Trips, Pics, and Tales

After our lunch and shopping, we w alked to the ancient Agora. First we went to the museum which is in the best preserved building in Athens, the Stoa of Attalos, dating back to 2 BC! The museum has many of the artifacts that have been found at the site. Here the open square was transversed by the Panathenaic Way, a covered walkway, surrounded by public buildings. The Agora was a center for social and religious activities, commerce, theater and athletic performances were held here as well. We walked to the Temple of Hephaistos, which is also very well preserved, I believe it was at one time a church, which helps to keep the ruins preserved. And then we left the Agora...can you believe our day in port still wasn't done? Nope, we still had one more stop to go! Our next stop was the New Acropolis Museum. We then zoomed through a flea market to meet our driver for a ride to the museum.  This next picture is blurry, which I really like about it. ...

We're still in Athens and it's still before lunch!  Moving along.... Next we wanted to be sure to catch the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We arrived with a few minutes to spare, so Georgia suggested we check out the artifacts in the metro station at  Syntagma  Square. Sure – why not! What a gorgeous Metro Station! And yes, it was filled with artifacts on display. We spent about 10 minutes walking through, it was like a mini museum! We came up, and got to the Parliament building just in time to see the Changing of the Guard ritual. Quite unusual. They do this either every 30 minutes or every hour – I can’t remember which. It’s a very serious position. They can’t smile, or flinch or talk. Georgia told us stories of when there were the riots in Syntagma Square a few years ago and one soldier was photographed with tears on his face from the tear gas being shot into the crowd – but he couldn’t leave his post or move until he was relea...

After leaving the Acropolis, we visited the Temple of Zeus. Funny thing was when we were up at the Acropolis Georgia kept referring to this huge structure we could see and it kept sounding like she was saying the Temple of Juice. I knew that wasn’t right of course. It never occurred to me that she meant Zeus until I had this blank look on my face and Alex caught it and looked at me and says “ZEUS mom, Zeus…not Juice!”  He’s pretty into mythology and was following right along with everything, even though the look on his face in most of the pictures is pretty grim. It was if he was playing a game as to how grumpy he could look in a picture. Just wait until you see some of his expressions in Ephesus! Agh! But even though I was taking him away from his friends and computer for about a third of the summer, I’m pretty sure he was nearly as fascinated with all of the ancient history as I was! Anyway…after he read my mind and clarified that there is no god of Juice…we moved along to the ...

Wednesday, June 12th, Athens Today was a very early morning! I was up before 5 am! Again, I think it’s the anticipation of the upcoming day, but we also had to meet our guide at 7:30 am to see Athens! I do like a little quiet time before getting our little group of four going in the morning. Sometimes it’s quite a challenge to get Megan out of bed. She’s never been what I’d call a morning person! This morning we thought we’d give room service a try. I liked that you could order a hot breakfast and this worked out well for us. Although there’s not a lot of room for trays or plates, we managed to juggle everything and quite enjoyed eating on our balcony as we waited to go to our meeting spot. Today we’d be joining Catherine and Ger again, as well as another family from England who we’d also met on Cruise Critic. Jan, Shane, their son Andrew and their grandson, Harry – from England. Again we arranged to meet at the Champagne Bar about 15 minutes to our scheduled tour so w...