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19day

2008-10-29

Day 13 – Shopping and Sightseeing

Filed under: Greece 2008 — 19day @ 19:07:44

We woke up a little later than usual just because we could, since there was no planned excursion for the day. Our first stop was breakfast where it was provided by the hotel on the Mezzanine floor, we didn’t want to take the elevator more that absolutely necessary so we usually took the stairs on the way down. Unfortunately the staircase was of the circular variety and I tended to get just a little dizzy while going down it at any speed.

We signed up for the Cape Sounion excursion the next day, among the downsides to the trip was that it was reasonably expensive. One of the few vouchers we got from the travel agency was a 50% off voucher, however it claimed it was 50% off per couple. We phoned the Transat office and got told off by the woman there because she had no answers and had to give us the number to another person, who was in a meeting when we phoned. We were eventually told that the coupon should work for each of us since we all had one, so we put in the 50% of the money and left it at the front desk and just hoped that everything would work out.

We got underway and made it to our first sightseeing stop, the Agoras, which had a lot of nice ruins about and we wondered around there for a while, and redeemed one of our many ticket portions from the ticket-strips from yesterday. There were a lot of pillars and headless statues around, and some information panels around. There were some good structures around that reminded me of the Parthenon, and looked much better because they didn’t have metal scaffolds all around it.

Agora

Most of the rest is in the British Museum

We then walked to the Keramikos Cemetery but when we saw it, we decided not to bother going in since it wasn’t that interesting a site, so we took some pictures from between the gate bars. We next walked, and it was quite a bit of a walk, to the Dionysos Theater, which was at the base of the Acropolis. It was just what we needed since it was a theater with benches that we were permitted to sit on. We took turns taking photos of each other sitting on the benches. Alicia and I sat for a while resting while Laura chatted with another tourist and told him about our bizarre bathroom.

Theater

This is as comfortable as it looks

We then when to the region of Plaka to do shopping since it has the reputation of being a shopping district. We wondered a few of the shops, and I had bought an Athens fridge magnet for my mother since her request for souvenirs were tacky fridge magnets. It was around this time that Alicia had a pretty bad fall on a store front. There was marble or marble like stone at the front at slightly different levels and it was all polished by traffic like at the Parthenon, and Alicia slipped and fell on her back. From my perspective, the fall looked very bad, and I tried to cradle her head since it looked like it had smashed into a nearby table on her way down. The fall looked so severe that I was expecting the need to staunch blood-flow, but Alicia recovered herself quickly and basically wanted to get out of there due to the embarrassment. The shopkeep offered her water, which we all thought to be an odd thing to offer after a fall, but whatever. Alicia had a slow developing bruise on her back that bothered her off and on over the next couple of days, but thankfully that was all.

We went to a cafe later and choked on the ambient cigarette smoke around while having a snack. I got a drink, while the girls got “Kind of Doughnut” which is how it was printed on the menu. I think they were dumbing it down just a little too much there. We walked for hours afterward, shopping and poking around. We went to some portable merchant stands (cases on tripods, for a hasty retreat) and Alicia hummed and hawed over a gift, and eventually bought it after haggling, a trick I hadn’t tried since Turkey. As we shopped we spotted more stray or not-so-stray cats. Two ran out of store and started playing in some potted plants, and I took some photos. The shopkeeper came out and grabbed the cats and brought them inside, and seemed rather annoyed at my taking pictures of them.

Later on we ended up at an outdoor restaurant across from the Acropolis and as darkness fell they lit it up. I tried to get some photos but none of them turned out particularly well. I also had another chicken souvlaki and basically resolved not to have it again for as long as possible, as I had hit a sort of chicken souvlaki-exaustion.

Parthenon at night

My point-and-shoot wasn’t up to this shot

We wondered our way back to the hotel, down streets we had been down that day, though you wouldn’t know it. During the day, one street was buzzing with open stalls with shops and stuff hanging in the street. At night, the place was completely abandoned, the stall gates were closed and revealed untold amounts of graffiti, and the street took on a much more seedy, sinister air.

When we arrived in the lobby we asked if they had our tickets for the excursion the next day, as we had left the money there. The guy seemed to me to act as if he had never heard of the money, the tickets, or even the very concept of same. He suggested maybe they were in our rooms, but in a way that indicated that this was merely a way of getting us to go away. As it turned out, they did deliver the tickets to our room, in fact, right on the bed. The girls accused me of jumping the gun with negativity, but it certainly wasn’t looking like things were going to turn out that way, especially with the uncertainty with the 50% off vouchers. But we got our tickets, huzzah.

The girls tried to sleep, but I watched the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre for no other reason that I wasn’t able to sleep. Apparently both of the girls eventually dropped off to the sound of chainsaws and screaming. At the end I turned off the TV as to not get sucked into another sleep-delay-tactic, and eventually fell asleep myself.

To Be Continued

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