Today we spent the day at sea. To my surprise, there wasn’t a lot of free time. We got up late, then went to a port and shopping presentation. We aren’t particularly interested in shopping, but we did get some good port information for Mykanos and Turkey.
After that, we had lunch, then went to a presentation on the 7 wonders of the ancient world. I hadn’t realized that the location of some of the wonders was known and that fragments had been found – I thought that the only remaining one was the pyramids, and that the others were totally lost. Also, the theories on what the hanging gardens of Babylon looked like are nothing like I assumed.
We played mini-golf in the afternoon, then got ready for the formal dinner. After dinner, we rushed off to talk with the port guide about some questions we had, then went to the Captain’s welcome aboard reception. After that, we went to the show (an Elton John impersonator), then it was time to go to sleep in preparation for Athens in the morning.
Thursday
We got up this morning and got on the tour to Athens. The weather was beautiful – sunny and hot, but pleasantly so. The first place we went was the Acropolis and Parthenon. We walked up to the Acropolis. It was crowded – a lot of other tour groups were there at the same time. It was very impressive. They are restoring it right now, but they have been restoring it since 1992, so it’s not like we came on a bad day.
We looked around the Parthenon and the Erechtherion temple (which is also at the top of the Acropolis). We had 45 minutes of free time to take pictures, and with the crowds we needed every minute. After that we went off to a souvenir shop for 20 minutes, then we did a bit of a city tour. We saw the stadium used for the first modern Olympics, as well as the remains of the temple of Zeus. We then headed to the Plaka, which is a historical part of Athens filled with a bunch of shops.
We had lunch, then started looking through the shops. Much to our surprise, all of us bought rugs. We also bought a bunch of cotton clothes – Anita bought some shirts and I bought a dress.
By that time, it was getting late in the afternoon, so we grabbed a taxi and headed back to the ship.
When I was on a cruise I played mini golf constantly. They had prizes, but I never won. Our boat was insanely rocky...even while docked. This did not help the situation.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the boat moving adds a whole new level of complexity to mini-golf.
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