dirty old town

Athens is a funny old place.  It has the strange air of a dying city, shuttered up shopfronts, graffitied buildings, empty pavements, inordinately long queues at the bus stops.  Unloved and unkempt.  But at the same time it's teeming with tourists. And at the moment it's Spring Break in the States so this might explain the presence of so many young Americans wandering around.  You hear them before you see them.  The tourists are naturally only in the tourist hotspots around the agoras and the museums and the acropolis parks.  Up by our rented appartment, not far from the archaeological museum, there are shops and restaurants run by Bangladeshis.  When we arrive we eat a good chicken and rice meal - enough for four - in a cheap place advertising Afghan food and then waddle over to a museum that's free on Thursdays and open till late.

note the hipster beard

We walk everywhere, happy for a change from the bikes and happy in the March temperatures.  Not hot, not cold.   We visit museums we haven't been to before - the Benaki and the aptly-named Byzantine museum, the latter requiring much form-filling to enter and entailing a complicated route through its exhibition space. Before we start we want to use the toilets.  At the ticket counter they point us towards another building across the courtyard.  There we are redirected to the building opposite where another attendant refuses us entry, referring us back to the first building, until we start screaming in frustration (and desperation) and threatening to pee in the central fountain.  

In need of a new bottle cage and some socks we hunt out the Decathlon sports shop that appeared on google maps.  It turns out to be an architect's practice called Decathlon.  Only in Athens.

On a sunny day we explore the ruins of the Greek agora set in remarkably peaceful grounds.  The cherry on the cake is the only wholly surviving Greek temple in Greece, the Temple of Hephaestus.  As usual we are exploring at a very slow rate.  There are probably 20 Must See Places in Athens for anyone visiting over a long weekend but we will have to return another time to see a few more.

Retracing our route back to the docks at Piraeus is easy to remember while it's fresh in our minds.  The only tricky bit, after taking a bike path down to the coast, is crossing the big highway that separates Piraeus from Athens.  We have spotted an underpass by the football stadium which leads to a park and then a ridiculously steep climb over the highest part of the Piraeus hill to swoop into the port.