Louis Grand-Sea View Glyfada

... BC...crazy. The whole museum is built on top of an ancient city and living area that you can see through the floor. Reconstructions of parts of the Parthenon were also there.

East of the Acropolis was the Temple of Zeus and Hadrian's Arch. This Temple of Olympian Zeus was the largest temple ever built in Greece and looking at the size of the columns, you'd believe it. The 15 remaining columns are only a portion, but they're so big! One of them had ...

... covered with people and felt special that we shared the sunset only with a few other travels. The sunset was gorgeous and we walked out to a fortress on the edge to see it closer and watch the beautiful colors in the sky. After the sun finished setting the people at the restaurant started applause it was really funny. After seeing the most beautiful sunset in the world we were hungry for dinner. We walked around the town a ...

... you and the person in front of you in any line, this is a direct invitation to another Athenian to step right in. "Mind the Gap" at the metro station basically means, "Someone's going to push you into the gap, so be ready to jump." I can proudly say that I have not missed one bus or metro yet due to being shoved (although the door did close on me one time). I perked myself up on Monday (or was it Tuesday? I have no idea anymore) by getting laundry done! What a luxury ...

... something like, "This train, beach Glyfada?" Fortunately, I could understand the part of her answer that has "Yes" in it. But then she looked at our tickets. "Eine edaxi?" (Is it ok?) I asked. "No, bloop bleep blah bar bar bar" she answered. (I'm making a little joke here because the Greeks coined the word "barbarian" to describe foreigners whose language sounded like "bar bar bar" to their ears.) She walked us over to where we bought the tickets. There is another machine there, and ...

... city of over 4 million inhabitants stretching as far as the eye can see into the harsh dry land. Modern Athens had a population boom around the 1960s, so simple apartment buildings were quickly built to support this growth. So modern Athens is unfortunately an ugly city. But it is a cosmopolitan and multicultural city with a lot to offer. It has affordable restaurants, an exciting nightlife and it is a shopper's haven. From our experience, Greeks ...

... set out to the hostel, got settled and then went to tour around the city... we walked around the Plaka to see what the shops were selling, slowly making our way for an early evening trip to the Acropolis...on the way, we somehow ended up in this little neighborhood along the cliff face of the Acropolis...Very cute...Apparantly, it's a neighborhood with settlers from the island of Amalfi who recreated their settlements because they were homesick...The Acropolis was very cool, but they ...

... at the parking lot planning to just go around the block which ended up taking an hour and a half (as they discovered all the one way streets in Athens). That night our sea legs took us to the closest restaurant where we scored a free carafe of wine and some traditional Greek food including moussaka, stuffed vine leaves and zucchini balls (which were brought out after Sharm asked the waiter "do you have balls?"). We spent the next couple of days exploring the many shops ...

... people I meet (don't worry mom & dad!) but I made friends with really nice kids who are studying abroad in France, and I spent a lot of my time in Athens with them. We spent a lot of time at the nearby Agora (marketplace) to shop and eat delicious gyros & greek salads at outdoor cafes. We explored the city, and with advice from a friend found our way to the most incredible view of the city at night--Lycabettus Hill, where we ate dinner ...

... services, but we decided to go solo. There were lots of signs, and of course, we had our trusty Lonely Planet guide and our vast internet research to help us along... We also went to the Stoa of Agorra and the Temple of Athena. Check out the photos from this part of our trip. We stopped for lunch at a cafe, and we were amazed at how many people ate outside, despite the 50 ...

... anyway, all the oldies were up there trying to avoid the midday heat. Although the Parthenon was mostly surrounded by scaffolding (the bane of my trip it seems!) it was a good wander. Spent a couple of hours sitting up there, enjoying the view over Athens and accepting requests from tourists to take their photos in front of the temple. Ah, but Athens is mad. Its not quite the same scale of madness you see in Istanbul, but enough to make you fear for your ...