The next day we joined a walking tour with Sebastian (the german guy). We started out walking around in the old city district which has some charming streets. Again, we went to see the Temple of Zeus and the National Garden. But in between these visits, we saw the old Olympic Stadium. The ruins of original stadium, which was built around 550BC, was found in 1870. After this the stadium got rebuilt and the first modern Olympic Games (1896) was held there.
We got to see the changing of the Evzones guards, their national guard (and their quite different uniforms too).
Another interesting thing we experienced was that usually people in Athens (actually I don't know whether this applies only for Athens or for Greece in general) don't have pets. Instead they have these kind of community dogs running around in the city. They aren't wild and are mostly wellbehaved. This is due to they get raised for a few months before being placed on the street. And even here they are looked after and fed regularly.
After seeing the Olympic Stadium we went to see the ancient agora of Athens. The area was quite interesting in itself, but the solely most interesting thing there was the Temple of Hephaestion, which is the best preserved ancient temple.
Last thing we got to see at the tour was the Acropolis, but I'm saving that for a later post. When we were at the site we got a good view of Athens. We "discovered" some hills in the middle of the city and we decided to climb to the top of the nearest one on the following picture in one of the next days.
In the evening we met a lot of people at the hostels bar. We met some cool new zealanders, englishmen, germans and australians. By coincidence we found out that Acropolis was open to visit that night, which it only is once a year, so we were quite lucky to experience that.
But since the camera is afraid of darkness it, once again, refused to take decent pictures of this.
To be continued...
- posted by Morten Kristiansen on 2009-08-18 12:38:06
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