Day 11. Athens, Greece

Today started last night. We ended up staying up and chatting to a huge group of people in the club. The staff actually left before all of the passengers did. Cory checked the clock when we went to bed and thinks it was 3am. mmm. Needless to say, the good morning PA telling everyone their passports were ready for collection at 7am did not go down too well. We were docked at Athens and disembarkation would commence shortly. We had breakfast, said our last goodbyes and were out of there. Piraeus, the port for Athens, is huge and there were about 7 cruise ships docked this morning. The Seaborn Pride was in prime position on the best dock, so it did not take long for us to get off. A nice touch was that the captain and first officer were waiting on the dock to farewell all departing guests, and actually spoke to and chatted with everyone. The ship is going onto the Suez canal, the middle east and then onto Asia, for a season there. It was sad to say good bye, but every goodbye is another hello, and there will be plenty more cruises!!!

The cab ride into town was interesting. The driver kept pointing things out and telling us what they were. It turned out he was touting for a tour, with him as tour guide. His cab stunk of smoke and heavy/ripe body odour, so there was no way we were going anywhere with him apart from our hotel (with no intention of having him come inside with us - LOL). Fortunately, they very generously allowed us to check in at 9am, so it was straight back to bed for me while Cory did some running around and organising where we would go today.

This afternoon, we ventured out to the acropolis and the ancient Greek ruins.

trash or treasure?

We had downloaded a tour onto our iphones, so listened to that as we walked around. The place was amazing and the area around it was scattered with various buildings and ruins from ancient times. There was a massive protest this afternoon, which we managed to avoid, however many of the shops and the subways were closed. There were flea markets in the area selling all sorts of antiques and things like old photos. It was interesting to see this stuff and hear people chatting away. Like all of the other places we have visited in Europe so far, the number of smokers was vast. There were cigarette butts everywhere. Graffiti is also rampant here and every spare bit of wall has been tagged or painted with the stuff. Overall, Athens seems very run down.

For dinner tonight, we ate under the stars, close to the ancient city. The acropolis is lit up at night so was stunning! We had Greek food including salty saganaki, eggplant soufflé, and oven baked lamb. It was delicious!! There was a very handsome street dog watching us happily, and after dinner, Cory took him an enormous amount of lamb. Needless to say, he adored it!!! We strolled back to the hotel past some night market stalls with nice memories of an interesting day! Ready for bed and a massive sleep!!!