Athens Part 2

Just a little side note: Apparently the title of my blog is a bit misleading. Yes, I am backpacking through Asia, but that officially begins September 29th in India. Until then I am traveling around Greece. I thought "backpackingthroughgreeceandasia.blogspot.com" was way too long. (And to be quite honest, I am not exactly roughing it in Greece. To me, backpacking is what I am least looking forward to: bugs, dirt, and carrying 45 lbs of my stuff around on my back. In Greece I am showering daily and spending time on the beach.)

Our second day in Athens wasn't much different. The city did not get prettier or cleaner, the dogs were just as rabid, and the Acropolis was still standing. We had lofty goals of seeing the National Archeological Museum, the new Acropolis museum, and the actual Acropolis, but how many major tourist things could we actually do if we were still jetlagged?

We went to the National Archeological Museum first. The museum was filled with your standard statues, jewelry, pottery, and other relics, but one of the collections most prized pieces was the Mask of Agamemnon. It was kind of anticlimactic; slightly smaller than we pictured and surrounded by a similar looking death mask and other golden artifacts. I was more into the cartoonish, black-figure pottery. The boys were not interested in any of it.

The Acropolis was next on our list (we decided to skip the new Acropolis museum since we are coming back to Athens in 2 weeks). At the risk of sounding like complete cliche, it was really beautiful. The real Parthenon (which we never correctly identified) was enormous, pretty well preserved, and partially covered in scaffolding. I get that these crumbling buildings need to be restored, but something about a big metal cage wrapped around half of the columns kind of takes away from the picture-perfect idea that I had in my head. (I have pictures of all of these sights, but since I am working off some sketchy computer in an internet cafe, I can't upload them yet.)

After four-ish hours exploring the Acropolis we killed time by eating and then made our way over to the port for an overnight ferry (read: low-end cruise ship) to Crete.

As always, I am running out of time on the computer, but I'll add more when I can.

-Jess