Day 20 – 2008-07-15

We're out walkabout in Athens today, first stop is their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This is guarded constantly I believe by 2 of the Presidential Guard? They are one of the ones that have the pom-poms on their shoes. I have no idea why they have pom-poms on their shoes, I will try to find out. I am very impressed with the 2 lads though, because while Celina and I are melting like the Wicked Witch of the East in our shorts & t-shirts, these guys are in full regalia and have not even broken a sweat as far as I can see. Ok fair enough they do have shade to stand under, but they are wearing woolen stocking things! Unbelievable. I believe this is the “summer uniform” too.

Next up is something called the Zappeion, which may or may not be a building dedicated to Frank Zappa. In fact I'm pretty sure it's not. It's closed anyway so I can neither confirm nor deny this.

We have a bit of a stroll around the Botanical Gardens (in which the Zappeion is located, conveniently), then hit the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This is a sort of similar style building to the Parthenon, in that it had a lot of columns, but was actually bigger than the Parthenon. This temple is in a worse state of repair than the Parthenon unfortunately and it's a bit harder to imagine the original size of it.


JENGA!

Just outside the temple of Olympian Zeus is Hadrian's Arch. The funniest thing about this (apart from all the foot jokes I'm going to make about Hadrian's instep) is the inscription that used to be on it. On one side it said “This is Athens the ancient city of Theseus” and on the other it said “This is the city of Hadrian AND NOT OF THESEUS”. Oooohhh, sorry!

We take a break from the gruelling work of sightseeing and get into some gruelling shopping instead. This is made more gruelling for yours truly by the fact that most European women's clothes shops still don't provide a husband chair.

Over to Hadrian's Library after this, which is quite difficult to tell that it was actually a library. I remember Celina asked if these ruins were disappointing, to which I replied “Not really, as far as ruins go these are pretty ruined”.

We had a bit more of a walk around, and then went and picked up the clothes that we had dropped off to be laundered. There are NO self-serve laundromats in Athens that we have been able to find, and this place charged 20 Euros to only do half our clothes. It was rather annoying.

The other thing we did was buy our train tickets for the trip to Thessaloniki. We are catching the train to the second largest city in Greece as that is where our plane to Prague is departing from – this will be happening on this coming Sunday. It's lucky we do go now to buy them and not wait till the day, as most of the regular train tickets have sold out, and he almost only has express tickets left. The express cuts the ~6 hour journey down to ~4 hours, but costs an extra 50 Euros for the two of us – we can afford to wait.

It's lucky we can afford to wait in more ways than one, as when we walk into the office and take a number (282) we see that the currently being served number is 252. About 10 minutes after we have come in, some really old Greek bloke comes in and walks straight up to the counter and starts talking to the guy, obviously asking some questions, and the guy (as far as we can tell) tells him to take a number like everyone else. The guy doesn't take kindly to this and there is much gesticulating and shrugging of shoulders etc. which I think means “hey I'm just trying to ask one question here”. This old guy finally admits defeat, goes and grabs a ticket, finds out that there are still 30 people in front of him, throws it on the floor in disgust and storms out. Funny stuff.