Athens 2019 – Day Three – The Good and the Bad of Athens

When we got up this morning it was to bad news. We had read and had been warned that Athens could be bad for pickpockets. Unfortunately one of our party had fallen prey to this and had lost their wallet. This must have happened in the short distance from the restaurant to the hotel last night. This is literally only 500 yards so they must have been pretty quick.

So the first job was to cancel the card but this turned out not to be straight forward either as you need to also report it to the police in order to limit the losses. As it wasn’t our card and there wasn’t anything for us to be gained by also going to the police station we went on with our plans for the day, which was a visit to the Acropolis.

When packing for this trip and looking at the weather forecasts I decided to pack a pair of shorts and, once they were in the case, I really had to wear them. Today was that day. It was bright and sunny as we left the hotel with a predicted temperature of 20 plus degrees.

The Acropolis dominates the city even now after the modern buildings have risen up but must have been even more impressive a couple of thousand years ago. I’ve been to the site a couple of times before but it never ceases to dazzle me. The picture that everyone sees is of the Parthenon but there is so much more to see here.

As ever my thoughts turned to the slaves that must have been employed in transporting all this beautiful marble and stone to the site. The end result is breathtaking but it must also have been life taking to get it to this state.

Having spent a couple of hours on the site we were pondering what to do next as the rest of our party were still wrestling with the Greek police. I think this was more an issue with locating them than anything else. We’d just decided to go into the Greek Agora and had, in fact, made it down to the ticket office when we got a call that the credit crisis had been dealt with. So we walked (swiftly) back to the parliament building to meet up.

We were in time to see the changing of the guard which looks very much like it has been put together by a combination of Monty Python and Wayne Sleep. It is all slow, graceful movements carried out by men with guns dressed in skirts and slippers!

We’re hoping that tomorrow is also shorts weather and the wallets will remains in our pockets.