Day 10: Athens, Greece

As has been the usual case at our ports of call, our Athens morning was an early one even though we weren’t on any actual tour or anything. The idea was kind of like the Rhodes thing, where we went and hit all the sites that we wanted to see before it became too unbearably hot. I figured this would be a little harder today because we had just heard someone on one of the news stations talk about how Athens had been especially hot due to fires or something to that effect. Anyway, the point of all of this jibberish was that we woke up very early for Athens. We got our usual Windjammer breakfast and I got my omelette. I’m so sad that I discovered them so late into the cruise. Before we left, we mentioned to our assistant waiter that we were going to do Athens on our own and without an organized tour and she looked very stressed.

We were doing another Chabba tour of Athens. I think it may have initially been an everybody tour like Rhodes, but it ended up just being the nine of us. We disembarked and after getting a little disoriented and trying to get onto another crowd, we eventually managed to get outside and enter Pireaus, which is where the port that we were at was located. The next tricky part would be to find the Metro to take us into Athens. This ended up being a lot harder than we had thought. We had to walk about twenty miles outside of the port to actually get to the town while fifty taxi cabs drove by and asked us if we wanted a ride to “___(enter big Athenian landmark here)___”. Each time after we declined their offers, they almost hit us while driving by. Additionally, it was hot, so we spent some time whining that life would have been so much easier if we could be on one of those air conditioned buses that would take us directly to the Acropolis. A few even drove by us, while our fellow cruise patrons (or people who were on the ship docked next to us), looked at us with pity.

So to get to the Metro Station, we eventually found out that we would have to take a bus. To get onto the bus, we would have to buy tickets. Unfortunately we were there on a weekend and they don’t sell bus tickets on weekends. The bus people tried to not so subtlety hint that we could just get on the bus and not pay, but this stressed Oppa out for a while, so we spend some time trying to find a place that would sell bus tickets before finally giving up and cheating the system like the public transportation employees had suggested. We weren’t actually sure what stop to get off on to get to the Metro Station, but we made a friend on the bus who told us exactly how many stops it would take to get there. We got to the station, and got our day passes for the Metro and went into Athens.

The ride into Athens took about fifteen to twenty minutes and we ended up getting off a couple of stops earlier than we had intended to so that we could explore an older neighborhood of the town before making the climb up to the Acropolis. This part of town was actually pretty cute and we shortly after started making our climb up to Acropolis. This part was a lot harder than I had imagined. Somehow, my image of the Acropolis was from the Chipmunk Adventure, where both the Chipmunks and the Chippettes run up the hill, while singing. It was definitely harder than that. Actually, it wasn’t that bad. It was just hot and I was sick with a cold, which makes things seem worse than they really are. We also had to circle around because we were also climbing up the hill from the wrong side, which added a little bit of extra work. Also, I would just like to say that the path up to the Acropolis is very slippery, so that also added to the challenge of getting up there.

We made it to the entrance eventually and purchased our tickets. There was still more of a climb to go, so we made our way up. By this time, we were at a high enough point where we had a very pretty view of the city below us. It was very nice. We finally got to the point where we could enter the Acropolis and it was unfortunately a lot more crowded than we had anticipated. There were like five hundred tour groups trying to enter the area. They were also doing a lot of reconstruction on the ruins, which was kind of lame. Even with all of that, it was still an extremely impressive and amazing thing to see and it was so cool to be walking around in that area. The view from the top was also even more impressive than what we saw on the climb up. We probably spent about thirty to forty minutes exploring the area and it didn’t really matter that I was being toasted by the hot Greek sun because it was just so cool. Eventually, the developing sunburn did start to hurt, so we all retreated to the shade. We also lost Mia and Andrew so we had to find them as well.

Also, even though Mia and I had asked Chabba multiple times, we were not allowed to jump onto the ruins and dance and sing on them like the Chipmunks and the Chippettes do in A Chipmunk Adventure. In fact, there was actually an explicit rule outside of the entrance that said no singing. Even though I know that it isn’t true, part of me hopes that it was in response to that movie.

Once we did locate them, we started walking back down the hill. On the way, I got my postcard, wrote a quick note on it and sent it out while Andrew and Umma were stressing about the fact that the vending machine full of water bottles kept on saying it was sold out or something like that.

We went down and found an overpriced place that sold water on the way down. We stopped by a few souvenir shops because Gianni was looking for an owl statuette and made our way down to the shopping areas in Plarka. Plarka is consisted of a lot of narrow streets, where they sell a lot of very touristy goods and Royal Caribbean-approved jewelry and rugs. This pretty much translates to an ideal stop for Umma. We walked through the shops in search of a restaurant that the cruise ship recommended. It was down almost at the end of the street, but we found out that it was actually a lot more expensive than we had wanted. We walked down a few other streets and ended up finding a tavern with an impressive view of the Parthenon, something that made Oppa very happy. The food at the restaurant was good and I finally got my authentic Greek gyros, which is another plus.

After eating, we left Oppa and Chabba to stress about how to get back to the Metro Station while we went to find a jacket for James. The jacket says Hellas, which is apparently how you say Greece in Greek, but also made Mia and me happy because we had initially thought it meant Nor Cal. We got that for James and then Umma sent everyone but me back to Oppa and Chabba while we ran to the beginning of the street we were on to find a jewelry store that she had seen very early on in our Plarka stop. It actually wasn’t that hard to find because I remember her getting very excited about it when we had first seen it. She got her stuff and we got Andrew a shirt for his birthday and ran back to where everyone else was. We got back to a very stressed Oppa and made our way to the Metro Station.

The Metro was a lot fuller than it had been on the way into Athens, but it wasn’t that bad overall. We got back to the Pireaus metro stop and had to find our way to the bus that we had taken in. I found it while everyone was way behind me and I was ahead with James. I called everyone over, pushed James into the bus and went inside myself. Everyone else started loading in, but then started stressing because they didn’t see me on the bus, even though I mentioned several times that I was there. End result was that the bus started taking off with Oppa caught in the door way doing a dance to try to hop onto the bus. It went on that way for half a second until Halmony took control of the situation, stood up, and shouted stop. At this point, the bus driver stopped the bus, let Oppa in, and we all had a good laugh on the way back to the port. We got back to the port and loaded onto the boat like thirty or forty minutes before the last call for passengers.

We threw our stuff down in the room and then went up to the Windjammer to get some refreshing ice tea-lemonade to cool off after our very hot, sweaty and disgusting day in Athens. We also managed to grab some cookies as well even though we were still very full from our Greek lunch. We hung around there for an exceptionally long time and even ran into a couple that we had met on the Cairo excursion and talked to them for a little while.

Actually, I am not quite too sure how everything happened after this because after Cyprus, I had not been taking notes of each day’s events in my Moleskin and it’s been quite some time since we were in Athens. However, I know that we did shower and get ready because we were very dirty from walking around Athens all day. After not smelling anymore, we went up to the Schooner Bar to go do the Name that Tune Trivia, which ended up being with movie themes again. For most of it, it was just Mia, Andrew, Gianni, and me trying to figure it out. And actually I think James was also there, but he usually just plays the DS and does not contribute much to our trivia masterminding. For this one, it turned out that there were only two teams playing. The Activity Staff person who was overseeing it thought that there were three groups, but one stopped. So, even though we actually did embarrassingly bad, we managed to win the game. I was kind of proud of us for getting the music for The Mask. We didn’t think we had gotten that one right. Anyway, they ended up giving prizes to the two teams that were playing, but we did walk away with about six new Royal Caribbean luggage tags. Yay for that.

We thought about going to see the entertainment for the night, but it was a show with swing dancing and it didn’t really seem to interest any of us, so we decided against it. Instead, we decided to take advantage of the fact that we had nothing to do for the next few hours and finally let James have his silly game of Monopoly. This process took forever. When we got there, people were actually playing the game, so we couldn’t really do much. They actually finished the game quickly and we managed to steal it back from them. At this point, we looked at the gameboard and realized why they had probably closed up shop so quickly. A lot of money was missing as were a lot of the deeds for property. We decided to be somewhat resourceful and ripped up the papers with the daily trivia to make deeds and extra money. Then, we began the game. Obviously, it took all of us a very short amount of time to remember why we do not play Monopoly that often and it soon devolved into the usual really dumb antics of Monopoly, where James somehow managed to get twenty Monopolys early into the game, Mia gave me all her money in an act of defiance, Gianni managed to get the two most coveted properties on the board and have houses on them only to be wiped out by James, and Andrew cried a little on the inside because he hates the game. All in all, a good game of Monopoly.

Then, we had dinner. I don’t actually remember what I had for dinner, but it was probably pretty good. The dessert was phenomenal. Umma and I split a Kahula crème brule. Yum. We left early, though, because we wanted to check out the big game show of the night. The game show was called the Quest and it was pretty much a scavenger hunt for adults. Umma sent us ahead to go save seats and it was already very crowded by the time we got there. We were not sure if she actually wanted us to participate, so we elected Andrew to be our team captain and grabbed a number.

So this is how this game works. They shout something that they want you to look for and the teams go up to the main stage with the item and the number in hand. The emcee shouts out the numbers of the teams that participate in the round and they get points. The game started off pretty tamely. We had sent Andrew up with a Cruise Compass, my purse, and a sock that he ripped up so that it could have a hole and everything was good. We did not participate in the conga line because no one wanted to do it with me or Umma and Andrew walked out when they needed a male to get on all fours and bark like a dog. We skipped over the men/women kiss some random bald guy on the head wearing lipstick and pretty much stopped participating at that point. We did actually join in a couple of other times. They needed a woman wearing man shoes and I wear man Rainbows, so that was easy. At some point Andrew and Gianni had to hold hands and skip up to the stage, which was really funny. However, once they started having men take up pairs of woman bras, have men and women change shirts, have men take off pants, etc., we stopped participated all together and just watched what slightly drunk people would do for a Royal Caribbean hat.

After the game was over, we went upstairs to the tenth deck to watch the Greek toga party from a distance. We kind of figured it was going to be kind of gross because we expected it to be crazy drunk people dancing around in togas, but it was actually kind of fun to watch. They had a Greek band out playing music and people participating in traditional Greek dances. We sat around and watched that for a while, but ended up deciding to go downstairs to the Schooner Bar to listen to the live music down there. After listening there for a while, we called it a night. I caught up on blogging for a while before going to sleep.