First Day in Greece

Kalispera! (Good evening in Greek)

The past two days have been the best combination of excitement and exhaustion.  We flew out of Nashville around 9 a.m. on Sunday and arrived in Athens, Greece around 11 a.m. Monday morning, so basically en entire 24 hours of nonstop traveling.  As soon as we got off the flight, we get into a bus and head for our hotel.  At first, Athens looks like any other foreign place to me with multilingual signs, cool telephone booths and a smell that says, "This is not America." (I love that smell) But as we get closer to the main part of the city, I look up and see it, the Acropolis.  It is so much closer to the Plaka than I excepted and appears to be floating on a sea of Athenian cityscape.  I instantly tried to picture what it would have looked like in it's prime and how I could get closer, thankfully, it was on our schedule for the next day.  After we freshened up at our hotel, The Art Gallery, we headed to see the Arch of Hadrian and the Temple of Olympian Zeus.  I cannot imagine traveling with two better guides than a philosopher and an art historian because they have completely filled us in on all of the great history that goes along with each of these places.  For example, apparently Socrates dialogue in Plato's Phaedra takes place at a house right outside of that temple!  I never thought I would possibly walk the same streets as Socrates, so that was an exciting thing to see.  After those two locations we hiked up higher, higher and even higher to one of the tallest point in the city, Lycabettus.  It was the most incredible view! You could see the entire city and even eat dinner up there if you wanted to.  What I enjoyed most was walking through residential apartments on the way and seeing about 4 different cats.  If we hadn't done enough walking already, we headed back to the hotel to change and then headed to the Athens Center to meet up with our guide and go to dinner.  Dinner was incredible.  We enjoyed bread, some Greek salad, and main dishes that could have fed a small village.  I have enjoyed tasting the staple Greek meals and leaving my comfort zone to experience good food.  Dinner put us over the top so we went back home and I feel asleep almost instantly.  Well, there you have it, our first day in Greece!  Sorry it is so choppy and short, but as you can imagine... I am still a little jet lagged ;)