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Athens
18 – 19 October
I was expecting much from Athens; it was supposed to just be
a pit stop en route to London but turned out to be one of
the best days we had during our time in Greece.
As all the others had pre-booked accommodation with their
tour and were leaving early, Paul, Mikey and I shared a room
which had been vacated due to Steve’s early departure and
then moved our stuff to a hostel down the road the next day.
It was pretty expensive by hostel standards – we paid 20
euros each for a 3 bedder.
The other guys had done the whole acropolis thing when they
first arrived in and I wasn’t super excited about seeing
more ruins – I was hanging out to do some shopping! But as
we had the whole day to kill we decided to check out the
ancient site and leave the shopping for the afternoon. We
figured it would only take an hour or two.
To make things interesting we did a walking tour which
featured in Mikey’s guidebook – with Mikey as
the…*ahem*…guide – which finished at the Acropolis. After
years of traveling and seeing many awesome ancient sites it
takes a lot to hold my interest. I’m not a big fan of seeing
a bunch of old rocks and taking photos of them. That means
nothing to me. But like our experience at Jerash, having
another person with us made things much more interesting.
Rather than just rushing around and taking photos for the
sake of taking photos we took our time and strolled around
the ancient city spending about 40 minutes at each site. We
chatted, sat down to have a good look at what was in front
of us, observed and imagined what it would have been like to
have lived there in its former glory days. We discovered
things that we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t taken the time to
appreciate what we were seeing – rows of small statues
intricately carved from a wall with their heads missing,
holes in the seats of the amphitheatre which looked
suspiciously like pissholes.
We had such a great time and spent nearly four hours at the
ruins!
By the time we got back to the hostel we were ready to crash
out but with only a few precious hours remaining of the
nearby markets we forced ourselves to go shopping. Paul
bought himself a travel chess set and that night we plonked
ourselves at a café and taught Mikey how to play.
It was the game of all games. Two hours later after giving
our brains a massive workout, Mikey (with me helping him
out) beat his teacher. And he was hooked. At 9am the next
morning, on our way to the metro to catch a train back to
the airport Mickey made a last minute dash to buy himself a
chess set.
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