Day 93

2:3
Athens:Greece

Title: Doric

Acropolis. It was impressive, but the whole damn thing was a construction site. They had cranes working around the Parthenon. It's 7,000 effing years old, what in the hell are you doing a remodeling job for? You had to take all of the ruins with a grain of salt because a lot of them are restorations with newly constructed parts (or the entirety of it) made to look like it used to back in the day. The POD is just about the only picture I was able to take without getting any scaffolding in it, although some still slipped its way into the upper left corner. The picture to the right of all the crisscrossing scaffolding was taken about 15 feet to the right of the POD.

Athens is huge. Like urban sprawl to the extreme. There's no central downtown (as far as I could tell), so the city is just 3-5 stories tall for as far as you can see in all directions. When we left Athens (a few days after these pictures were taken), we took a bus to the airport at 3 in the morning, so there was no other traffic on the road and the bus was flying though the city at a pretty good clip. It still took us about a half an hour of this nonstop driving to get out of the city. Everthing looked i-*clap*-dentical for that whole drive. The "city proper" itself has only half the population of Manhattan, but also takes up half as much area, and isn't nearly as vertical. Conclusion: they have similarish population densities in two-dimensions, but if you add the third dimension of height, I'm sure Athens is significantly more dense per unit volume.

Um...what else? We napped a lot. It was hot as ball sacks, so we would get up early, go see some sites and shit in the morning, and head back to our hotel around mid afternoon and napped until dinner. It was almost lame that we "wasted" all that time sleeping, but we were still adjusting to the time difference, and we couldn't have survived in the 40°C weather for long. We would have died from exposure. Or is exposure when you get cold?

They have a lot of stray dogs, stray cats, and scooters. Two of the three are pictured below. Can you pick out which ones?