1st Full day in Athens, Greece!! What a blast!

This was our first full day in Athens! We had decided to take a bus tour of the city to make sure we were able to see all that we needed to see. We started our day with breakfast in the hotel which consisted of crossints lots of various breads, some fruit, juice, eggs, little smokies that looked more like mini hotdogs, cheeses and cereal selection. We headed down to the front desk around 8 am which is 10 pm Oregon time. Met our bus and headed into the city.

Chat Tours Guided Bus Tour

We had a great tour guide. In fact she has been teaching at the university for 32 years and does the tour guide gig because she enjoys it. Not only has she been teaching there but is also an archeologist who has helped with some of the various dig sights arround the city. This is Sophia. She has also published at least 2 books which we decided to purchase and had her sign. It was pretty amazing visiting the various dig sights. At first glance they look like a pile of rubble that no one decided to clean up but with more insight and understanding you can discover many magnificint things about each site.

Sophia our Guide

The first place we stoped at was the original stadium for the olympics which seats 60,000 people. They don't use this stadium any more for any kind of track and filed excersizes however, we did learn that they used it in the 2004 olympics for the archery field competition.

Taylor in front of the Stadium

Our next stop was The Temple of Zues. It is actually right in the traffic pattern for the city with 100's of cars going past it every day. It seemed funny to me that it would be located there but I guess you can't exactly move a historic site like that. There are 15 standing pillars and 1 fallen one. The original temple had 104 collums that surrounded the temple. All the enterances to them face east.

Zues Temple Ruins, Athens

Rock sitting arround the ruins

Next was the Parthenon which has The Temple Nike and the Temple of Athena. Pictures are worth a thousand words! :)

Temple of Nike

Temple of Athena

When the Apostle Paul was preaching in Athens it was said that he was preaching from this rock!

With a short break between tours we were able to grab some lunch from a local's hangout! At least thats what the man on the street told us who actually took the time to walk us into the restaurant.

Our next tour was a coastal tour arround the outskirts of Athens. We went to see The Temple of Poesideon. The ruins are in their original found state with no tampering. Aparaently they have had to re-inforce some of the structures so that they don't fall over and with city built up arround most of them it's no wonder they'd want to stablize them.

Temple of Poesideon

We got back to the hotel around 8 pm in time to rest for a few minutes, freshen up and head out for dinner. We have had good luck with the places we choose to eat but we can't seem to get them to stop giving us free drinks or food! Just when we think we're done eating....out comes another surprise dish. This time it was a drink and dessert!

Stay tuned for more!! We're going to visit some of the museams tomorrow and who knows what else! Be sure to check out Taylors blog too at http://taylorstrax.blogspot.com/

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