We’re back in our hotel room having a late Sunday afternoon rest, a very sensible local tradition.

We’ve had a great start to the trip. Thursday morning we walked about 1 km to the National Archeological Museum. It is very impressive, perhaps, for those other than committed archeologists, perhaps to much so. They have so much stuff from several thousand years of history that just walking around everything without stopping to look would take a couple of hours. We had a couple of quiet hours by the pool then went down to the Plaka and ended up having a spectacular dinner in a restaurant where the maitre d’ turned out to be from Sydney Australia – pretty much everyone in contact with tourists speaks English, but not with an Australian accent! Note to potential travelers though – the service really does improve when you say please and thank you in Greek.

Walked up though narrow winding back streets the next morning to the Acropolis, getting there about 8.30 a.m. This turned out to be a very smart move as by the time we were leaving at 10.30 it was pushing 30 degrees, we’d gone through 2 litres of water and there must have been about 10,000 people there! We walked down through the partially restored, largely Roman, settlement of Agora and found yet another nice restaurant for lunch, after which we stuck to the previous day’s program.

We did a bus tour into the Eastern Peloponnese yesterday, visiting the Corinth Canal, the citadel at Mycenae (of Agamemnon, Trojan war, etc fame), having lunch in Napthlion, the former capital of Greece after the War of Independence, before going on to Epiduarus, where there was a series shrines to the Aesculpius, of staff with snake symbolizing medicine fame, where there is the largest and best preserved Greek theatre. A series of private hospitals were operated there for several hundred years, with patients bringing “offerings” for treatment – not unlike the visions some seem to have for Canadian Medicare.

This morning we went down to the local flea market where you can buy anything – talk about a cash economy. We saw the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, much pomp and very difficult marching steps, and then went on to Benaki Museum – very well done and much more digestible than the National Archeological museum. Then, stroll through the National Gardens (full of children on a Sunday – not many places here would have gardens of their own), followed by taking 2 hours over a great lunch and a bottle of Macedonian wine.

Important things learned in 4 days:

Nowhere in Athens seems to make a bad salad.
Macedonian white wine is pretty good but has about 40% more alcohol than the Canadian stuff.
The optimum ratio of Ouzo to water is 1:1!

Off to sea tomorrow morning – next installment probably from Crete. A few photos are included but the unsecured network I've been "borrowing" for the last few days is not on line and the hotel business centre where I am doing this is painfully slow - so we'll send more later!