Turley Family News Europe: Athens

John may well end up adding a few names and dates . . .but the short story of Athens is that we got there in the afternoon . . .scared ourselves up a little apartment with a kitchen after some hiking around and then proceeded to walk almost a million miles on concrete looking at old things with lots of marble columns. The acropolis is on the highest hill on town, so we hiked up that and looked around (best memory: tour guide telling group of Japenese tourists that he was about to show them the temple of Athena and all of them gasping "oooooohhhh" in unison :) ) and then hiked up the other two tall hills in town and looked around from there as well. What I liked best about Athens was how all of the old ruins are just here and there throughout the town . . .columns and letters on stone tablets just here and about . . .so common that they don´t even have little fences or anything around most of them it seemed.

We went to see the changing of the guards at the palace on the first day and were surprised to see hordes of policemen with riot shields and guns. After we looked around a bit we spotted the real "guards" in their vivid outfits and over-large pompoms on their boots doing some high stepping and realized that the more serious looking policeman were for real, and that the large crowd with banners were not there to watch the guards change but to protest something. We left . . .but an hour or two later there were traffic jams left over from the protest still sorting themselves out. I think it was all pretty peaceful . . at least we never heard anything otherwise.

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Pireas, The port town of Athens.