Blonde Across The Pond: Owls, Olive Oil, and Lots of Really Old Things: Athens, Greece

Hey friends!!
Weeeelllllllll.... I think London may have some competition for my favorite city... Athens stole my heart!! It is such a beautiful and historic place that you can't help but smile while you wind your way through the twisty roads and plazas. We got to our hostel around 5 pm on the first day and decided to go out to get some dinner and explore a bit. The lady at the front desk tried to give us directions to one of her favorite traditional Greek restaurants, but we ended up not being able to find it. It was not challenge finding a place to eat. While you walk down the street, the hosts are standing outside with their menus on a podium and they try to talk to you and get you to pull over to look at their selection. It was a little overwhelming at first, but it is all part of the experience! We finally decided on a place and sat outside at a table because we thought it was really nice out. The waitstaff thought we were crazy because they thought it was freezing cold outside!! I felt like I was back home in the lone star state!! After our insanely delicious dinner of Chicken Risotto and some vegetarian dish Lindsay got, we found some gelato at this little shop. It was so good, we ended up getting gelato there every day!! We retired really early on the first night because we were both exhausted from our super early trip to the airport. However, we did get a little preview of what we were going to see the next day on our walk back to the hostel...

On day two we were off to the races at exactly 8:00 am because we had so much we wanted to do! First, we went to visit the Acropolis. This is where the Parthenon, Dionysus's Theatre (we got to actually sit on the stone benches the ancient Greeks sat on!!), and many other ruins are located. It was by far the most spectacular thing I have ever scene and I was in hog heaven with all of the Greek Mythology. I knew that Athena (goddess of wisdom and battle strategy) was "the patron goddess of Athens", but I was honestly surprised with how many temples and shrines there were dedicated to her and her close companion Nike (the goddess of victory, not the athletic wear brand!) There are also SO MANY olive trees everywhere (fun Greek mythology fact: Athena and Poseidon both wanted to be patron god of Athens so they each gave the people of the city a gift. Poseidon gave them a salt water spring and Athena gave them the olive tree! The people obviously liked the tree better, so Athena became the patron god and the city was named after her!) . So back in the states/in Oxford we see acorns and other seeds on the ground, in Athens you just see smushed olives all over the place. It was probably one of the weirdest things that we have encountered. They had these nice little engraved signs with the names of all of the ruins and I tried my hardest to get them in the picture. So I won't write a label under the photos because I'm lazy and have a paper to write :).

After we finished walking around the Acropolis, we took a short walk over to the new Acropolis museum. Here they kept pieces of ruins that were too fragile to stay outside, so lots of ornate carvings and statues. The building was built on top of some ruins that they are currently excavating. Both outside and inside there were clear tiles on the ground where you can look down and see all of the ruins!! Apparently guests will be able to eventually walk around in the ruins. Pretty neat stuff! We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but we did get to take a picture of the delicious Greek doughnuts we ate at the café!!

Once we finished with the Acropolis museum, we wandered around looking for our next destination. Eventually, we came around the back of Dionysus's Theatre. We got a very interesting view of it and the rest of the Acropolis this way!! Afterwards, we followed the flow of tourist onto this rock that gave us a beautiful view of Athens.

Our next stop was the ruins we had seen the night before. It turns out that they were more places of worship as well as places to work. We also ended up wandering through this massive park that had a huge temple and all kinds of other ruins. After a few hours in the park, we went to a museum that was home to hundreds and hundreds of statues. Honestly, we were dragging a little bit at this point so we breezed through it pretty quickly without taking many pictures. We were still amazed by how old yet well preserved everything was. On our way over to our next "big event" main stop, we walked through the area with the government official's (we assume) houses. They had guards similar to the ones you see in London that guard Buckingham Palace. Their costumes were pretty interesting and they appeared to have taps on the bottoms of their shoes because part of their routine involves steps that I remembered doing in tap dance class.

We were lucky enough to stumble upon the original Olympic stadium and it was definitely one of the highlights of the trip!! It is so well preserved and visitors are able to walk all in and around it as well as run a lap on their track (it was very run down and SO LONG!! It barely had curves!! I know my HPJVLD girls are cringing at the thought of a track without curves... trust me, I did the same!). While this was all cool and fun, the best part of this attraction is very easy to miss. You can actually walk through the tunnel all of the athletes came out from and it leads you back into a room that holds all of the torches and posters from the different Olympics!! Very very very cool stuff!! I definitely geeked out a little in there. They also had a little information poster about the original marathon. For those of you who aren't familiar with how the marathon came to be, Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, ran all the way from Marathon, Greece to Athens to tell everybody that they had won the Battle of Marathon against the Persian army who had greatly out numbered them. The route was around 26.2 miles, hence the distance of a traditional marathon. After brushing up on my knowledge of running history, I decided that eventually I want to run the original Athens Marathon (which definitely is a thing, I looked it up!!). So if anybody wants to join me.... :) This is also where they light the torch to begin the journey to light the big one every year apparently.

After the Olympic stadium, we visited the Zappeion, a government building that is also used to hold events such as the health item market that was going on while we were there. We were absolutely exhausted at this point so we walked straight to dinner afterwards and got ourselves some very tasty Greek food that had a bit of an Italian flair which was really interesting and delicious!

We only had like half of the day on Monday to explore, but luckily we only had one more big thing we wanted to do before we left. We visited the ruins of this MASSIVE temple of Zeus. All that's left now are the pillars and a few miscellaneous stones, but just from those pieces you could tell it was a huge building!! Around the temple, there were ruins of houses and a few other small buildings. After that, we stood outside of the parliament building and watched the changing of the guards. Then we tied up our loose odds and ends with shopping and had to head back to the airport :(. When we were in the metro station, we noticed that they had all kinds of different ruins that were embedded in the walls showing through display cases. Apparently, their subway system was made for the last time they hosted the olympics and when they were building, they found all of these new ruins!!