Days of Travel, Nights of Fun

Today started early again (though it's ending rather later than expected!) I saw the sunrise and took nearly th same photographs as yesterday. As today was the final day of orientation, most of it was self-guided, particularly in the cases of my roommates and me. We started with a trip to the academic center to get books and finalize a few matters with the registrar. Naturally, I took my camera. :)


This is less than half of the cats we ran into at the corner. They're malnourished strays, but mostly kittens, and watching them play is so heart warming. There's a reason that the program has to stress to us that we aren't allowed to domesticate the animals. It's SO tempting!


The Acropolis is closer, and just as lovely from the balcony at the Academic Center. :)


In case I haven't mentioned, the Academic Center is quite literally next door to an ancient stadium that was recovered in marble for the Olympics. Lucky for me, it's a heavily trafficked tourist stop, so I can take all the pictures I want pretty surreptitiously.





After lunch, five of us decided to take a walk down to Plaka and be tourists for a little while. This meant going even closer to the acropolis, and heading right into fresh photography grounds!


The Parthenon almost recedes behind the traffic. Almost. :)


I'm know the name of this building from it's roof, but I don't know exactly what it is. The area around it is just lovely, though. They seem to have to plant flowers intentionally in the urban districts, but the flowers that survive are beautiful and oddly exotic.


Statue at a street corner. No idea on the date or what she's doing there, but she's very lovely. It's incredible how the ruins just sit right in with the modern architecture!


Evidence of the same. Couldn't quite make out what this depicts from across the street. Will examine more closely soon. :)

Arriving in Plaka, we quickly found fun stores for tourists who wanted everything from Postcards to jewelry to replica antiques to funny t-shirts to...

Spartan helmets?

Well, whatever floats your boat I guess. M and G had a lot of fun trying these on. Unfortunately, the price tag prevented us from bringing them back with us.

G found these lying outside a shop and had to try them on. We HAD been looking for a shoe store anyway. :P


Turning a corner and quickly getting lost, we found a large, roped-off area of ruins. We didn't notice an English sign explaining them, but that didn't stop our cameras (and the cameras of many people around us!)


Without the barricade in front of the lens.


From left to right: G, SE, M and K walking in front of me past the ruins and on towards what turned out to be a large open food market, a restaurant row equivalent, and the entrance to the flea market.

Some awesome ruins (edit: Hadrian's Library) against the bluest (un-photoshopped) sky I've ever seen. No digital alterations here!


What is that I spy beyond the amazing building of which I have no knowledge?


Oh, hello again, Parthenon. It's always nice to see you. :)


A beautiful church of some kind. Pity about the scaffolding, but that stuff does seem to be as much a part of the architecture of the city as anything.

We did manage to make it back, despite being told by our directional giver that it was "not possible by foot" and nearly getting lost in the National Garden (a good place to lose your way if you must!) We'll be getting our full exercise this semester, no question! We also went (in two groups) to a place called The Grill and Pita for fabulous gyros, only 1.80€! We will definitely be going there more often than we should. It's quite literally across the street from our apartment. M and G had attended a 2 hour crash lesson in Modern Greek between our adventure and dinner (I napped) tried ordering in Greek. They basically succeeded in that the server knew what we all wanted and told us how to say it properly.

We spent most of the night trying to get back online (that's my excuse for posting so late, anyway - plus our internet seems a bit wonky) and planning trips to Meteora, Olympus, Corinth, Neopoli, Santorini and many, many other places. I'm afraid we won't have enough weekends to cover them all. But we'll try. ;) I took a quick break when I noticed the sun was setting to take one last (the previous adjective is a lie) shot of the Parthenon from our window.


I'm having far too much fun with this camera.

Classes start bright and early (8:30 am) tomorrow, so that will be a whole new adventure! And I've recently discovered that after this week, every weekend is a three-day-weekend, as we don't have Friday classes usually. This will make trips much easier and much better. We don't plan on going anywhere as a group this weekend, so I'll probably go back to Plaka and maybe up to the acropolis. Who knows? More adventures always await!