Athos Palace Hotel Kalithea

... sun. It's 5pm here and we've reset our clocks two hours backwards, now being only two hours in front of UK time. We're hungry and go into the restaurant for salad, feta cheese, souvlakia and of course, an ouzo. Kalispera (Good afternoon) - welcome to Greece! We returned to the room for an early night, where there was nothing much on the Greek tv but old episodes of 'Mr Bean', which we chuckled at , helped by chunks of Cadburys chocolate that I'd found in ...

With apologies to Rocky Horror... We're back in Athens for a regular day of classroom instruction and blogging catch-up after our trip of wonders through the Peloponnese. As I was going through my pictures, I realized I had a lot of pics of the students' unceasing touching. They're always touching each other in public, but NONE of it is between pairs who have been rumored to be romantically linked. I have some ...

... ATV broke down and the guy had to come pick them up. They decided to get a new bike and go in town to see the parade that George's sun was in for a World War II holiday in Greece. Sara and I wanted to see some more of the Island so we continued on. We stopped at looked at this adorable blue and white church. I love how almost all of the building are painted this way it adds to the ambiance of the Island. Then we tried to find ...

Indy's class was about ancient Greek religion today. Some things I didn't know before: -- Ancient sanctuaries were places of asylum if you were physically touching the altar. BUT tying a rope around the altar and staying connected to the rope still counted as "touching" the altar. You'd just better make sure the rope didn't break. -- The altar of Zeus at Olympia was not a table of wood or stone, it was actually just a big cone ...

... revealed that the Doric order columns are actually slightly curved on the sides which gives the structure a feeling of lightness and gracefulness even though it is composed of the most massive and masculine of the classical orders. We were lucky to have seen the Parthenon's paediement sculptures at the British museum which were taken from the site by Lord Elgin in 1801. We also had the opportunity at that museum to see digital colour reconstructions ...

... looking forward to, because the only portraits of him that are as good or better are not in Greece. Located on the Agora is a temple that has come to be called the Theseion -- a misnomer, as it was actually dedicated to the deities Hephaistos and Athena, not Theseus, the much-beloved hero of Athens, though four of his labours were pictured in low-relief on it. That could be why the place got the name, though I suspect that bias ...

... outside. today we walked around for hours and took in everything we could. we got on top of the acropolis, which aside from the crazy wind was very breathtaking. we knew that athens was a large city, but we really didn't realize just how big it was until we got way up there and could see in 360 degrees. 3.7 million people live here, and we could tell once we were high up. our ticket to the acropolis (which i had to pay full price for because of my age) also got us ...

... on it. From the airport, we took the metro to the train station to catch the night train to Thessaloniki. The first departure was sold out so we had to buy 'standing' tickets for the journey. 'Standýng' proved to be just that, people had to stand in the ailes of the train coach. Luckily, we boarded in time to get a couple of seats. Regardless, it was still an uncomfortable journey.

... like 20 litres of spirits and 40 litres of wine each! So basically we figured it was as much as you could possibly carry. So we stocked up on vodka, baileys, gin for mum and lemoncello (a traditional Italian kind of Lemon flavoured firewater). we managed to see the acropolis and a few of the other ruins like the anicient agora and the roman agora, but took it pretty easy compared to our busy Italian schedule ...

And now it's off to Athens for a few days... as one does wot wot wot! Arrived at 2.30am on the 7th. Hadn't booked anything for this night because we thought 'what's the point!'. Went to hotel on the off chance and the man on the desk let us have our room anyway and told us if anyone asked to say we had arrived at around 7ish!.. Sweet.. free night accom! Woke up to ...