Sunday 12th October
We started the day at the hotel’s breakfast buffet with a view of the Acropolis. Breakfast was generous but not as good a quality as I’d normally expect in a five-star hotel.
The food was generally not hot enough and far too American for a European city. The bacon was the streaky variety and too tough. The Greek yoghurt and honey from the comb were delicious though.
We first headed to Syntagma Square, planning to watch the changing of the guard first off. I thought that it was on the hour, but it was half over when we arrived. It turns out it is at five to the hour. Hopefully, we will get time to return and see it again.
We then tried to follow Rick Steve’s Athens City tour. It was generally fairly good; his historical explanations were interesting and taught us a lot that we didn’t know about Athens.
We had a few issues with his directions, due to things having changed since the tour was published and the fact that there were lots of mentions of going south or west as an example rather than left or right. Still all in all it was a great overview, and we managed to cover a lot including Syntagma Square, the Parliament, the main shopping street, Ermou Street, the Athens Cathedral, the stunning mediaeval Church of Kapnikaria plus another few Orthodox Greek churches.
After that we wandered through the pretty Plaka district before visiting Hadrian’s Arch and the Temple of Zeus. We chose not to buy tickets to these two attractions as since we’d booked our trip to Greece, Athens has changed its ticket system from one where you could purchase a combi ticket to seven attractions for €30, to one where the Acropolis alone is €30 and each other attraction is €20. With the AUD being slightly over half of one Euro these days it would have been very expensive to visit them all.
Both of these ruins were easily visible from the street, so we left it at that.
We saw the Lysicrates Monument before deciding we needed a break.
We were in the heart of Plaka, so possibly not the wisest place to eat, but we very much needed a rest, and we found a table for two outdoors at a really cute café. We both had a gyros plate, mine was pork and G’s was chicken, and we shared an excellent bottle of dry local white wine and a litre of mineral water. The food was no more than okay, but the atmosphere was brilliant.
After lunch we wandered around the Acropolis without going in. That’s for tomorrow, after the Museum in the morning. The gorgeous area of Anafiotika was super cute but there were so many noisy tourists who seemed not to realise that it was Sunday afternoon and that these little houses were people’s homes. I’m pleased we saw it, but we didn’t stay too long.
The next piece of the tour took us past the Roman Forum and the beautiful Tower of the Winds. Again, we viewed these from the street which was easy to do.
We went to Hadrian’s Library then, on the way to Monastiraki Square. The square, and the area around it, was jammed with people and not at all an enjoyable place to be. We’d originally booked a suite in a hotel, A for Athens, then read reviews about noise, so changed our minds and cancelled. Thank heavens we did, I would have hated staying there.
This was the end of the tour, but we continued to the Ancient Agora. This time we did buy tickets and did another walking tour in this incredibly ancient place. We also spent some time in the Agora Museum inside the Stoa.
At this point we’d been walking for over seven hours, apart from lunch, so we’ve returned to the hotel for a much-needed rest before dinner at a restaurant that was thankfully just over the road named Ella’s Greek Cooking.
The food here was great. We shared a starter of grilled feta cheese which was different to what we are used to, but very nice.
G had pork souvlaki, and I had the grilled fish of the day with fish soup sauce, carrots and steamed greens. A very nice meal indeed.