressive and with the Acropolis Hill and the Parthenon looming up outside I can only explain it rather inadequately as a very memorable experience.  The top floor is designed to provide a full 360º panoramic of the building and how the sculptures would have looked when they were originally commissioned and sculptured in the fifth century BC.

I really liked the Museum but what I didn’t care for especially was the demonising of Lord Elgin and the unnecessary nationalist, provocative and belligerentanti-English sentiment attached to the explanations and the video commentary. I considered that rather offensive as an English visitor and it made me feel slightly uncomfortable and unwelcome.  The descriptions of Elgin as a looter and a pirate seemed especially designed to stimulate a reaction from visitors from the United States who were encouraged to gasp in awe that a British Lord could have done such malicious and terrible things.  I know that a lot of what should be in Athens is in London but let’s not forget that material from the Parthenon was dispersed both before and after Elgin’s time and the remainder of the surviving sculptures that are not in Athens are in museums in various locations across Europe and there are also parts of it in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Vatican Museums in Rome, the National Museum, Copenhagen, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the University Museum, Würzburg and the Glyptothek in Munich all of which seemed to have been conveniently ignored.

As I wandered around I considered the debate and tried to balance the two radically opposing views.  There are many factors to take into consideration. We do not know if Elgin’s actions were legal at the time but he had certainly obtained permission to work on the Acropolis from the Ottoman authorities, then in control of Athens, and it seems that he had a genuine interest in archaeology and the preservation of the past.  What shouldn’t be forgotten is that when Elgin removed the sculptures from the Parthenon, the building was in a very sorry state indeed and this is expediently omitted from the commentary and the otherwise excellent interpretation.   In the early twentieth century there was some inappropriate restoration work that has subsequently been proved to be damaging so perhaps Elgin saved the Marbles from the deadly fate of ignorant restoration and we should thank him for that?

Although we think of it primarily as a pagan temple, its history as church and mosque was an even longer one, and no less distinguished. It was, as one British traveller put it in the mid seventeenth century, ‘the finest mosque in the world’ but all that changed in 1687 when, during fighting between Venetians and Turks, a Venetian cannonball hit the building, which was inappropriately being used as a temporary gunpowder store and approximately three hundred women and children were amongst those killed as the building itself was blown apart and destroyed. By 1800 a small replacement mosque had been erected inside the shell, while the surviving fabric and sculpture was suffering the predictable fate of many ancient ruins and falling further into a state of unloved disrepair.

Elgin might be the villain in the opinion of modern Greeks but what the Acropolis museum conveniently fails to mention is that at the time he removed the sculptures Turks and Athenians were using it as a convenient quarry and a great deal of the original sculptures and the basic building blocks of the temple itself were being reused for new local housing or simply being ground down for mortar.  It is all very well getting precious about it now but whatever Elgin’s motives were for removing the sculptures there is no doubt at all that he saved them from possible even worse damage and without his intervention we might not be even having the ‘Elgin Marbles’ debate at all.

My personal opinion?  Well, I believe that we should thank the British Museum for having looked after them for the last two hundred years while all this was going on and then the Marbles should be returned and I believe that one day they will because as the poet and Grecophile, Lord Byron wrote and with whom I leave the last word:

‘Dull is the eye that will not weep to see                                                                             Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed                                                     By British hands, which it had best behoved                                                                      To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.                                                                     Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,                                                       And once again thy hapless bosom gored,                                                                        And snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!’

Greece 2011, Athens and the Varvakios Agora (Central Market)

“The early morning animation is somehow an indication of the tempo at which Greece lives; you rise each morning to a new day, a new world, which has to be created from scratch.  Each day is a brilliant improvisation…”,                 Lawrence Durrell

On the last day we deliberately woke early because we wanted to return to the busy commercial street close to the hotel and visit the central market called the Varvakios Agora which was only a hundred metres or so away and housed inside a huge building with a dangerously crumbling facade that looked as though it might catastrophically collapse into the street into a pile of masonry and debris on the pavement at any moment.

Athens and Ancient Greece

I was reading a blog posting where the author suggested that while the Acropolis is a place worth seeing  there is not a lot else in Athens and recommended going to Mykonos or Santorini instead.

Well I have to disagree with that because Athens is a wonderful city for visiting ancient monuments and buildings, in addition to the Acropolis there is the Ancient Greek and Roman Agora and the dramatic Temple of Zeus with its spectacular columns thrusting triumphantly into the sky.

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Greek Islands, Blue Star Ferry to Paros

My apologies to residents of Piraeus but it is not the most attractive city in Greece – constructed almost entirely from limestone and clay as a reminder of the Athenians fifty year love affair with concrete and cement.  In the words of Mike Gatting (talking about Pakistan), this is not a place that you would even send your mother-in-law and we were pleased when the ferry slipped its moorings and headed out to sea precisely on time and our personal chill tanks started to fill with credit!

We were travelling economy class of course but this is the best place to be - sharing the open top deck with grey haired hippies with pony tails revisiting the 1960s, back-packers wearing creased clothes who haven’t washed for a fortnight, sun-seekers, thrill-seekers and nostalgia-seekers, bench-hogging sleep-snatchers, aging grey-beards in open toed sandals and sun kissed show-offs strutting their stuff.  This is good company thankfully missing the football shirts, lycra and stag and hen parties who have all flown directly to Mykonos and Zakynthos!

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Greece 2011, Piraeus – Planes, Buses, Taxis and Ferries

In the weeks and days before flying to Athens to start a holiday in the Cyclades I began to wonder if it really was a clever idea to fly into a city in the grip of economic crisis and social disorder with regular demonstrations and disruptive strikes by the transport sector which we would be completely reliant upon to get from the Greek capital to the islands.  But we put on our holiday blinkers and ignored the concerns and reluctant to spend more money on an alternative flight to Santorini went through with the original plan.

On a previous arrival at Athens airport I was metaphorically mugged by a taxi driver and paid a fortune to get to the city and the last time we left Athens Kim was literally robbed on the metro so we didn’t want to chance either of those options this time and took the only alternative form of transport available, the X96 express bus to Piraeus.  The man in the ticket booth was rather terse and didn’t have his ‘welcome to Athens, nice to see you’ head on this lunch time but I suppose anyone would be grumpy if it is their job to sit in a stuffy wooden box all day answering the same dumb question over and again.  The cost was €5 which was an eye watering 56% more expensive than two years previously and I hoped this wasn’t indicative of an average inflation rate over this time or else this would put the holiday budget under extreme pressure.

A bus ride in Athens is a unique experience, it has to be said.  The roads were busy but the driver of the Solaris flexibus seemed totally oblivious to other vehicles as he charged along at high speed, switching lanes, clattering over tram lines and tossing the passengers about like the Saturday night lottery balls on hard unyielding plastic seats.  It was like being in a car chase at the movies, anyone in the way had better watch out and at one stage I had to take a look to see if Sandra Bullock was driving.  Corners didn’t slow the bus down and the only respite from the madness was a few infrequent stops on the way to the port, which we reached after about fifty minutes.

The metro would have been preferable but you get mugged on the metro and as this was our first time back in Athens since the robbery we were understandably on edge.  We had taken improved precautions to protect our possessions but we still felt nervous and slightly anxious.  We continually scanned the bus for potential robbers and pickpockets and held on tight to our wallets, cameras and bags and after every stop we suspiciously scrutinised every new passenger that joined us.

In our experience dining options around the port are seriously limited and after we arrived in Piraeus there was about four hours before the ferry to Paros so we had made plans to visit a taverna/bar that we knew and to have a long lunch to fill the time.

This involved a walk along the busy harbour front and this was not as easy as it sounds because Piraeus simply has to be one of the most traffic crazy places in Europe that makes an Italian city look like Emmerdale on a late Sunday afternoon and there was a mad confusion of snarling traffic that almost defies description. Cars, buses and lorries were all growling aggressively through the streets with absolutely no regard for traffic lights, lanes, rights of way or pedestrians (especially pedestrians).  Swarms of yellow and black cabs drove around with complete disregard for anything else and for anyone foolish enough to irritate them it was like poking a stick into an angry wasp’s nest.  The madness was being ineffectively choreographed every now and again by traffic police blowing madly on whistles and waving arms in a totally manic way that quite frankly was completely unintelligible to absolutely everyone whether in a car or on the pavement and all in all didn’t seem to be helping a great deal.

It is easy to imagine that Piraeus is simply a suburb of Athens but it is in fact a completely separate city, the third largest in Greece, with an interesting history all of its  own.  Most of this we fail to appreciate because we just hurry through on the way to somewhere else.  In 493 BC, taking advantage of the natural harbour and strategic geographical position, the Athenian politician and soldier Themistocles initiated the construction of fortification works in Piraeus to protect  Athens, ten years later the Athenian fleet was transferred there and it was then permanently used as the naval base for the powerful fleet of the ancient city.

Themistocles fortified the three harbours of Piraeus with the Themistoclean Walls turning Piraeus into a great military and commercial harbour. The fortification was farther reinforced later by the construction of the Long Walls under Cimon and Pericles, with which Piraeus was safely connected to Athens. Piraeus was rebuilt to the famous grid plan of the architect Hippodamus of Miletus to a pattern that has been replicated in many cities in the USA and in Milton Keynes in England.  The walls were destroyed after the defeat by Athens to the Spartans in the Peloponnesian war and the port of Rhodes assumed predominance in the Aegean.  Later the walls were rebuilt but destroyed again by both the Romans and the Goths and during the Byzantine period the port completely lost its trading status.

Today, Piraeus has regained its importance and is a mad world of taxis, trams, back-packers and local people all competing for the same piece of tarmac.  This should not have been surprising because it is the largest passenger port in Europe and the third largest worldwide in terms of passenger transportation where nearly twenty million people pass through every year. There were certainly a lot of people about this afternoon and there was a long queue to get on board the Blue Star Paros and in the usual way foot passengers were competing for space with cars and commercial vehicles.  We didn’t want to sit inside so we made our way to the top deck and found a seat outside at the back of the boat to catch the sun and we made ourselves comfortable in preparation for the four and a half hour passage to the island of Paros, one hundred and eighty-five kilometres to the south east.

Island Hopping 2006, Return to Athens

I didn’t have time to waste so I decided to try my luck on the metro, which was just over the road. I walked there and bought a ticket for eight cents, about 3% of the price of the taxi. How glad I was that I did, the journey was quick, clean and efficient, I met some helpful Athenians who gave me an idiot’s guide to the metro and I arrived in the City much sooner even than if I had taken the taxi. I left my bag at the hotel where we had stayed the previous week and I set off to do some serious speed sightseeing.

Without anyone to slow me down I cruised through the Plaka and went straight to the Agora to see the sights that I missed the previous week when we had given up through sheer exhaustion. This was a great site, not as dramatic as the Acropolis but the ancient ruins were in good shape and there was no building work here to spoil it and there were fewer people. I enjoyed myself walking through the streets of ancient Athens and then I walked back to the Plaka via the Roman Agora and the busy tourist shops and I thought again about buying the gladiator helmet but again resisted the temptation. At the Plaka I had my final meal in Greece, I enjoyed saganaki and chicken souvlaki and a couple of Mythos. And then it was time to go, so I paid my bill and returned to the hotel to retrieve my backpack and say goodbye.

After the affair with the robber taxi driver at Piraeus and the alternative efficient metro journey into the city it didn’t even cross my mind to think about a taxi ride back to the airport, so I walked to the train station and purchased a ticket for eight euros and felt smug in the knowledge that I had saved myself about thirty. The metro was constructed in 2004 for the Olympic Games and it was a real delight. It was exceptionally clean and the trains all ran exactly on time. It took about forty minutes to get to the airport and the station was right inside the terminal building.

Once inside departures I scanned the flight information board to find my desk number. My heart sank, next to details of my flight was the dreaded word ‘delayed’. I enquired how long and was told three hours. Oh well, what could I do? I checked in, walked at snails pace around the duty free shops and went for a beer. Actually it was a very nice airport and it even had its own museum displaying items discovered during its construction. It wasn’t very big and I went round it three times to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. And after three times that was impossible, believe me.

For a man with little patience the time passed surprisingly quickly, I didn’t get irritable and pretty soon the plane arrived and I was sitting down in the cabin. During the delay I bought a notepad and decided to begin this journal.  The captain explained that they were late because they had had to squeeze in an extra flight to Faro and I speculated on how the company could possibly imagine that this was a reasonable thing to do? But I was comforted by the thought that they wouldn’t be able to claim that they made this one on time and it had spoilt their performance indicators for the month.

The plane took off; I fell asleep and woke up in Luton. I had had a wonderful two weeks and I thought of Sally and Charlotte beginning the next leg of their adventure on Antiparos, without me, and although I was pleased to be home I was sad that I wasn’t with them.

Island Hopping 2006, Blue Star Ferry to Piraeus

I woke especially early today and I sat with my tea on the balcony to watch the building pantomime. The men arrived early and had their thirty minutes together organising the day’s chaos. Surely it would have made sense to begin work straight away because this was the coolest part of the day but instead they sat around under a tree, a thoroughly disorganised debating society that became steadily louder as more turned up and joined in. One man had most to say so I guessed that he had some sort of seniority but despite expansive arm waving and shoulder heaving the others didn’t appear to acknowledge his authority.

I learned later that they were in fact not Greeks but Albanian migrant workers many of whom come to Greece every year in search of work that is not available or simply does not pay enough in their own country.  When they did finally get going they seemed to work quite hard and walls got built quite quickly.  In England we are obsessed with workplace health and safety so I was amused to watch these men work without even the most basic protective clothing or equipment to protect them. I am convinced that we are the only EU member state that abides by all the rules and regulations that emanates from Brussels.

My ferry was due to leave at half past ten and against my better judgement I was talked into relying upon the water taxi that was scheduled to start its shuttle service at ten o’clock. I was a bit nervous about this but went along with Sally’s arrangements. We walked to the taxi quay in good time and arrived with a lot of it to spare. I anxiously scanned the sea for any sign of the little boat crossing the bay but it stubbornly refused to appear. After a while, ok actually only a short while, I began to panic especially when the Blue Star steamed into port bang on time! By ten past ten I was certain I would miss my boat and even when the ferry finally appeared at quarter past. I remained deeply pessimistic.

Of course it was full of the slowest people in Greece who took ages to disembark and we finally set off for the ten-minute journey at eighteen minutes past. Sally was cool and tried to persuade me that my watch was fast but I was not convinced and it got very, very tight and I paced the deck nervously. Finally the boat arrived and tied up and I made a dash for the ferry with the girls shouting encouragement from behind and imploring me to run faster. I made it but I was disappointed that I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye properly. And then the boat was ten minutes late leaving so I needn’t have panicked after all. I waved goodbye to Sally, Charlotte and Paros and then settled down for the three and a half hour journey to Piraeus.

I choose a seat on the top deck sharing a table with some good looking French girls. After only a short time they turned out to be full-on lesbians, which made the journey even more interesting that I could have hoped for.

It was a good voyage and it was interesting to sit and watch the arrival into Piraeus. From the sea Athens was laid out before us, nestling beneath the mountains to the north, east and west (Parnitha, Pendeli and Hymettos) and the Saronic Gulf to the south. Out at sea, where we were, the expanse of grey concrete, which formed the outer environs of the city, shimmered brightly in the strong sun and it looked much more attractive than I guessed it would from up close.

The Ferry steamed into harbour, docked and I made my way off the boat and onto the busy dock. My plan was to get a taxi back into the city so that I could maximise my time there but finding one willing to take my fare wasn’t that easy. There were lots of them about buzzing around like bees in their black and yellow livery but most seemed to be looking for someone else for their business.  Eventually I found one that was available and enquired the price. Lucky I did! The driver quoted me €25, which I thought was a bit expensive as it had only cost €10 to come the other way. I queried this but he explained that it was always twice the price to go back. This didn’t seem at all logical to me so I continued to press him for a more reasonable price but he wouldn’t budge on his quote. I found another taxi and enquired the price and he wanted €25 as well. Clearly this was a conspiracy and the only ‘knowledge’ an Athenian taxi driver needs is ‘how to rip you off’.

Taxi drivers in Athens are notorious for ignoring regulations of the Athens Taxi Association and If I had taken that cab it would have probably been the biggest taxi swindle that I had ever suffered, worse even that £10 to go half a mile in Riga, or even the €25 on the Venice water taxi to take a journey that would have cost about €3 on the Vaporetto. It seems to me that taxi drivers are outright bandits wherever you happen to go. 

 

Island Hopping 2006, Piraeus to Naxos

I was conscious that we had to get up very early and consequently I had a restless night and woke prematurely sometime before the alarm because it was on my mind that we had to catch the seven thirty ferry to Naxos. It was still dark when I got up first at about six o’clock and then used my banging about and switching the lights on technique to wake the girls. Not very sophisticated I have to concede but it worked well enough. Packing a rucksack is quite straightforward and the girls had already perfected the back-packers art of cramming without folding so it didn’t take long to get ready.

The hotel staff arranged a taxi for us to the port of Piraeus and the driver took us straight to the boat.  The Blue Star ferry was much bigger that I had imagined it would be and we made directly for the top deck and found ourselves a nice seat next to a young German couple.  The ferry left precisely on time and cast off was accompanied by the sun rising majestically over the city.  Unfortunately as we left port it disappeared on the other side of the boat!  Being some time since I was in the Boy Scouts and not having a compass with me I had misjudged our position and direction of travel and set us down on the western side of the deck.  It was a bit chilly in the shade and we had to wait about two hours before the ferry and the sun synchronised their position in our favour and we were able to fully enjoy the warm rays of the morning sun.

It was a good journey and the German couple were very entertaining.  They were on their way to Santorini and had arrived the night before on a flight from Hamburg and had spent the night drinking in a bar in Piraeus, they hadn’t slept a wink and were in a very bad mood with each other. We couldn’t understand German of course but there is an international language of grumpiness and we could comprehend that well enough.  We had a good rambling gossip about them and then later realised that they could speak excellent English (doh!).

It took about five and a half hours to sail the one hundred and three nautical miles to Naxos including a stop off in Paros and it was a good journey except that there wasn’t any Mythos in the bar.  On the plus side Sally didn’t get bored at all which sort of surprised us all!  I struggled with sudoku and the girls plotted alternative routes around the islands using the island hopping guide.

Being on the top deck of the ferry had kept us quite cool but when we arrived in Naxos it was one o’clock and really very hot.  We got off and ran the gauntlet of the frantically animated Greek apartment owners all imploring us to choose their accommodation.  The associated chaos was not dissimilar to a French bus queue and I’m not sure which part of ‘no thank you’ they didn’t fully understand but it was an entertaining passage from harbour to town nonetheless and we knew that we would have to go through the whole experience whenever we got off of a ferry again for the entire holiday.

The sun was strong and we walked into town and using tablecloths as a primary selection criteria choose a taverna with green check and I ordered a Mythos! To my complete surprise Sally and Charlotte choose a Greek salad so just to be different I had a Naxion salad instead. I don’t think I will be having another one!  It wasn’t inedible, it was just smothered in a sort of cottage cheese, which was a bit sticky and there was an awful lot of it!  I had to have another Mythos to wash it down!

We decided that it was time to find our accommodation so we looked for a taxi to take us there. We found one without any difficulty at all and after loading our backpacks in the boot I jumped into the passenger seat and burnt my arse on the red-hot vinyl that had been baking in the hot sun all morning.  Sizzle, sizzle no warning or anything! I felt like a griddled steak and I noticed that the driver’s seat had a towel strategically draped across the seat to offer protection but there was nothing for the passengers.  It was just a ten-minute ride to our hotel, the Agios Prokopios, which turned out to be really good.  Nice people and a very good room with balconies front and back so that we could get both the morning and the afternoon sun.  We quickly unpacked (well not so much unpacked but threw our bags untidily on the floor) and went to the pool where we chilled out for a while.

Only a short while because after Sally had got bored (only a matter of about five minutes or so) we walked down to the beach, which was close by and we paddled both ways along the waters edge. We sauntered back to the hotel and found a convenient little supermarket selling cheap Mythos and I bought some supplies.  Back at the hotel the girls sat around the pool and I sat on the rear balcony enjoying a beer and reading Bill Bryson and later I found some neighbours to chat to.

We chilled out for the rest of the day and practiced doing nothing until the sun went down and it was time to go out to eat.

In the evening it was back to the seafront and we found a taverna with tables on the beach, a bit like Shirley Valentine.  I had a chicken souvlaki and the girls probably had a Greek salad but I can’t really remember because it had been a very long day and the alcohol was beginning to kick in.  After dinner we went back to the hotel and I had a very early night due to the consumption of six Mythos (give or take).  It had been a very good day but sitting on the terrace knowing that my bed was on the other side of the wall and only about four feet away was too much and I made my excuses, retired and crashed out! 

Agios Prokopis Hotel

Island Hopping 2006, Athens and Ancient Greece

“We climbed up the hill to the theatre whence we overlooked the splintered treasures of the gods, the ruined temples, the fallen columns, trying vainly to recreate the splendour of this ancient site.”                                                                Henry Miller

I woke quite early because when I am on holiday the first thing I have to do is check the weather, this is a huge responsibility and although it doesn’t take a great deal of preparation I can’t possibly slouch around in bed too long. I disentangled myself out of the creaky camp bed and banged about the room in a disorderly fashion in an effort to make sure that I woke the girls up as well.  My mission was thoroughly accomplished when I threw back the curtains and a blazing light flooded into the room and revealed a gloriously sunny morning with a big bright sky so magnificently blue that it made me squint just to gaze up into it.

Our plan was to go first to the Acropolis and the city guidebook advised getting there early to avoid the crowds.  We did as it suggested and got there early (well, reasonably early) and it was swarming, I mean really swarming! Obviously we weren’t early enough.  I can’t imagine what it is like when it is really busy!

The Acropolis and the Parthenon were fantastic. Let’s not make any mistake, this was a really nice building and believe me it is going to be even better when it is finished. I don’t know what it is about the Greeks but they have been building this place for about 2,500 years and even after all that time it is still full of cranes and construction workers.

We visited the hopelessly inadequate Acropolis Museum; It was small, hot and stuffy and overcrowded with lots of pushing and shoving, and there were so many treasures to show but it was smaller than a corner shop; later we saw the buildings where the famous marbles used to be before Lord Elgin pillaged them for the British Empire 200 years ago.

Well, not surprisingly the Greeks now want them back, and why shouldn’t they? but get this, the British in their retained imperial arrogance claim that they cannot possibly be trusted to look after such important antiquities and insist on keeping them in London. Anyway, the Greeks have a cunning plan and they are building a state of the art museum with environmental climate control to house the marbles that is more technologically advanced than anything in London and will soon be even more insistent that they should be returned.  Until they are they propose to keep a specially prepared room empty for them in the hope that this will shame the British into putting the plundered treasures back into their packing cases and returning them.

After we left the Acropolis we walked back down the slope of the Parthenon and picked our way between olive trees and day trippers and after we left we had a good long walk round the tourist attractions in the city.

We walked past the city museum but didn’t have time to go in and then to the original Olympic stadium of the modern games built in 1884, which looked perfectly useable to me. I don’t know why they had to build another one in 2004 when this one was completely adequate.  And that gave them a lot of trouble as well because they nearly didn’t get that finished on time; what a good job they didn’t need the Acropolis for the 2004 games! We walked around the official government buildings and saw the Greek soldiers famous for their Monty Python funny walk.

Near to our hotel was a shipping agent so we stopped off and bought our ferry tickets for the next day from a helpful man who explained all of the different options to us.  We choose the early morning departure.  Next stop was lunch in the Plaka and more Greek salad in a nice pavement taverna next door to the one we ate in last night. I had my first Mythos, what a relief! Actually I think I had two!

In the afternoon we went to the temple of Dionysus and the day was really hot by now and the afternoon temperature in the city was rising all the time but we carried on as best we could. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that! I specialise in speed sight seeing but even I was beginning to flag and I had a bit of a sweat on now but hopefully no one had noticed? Around the back of the Parthenon we walked through a collection of interesting whitewashed sugar cube houses, that looked curiously out of place and resembled those on the Cyclades and we read later that they were in fact built by workmen from Santorini who came to Athens many years ago to find employment during a building boom in the city.

We arrived at the Greek Agora, which is the equivalent of the Roman Forum in Rome, but we had been walking now for almost six hours and really couldn’t do much more so we had to give up after only seeing less than half of it. We took some shade and applied some cream and then we walked back to the hotel stopping off at a little shady pavement bar next to the Roman Agora, another Mythos for me and iced tea for the girls.

On the way back I bought a cheap bottle of local red wine from an untidy little back street mini-market and we returned to the hotel. No one wanted to share it with me so I had to drink most of it myself but couldn’t quite manage the full bottle all in one go. We changed and went out again into the Plaka to eat. This time we choose a taverna adjacent to the first in a picturesque tree lined square. I had probably my best meal of the holiday, a lovely grilled chicken with fresh vegetables with especially memorable baked tomatoes. The girls had salad (again). And there was Greek music and dancing including our first Zorba of the holiday, which was really good.

After dinner we walked through the tourist shops again and I was almost tempted to buy a Russell Crowe gladiator helmet, but it was 300 euros, which is a lot of money and I knew that I unless I had a social diary full of fancy dress parties that I wouldn’t get a lot of use out of it back home. Charlotte decided to buy a straw hat to keep the sun off that was quite fetching but I don’t recall her ever wearing it ever again all holiday.