Day 36

Kaliméra,

This will be a bit of a boring update, as it was a day spent organising ourselves for the rest of the week.

We have organised the hire of a car for four days, so we can get ourselves to Meteora and Mount Olympus. We have organised accommodation and we have organised a short trip to a couple of Greek islands.

Grandma also managed to get her nails done, something that she has been trying to do for the last week.

The weather was cool today and as the afternoon wore on the clouds got darker and the wind came up.

We used the Hop On Hop Off bus to take a trip out to the port of Athens, and that was interesting. We saw the Strait of Salamis, where a very famous naval battle was fought between the Greeks and the Persians in 480BC. The Greek navy won against a much larger and much more powerful fleet through the use of cunning plan. The Greek victory led to the rise of Athens as a prosperous and powerful city state, and the birth of democracy and Western civilization as we know it. Some people claim that this was the most important naval battle in history, because it helped to shape world politics for the next two thousand years.

We also got to see more of Athens beyond the area of Plaka where we have been staying. Athens seems to be a city in transition. We get the same feeling from it as we got from Prague two years ago. Old, abandoned looking buildings sit side by side with brand new modern buildings. There is a lot of construction going on, either to build new buildings and roads, or to renovate existing buildings.

One of the new buildings is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. This is a huge building down by the waterfront, one of the most environmentally sustainable buildings in the world. It has an opera theatre, a library and other facilities to promote various arts and cultural pursuits. On top of the building is a huge public park.

There were bikes for hire, and we didn’t have a lot of time before we had to catch our next bus. So we thought we’d hire a couple of bikes and tour the place quickly. There was some palava while we had to wait while we got our special card to unlock the bikes. Sometimes nothing is simple.

After all that waiting, we were getting on our bikes, and that’s when we were told we couldn’t ride the bikes through the public park, only the areas around it. Argh! If we’d known that, we could have been walking up the park to the top.

Never mind, we had a quick bike ride. The facilities look impressive, at least what we saw of them. Buzzy Bee was happy, he got to ride up front and navigate.

Bit of a boring update, but sometimes we need to take a day to get ourselves organised.

Love to you all from Grandma and Koro and Biker Bee. XXX OOO.