Friday, April 2, 2010

Day 21 Athens & Homeward Bound

Our final day of the trip started out completely different. The ship didn’t get into Piraeus, the port for Athens, until 9:00AM and it was completely overcast. The very first cloudy day we have seen since we left the house on March 13!!!!! It was decidedly strange not seeing the sun at breakfast.


In all of our cruising experience, this is the first time that our last day on the ship was a port day and not a sea day and since we leave the ship at 5:15AM Saturday morning, we had to fit in packing and site-seeing. Being that it was also Good Friday and many places in Athens were closed today, the choice of tours was limited, so we decided on packing in the morning and an afternoon city tour.

We were the only non-Greek cruise ship in the area, and the only other one in port with any activity was boarding this afternoon. It didn’t help much that it was called the ‘Cristal’ - because there isn’t really much control in the port once you’re checked in, we actually passed someone with a boarding card for the Cristal trying to get up our gangway! We also saw a slightly modified ‘old friend’ in port - the former Nordic Prince that we sailed on in the early 1990’s. She’s now called the ‘Aquamarine’ and like Cristal, she sails for Louis Cruises, a Greek line.

Our tour was Athens and the Acropolis, a bus tour of the principal sites, followed by a visit to the Acropolis. As it happens, there are not a whole lot of sites to be seen from a bus, so our first and only stop before the Acropolis was the Athens Olympic Stadium built for the 1896 Summer Olympics, the first Olympics of the modern age. As you can see from the picture it’s a small stadium by today’s Olympic stadium standards, but it is still in use and seats 60,000 people!!!



Our second and final stop was the Acropolis, which stands on a surprisingly high hill in the center of the city. Building heights in Athens are strictly controlled, 12 storeys for apartments and 10 for offices, so that the Acropolis is always in view. The bus park was half way up the hill, meaning we had to hike up the steps the remainder of the way. Surprising us not at all, like virtually every “world site” we have ever visited, large parts of the temples were covered by scaffolding. According to our guide, restoration work is almost a constant feature, meaning the scaffolding is too!



It was a good thing that the tourist traffic was light; we had a better opportunity to wander around and get a good look at the temples and surrounding areas. It was certainly impressive to see these temples, but not as impressive as seeing the pyramids. We think it is probably because we can identify more with the Greek culture that built the temples and it does not seem as much an engineering feat as a marvel of design and sculpting. Here are some of the photos we took:

The Erechtheum and the Porch of Caryitides


Looking Down over Hadrian's Arch (in the lower left corner) and the remains of the Temple of Zeus


From below, the arches of the Herodeon Theatre and the Parthenon in the background

It is now just after Midnight here in Athens and our bus for the airport leaves at 5:15AM Saturday morning our time or 10:15 Friday night Toronto time. We plan on sleeping most of the way home (to make up for the sleep we won’t get tonight!!) and with luck, we should be home by 4:30 Saturday afternoon. It has been a great trip and we hope you have enjoyed coming along for the ride with us.

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