Leandros Hotel Athens

... shopping in the trendy shops and stopping for a (very expensive) coffee at a delightful roadside coffee and tea house.

Next on to the Olympian Zeus monument, and then we walked some more, through the public garden created by Queen Amalia when it was part of her palace. She invited architects from Germany and they planted 600 different trees, 400 from Germany and 200 from Greece. There are 7km of paths. So again the poor old feet were ...

... boy by police, but from the place I am now living and the people I am living with, I have been given a first hand incite into the events and the "anarchist" movement in Athens.

Alexandros Grigoropoulos was fifteen last December when he was killed by a police officer and his death lead to mass riots that plagued Greece for weeks last December. For more information on this, I recommend reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Greek _riots ...

... security, police and throngs of people standing if front of a church and someone was speaking over a loud speaker. The police lined the roadway all along to Astros. Still don`t know what was going and probably never will. We hugged the coast along a twisty winding road carved out of the side of the mountains with gorgeous views at every turn. We arrived in Leonidio which is a sheltered fertile valley surrounded by the mountains. We drove on through the mountains to ...

... to be done from several feet away but it was still magical to just be that close to this iconic structure. After leaving the Acropolis, we headed down to the Plaka section of Athens. The Plaka is the oldest section of Athens. Most of its streets have been closed to automobiles and is now best know for its dinning and shopping. We wandered around until we found a very nice restaurant were we had lunch ...

... princesses and that we should come back the next night. We did and it was the most amazing evening we have had so far (in my opinion). No menu, no prices, this short old man just cooks food for the night and only locals know about it. There was a table of locals next to us, whom we ended up joining for the rest of the evening with them showing us around parts we had not seen. They told us that they have been going ...

... the properties (most were mortgaged.... Note: Karla is taking dictation for me right now so therefore her opinion is naturally included). Karla had all the money and she wanted to go eat and proclaimed that she was the winner because she had more money then I. I claimed that I was the overall winner because I had more assets and given enough time, would choke her vast wealth with my high rent. I said that if I had known there was a time limit I would have taken a different ...

... free to wander around there and many photos were taken. At times it was quite dangerous as the steps up to the ruins were man of solid marble and it was very slippery when walking on them. After the ruins we continued around Athens and made a number of stops when the guide thought appropriate. She was great and very knowledgeable. We stopped off at the National Gardens where we saw the changing of the guards ...

... trains with much more ease but it didn't really help. We arrived in Hong Kong about 5am and I saw a daylight which would not turn to darkness for another 20 hours as I would be quickly reclaiming all the time I'd lost more gradually along the way. In Hong Kong I switched planes to a Finnair flight to Helsinki. That was another 10 hours and I slouched in my seat waiting for the boredom to restart. This original Finnair flight was booked for September 10th and what I ...

... NOT a good idea. I alternate liver with other things: salad, bread, French fries, beer, anything to discover what combination reduces the likelihood of my gagging. I discover there is no good combination. We eat in silence. I ask Irenee how she cooked the different things. Bottom line- she cooked the liver in a pan with breadcrumbs in oil. Then she took the quail, sliced them open and peeled off the skin (feathers and all) and dropped them in the oil in the pan where she had ...

... it didn’t take long for us to get hungry. Unfortunately, if we even glanced in the direction of some of these restaurants, we would be set upon by a tout that would strongly encourage us to enter. I was getting very tired of being hustled by (what seemed like) every Greek that was trying to sell something. Instead of getting angry, we just strolled down a street that didn’t seem as crowded with touts. We found ourselves at a quiet restaurant at 4 ...