May 27 - Athens

Tuesday, May 27 - Athens
We each had a warm raisin bun and a bowl of cereal at the hostel.



A gal here gave us directions (which we wrote down) for getting to the city center and back by bus and city train. They worked well for us, and after about an hour we reached the area with the Greek ruins. We bought passes for all the sites. We first walked through the ruins of a library built before Christ. We then went to the Agora -- shops and government building ruins. It was getting quite hot in the sun.
We climbed and climbed to get up to the top of the mountain where the Acropolis and the Parthenon ruins are located.



Verle bought me an umbrella to give shade from the hot sun -- I seem to get overheated and miserable pretty fast. It really helped.



We walked around the whole area -- amazing. Without a guide, we don't know too much about it, but it appears to have been a wholly religious area for the wealthy.



Many of the ruins had scaffolding around them. They are doing restorations on the restorations done in the early 1900's, adding more original rocks to the structures. Down below we could see a complete temple standing in a green area, but we didn't try to walk to it.



We stopped for orange juice and a baklava on the rooftop of a little restaurant on the way back down. It was pricey but cool and a nice rest.
We took a detour in our train route on the way home to ask at the Larissa Central Train Station about validating our Eurail passes for going on the ferry tomorrow. We went the wrong direction first (both endpoint towns started with an A, and we can't read the rest in Greek.) We discovered the error right away and got back on the other direction. Other than that, we were able to make all our connections out and back with a minimum of trouble -- except -- a guy came close to us with a package of kleenex acting as though he needed some sort of help - and a pickpocket took Verle's billfold. Darn! Luckily, he had only the day's cash and no credit cards in it -- but still we lost over $100. Rick Steves had said not to carry a billfold -- now we know why.
We got back to our hostel around 3. I took a shower and took a nap, and Verle worked on getting more information about finding the ferry to Italy tomorrow.