In Athina

Reached the airport at 10 pm yesterday. The friendly Greek lady next to me in the plane had informed me that the metro is not available after 8:30pm and so I should take the bus instead. Bus 95 is to Syntagma square, the heart of Athens. This bus was jam-packed, there was hardly any room for breathing, with almost every passenger having brought his luggage inside.

The journey to Syntagma was long, took over an hour. From there I took the metro to Acropolis and spotted the Athens backpackers youth hostel. Cities in Europe are so organized, and public transport is so efficient and well marked, that I wasn’t at all nervous although it was so late at night. It was almost as if the map of the city was at the back of my mind. So thank you Athens, for making the directions so friendly to tourists.

I have lived in many youth hostels in Europe and this one has been one of the cleanest, the only better one I have experienced was at Vienna. Youth hostels are fun, they are very lively, you get to meet a lot of students, they offer cheap beds, and they always have English speaking crowds. But they come at a cons, you have to sleep in a room which has 6-8 other beds, there is less privacy, you may not sleep well if you are disturbed by other people coughing or snoring. In my room, there were five girls who came from Boston, a guy from Chicago, and another from Melbourne. I got to sleep at 12:30am, but sleep was intermittent and I was up by 7 in the morning.

After a quick breakfast at the youth hostel, I started for the Acropolis. Athens has done an excellent job of keeping its historical sites well maintained in the midst of a growing and modern metropolis. Although the Acropolis area is located in the heart of Athens, it is well cordoned off from the commercial areas. The weather was nice in the morning, not very hot and humid. I had been advised by my Travel Guide book to avoid afternoon hours at the Acropolis because of large crowds and high temperatures at Athens which makes the climb to the top painful. The Theatre of Dionysus, Herodes, Pathenon, Erechtion, Temple of Athena are important sites here, and I will post pictures later. It took close to two hours to survey the whole area. The Acropolis Museum is also very good. The views of the city from the top are breathtaking. It is impressive how various geographical considerations such as water, mountains, line of attack from an enemy, were taken into consideration while building this place by our ancestors.

I gave my camera to a person to take a few shots, and he introduced himself as Costas from Crete and his friend Sam from Thailand. Sam turned out also to be working in computer science, for IBM in Thailand. These guys were very friendly and asked me to join them to the Acropolis Museum. They were good company till we parted ways at the exit of Acropolis. It was nice to have a native person around because he explained a lot of the Greek history and art. Costas had also lived for a month in India in 2004 in the Bombay-Pune belt, and he had lots of stories to tell me about his stay.

The directions around Acropolis are not well marked, although there are maps at a number of places, they don’t come to the attention of tourists very easily. While I was sitting at a crossing trying to decipher the road to the Roman Forum from my map, a number of tourists came to me and asked for directions to the entrance of the Acropolis.

After the Roman Forum which has the ruins for an ancient commercial and administrative center, I went to the Agora, the Athens ancient marketplace, founded in the 6th century BC. Among the many attractions here are the Temple of Hephaestus, and the Tholos, where members of the first parliament in history worked and lived.

The sun was out now and it was getting pretty hot. I has lunch of Moussaka (country casserole made of eggplant). Thereafter, a short visit to Kerameikos, the outer walls of ancient Athens. It was getting very hot and my legs were tired, so I decided to return to the hostel. I am blogging from here.