Travel Day

We have now left Turkey behind.  The last six days have been very enjoyable.  Lots of  history and natural beauty, and reminders of how we can better serve the God that all this history and natural beauty points to.  Definitely worth coming back to and exploring more.

Today was primarily a travel day. Two bus rides and two flight segments brought us to downtown Athens, to the Titiana Hotel.  

Athens is one of the world’s oldest cities, inhabited since the 11th century BC.  The urban area sports a population of over 3 million people, and, from what I could see, most of them live on top of each other.  Coming into downtown on the bus, we passed street after street of several-story concrete buildings, and their nearness too the narrow streets made the whole area look like warrens or narrow concrete canyons.  Interestingly, the guide on the bus told us that Athens does not have any skyscrapers as they keep the height of all the buildings below the overall height of the Acropolis, which towers above the center of the city.

What she didn’t say is that all the buildings come close to the height of the Acropolis, so downtown is all 10-story buildings, putting the streets and sidewalks in perpetual shadow.

The hotel is 11 stories tall and the top story is the restaurant.  It offers a birds-eye view of the Parthenon, less than a mile from here.

If you can’t see it from the street, create a view from the roof.

We used the time before dinner to walk around town for a bit.  In 10 minutes of walking, we arrived at Syntagma Square,  where a crowd had gathered to witness the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Since we arrived as it was in progress, I  stood behind most of the crowd, held my phone up, and recorded the whole thing.

As the soldiers left, they marched away from the building, the crowd splitting before them as they went.  They came in my direction and I had to dodge them as they approached.  I never dreamed of being run over by the changing of the guard.

Greece, like Turkey, has lots of ancient history.  Part of the problem with a city like Athens is all the archeological history buried under the city.  They found this out big-time when building the subway system for the city.  Just a few stations took 20 years because they kept running into archeological relics, which also required many areas to be hand-dug.

We ran into one of these on our walk.  In digging a ventilation shaft for the subway, they unearthed a well-preserved bathing complex, built around the 3rd or 4th century AD.  The ventilation shaft had to be relocated.

We had asked the hotel desk where the markets were and he pointed us toward it, however, it was not the market we expected.  We were looking more for food and souvenirs, this was high-end handbags, shoes, etc.  From the number of people on the streets, half of Europe was out here looking for expensive stuff to buy.

Other than a large mall in Guangzhou, China, I have never seen so many people in this amount of space as there were here.

We located the food market on the map after we got back to the hotel.  It’s not far from here.  We’ll go there in the next couple of days.  We’ll be three nights here in Athens at this hotel.

Dinner was at the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel.  Not quite the large spread of the hotel in Turkey, but very good.  And the view was fantastic.