Athens Studios

... to find out we were right in the middle of a market. Spent the rest of our time in Athens touring all the sites which were full of history and beautiful to see (due to Jacques advise we conserved our water and still had half at the top of the acropolis. Temperature was plus 36 and dropped to a cool 28 at night (thankful for AC in the room). 4:50 am had us on our way to catch a ferry to santorini where we arrived to paradise! Feels kind of like the ...

... games, it's built entirely of local marble and is gleaming white. According to our guide, marble is cheaper than wood here, so everything is marble! We also got a tour of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the old Parliament building. Since it was Sunday, the honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was wearing their traditional Greek uniforms and giving a great show of ...

... this, maybe she was distracted by food) "You have your student card?" "No sorry. I think I left it on campus" (On campus? Is that the best you can do?) "Ahh, then you must buy full price ticket- twelve Euro" I forked over the cash begrudgingly, silently cursing all the *******s in higher education. I would have gladly gone to university if I'd known I'd get money off when visiting Ancient Greek sights but for some reason UCAS didn't consider it important enough to mention ...

... to the small town we had to catch the bus from, which now would have been a 4 km walk in the baking hot afternoon heat. They were really very nice; she was a naturalist so spent most of her time rescuing insects from the ground and putting them back on trees, and he was some sort of political science and history graduate, and their little girl was mostly just along for the ride. Cassy spent most of the time translating the things in the museum which were written only in English and ...

... always got in the way. Well, we almost turned around when we saw the line. There were tons of tour guides trying to get people to go with them and skip the line and get an awesome tour all for the low price of 40 euro WITH student discount. No thanks. The line actually moved very quickly and we were in the Vatican museum in no time. The museum is 4+ miles of exhibits. It seemed like 40+ miles. I got the little guide headset thing, which was ...

... and merchandise shelving had to be removed, the slotted wall paneling that allowed inserting of merchandising shelving brackets had to be covered with more "library-like" paneling. Lovely mahogany Reference/Circulation desk Unfortunately, the ship's wonderful windows had been covered by the gift shop to allow displays and TSS had decided that rather than expose ...

... and laundry - gees life is hard :-) Tomorrow we head take a boat trip to a place called Granvousa (pronounced as you read it) we take a yacht from Kissamos port and we end up in a place called Balos Lagoon we spend about 4 hours there - on apparently white sandy beaches with sea the colour of jade - I will let you know if this is fact or not. KMS travelled to date: Cycling : 35kms Boat: 250kms Bus: Grand Total: 285kms ...

... dump them out and arrange them on the plate. The main course was breaded fish and the rest of the pasta from the night before using some wine and black olives and some parmesan in the sauce. There were no complaints, but I thought the malatavi olives made it a little bitter. For dessert we had cheesecake cover in strawberries and some local Greek wine that Carolyn bought from Il Vitro (a little shop near the apt). We all chatted for some time and Sarah offered to clean up.

... a stone's throw from one of the entrances to the Acropolis. It's the one must-see in Athens and it's ****. I just couldn't get excited over it after seeing Palmyra, Ephesus, Abu Simbel, etc. Actually, it's **** for very good reasons, starting with the Persians burning it to the ground in 480 BCE. Centuries of disasters led to the ultimate blow in 1687 when the Venecians attacked the Turks and opened fire on the ...

... the Adrian. We cheered his bravery, and even threw in a 1,000 drachma tip for his daring.<br><br>We checked back in to the Adrian and were given a room right next door to the room where we stayed on our initial visit. We quickly unpacked and headed off to Key Tours office to retrieve my sunglasses. It didn&#8217;t take long for us to realize that we weren&#8217;t in Hydra anymore. The noise and pollution of the cars and motorcycles made us long for the quiet that we were ...