To read the first honeymoon post, click here.
One of the smartest things we did on our honeymoon (and this was all Keith's idea and trust me, I complained about it a lot) was waking up early to beat the crows to the big attractions. It's not easy to do that when you're exhausted but it's 100% worth it later in the day. And now I'll step off my soap box and begin telling you about the 10 pictures this post contains. Oops, did I say 10? I meant 31.
Our hotel offered us breakfast every morning, which was really nice. And by "offer" I mean they offered it to you if you wanted to pay for it, which we did. It was definitely worth it. Our hotel in Athens had a really cute breakfast buffet area and it was delicious! We were a little bit concerned that we wouldn't like any of the food (well, I was, Keith was excited to try weird things) but there wasn't anything very strange that they offered us.
Greek coffee is not delicious unless you like your coffee to be the consistency of mud (my aunt warned me about this but I didn't take her seriously), so that cup stayed pretty full. Every single hotel we stayed at had a plethora of Nutella or generic hazelnut spread and that made me pretty happy. There was also random platters of meats and cheeses but I didn't trust them so I didn't eat very much. The bread though... I ate loaves and loaves of bread.
At this hotel there was an electric juicer with what looked like green oranges, and genius Keith told me I just had to put a half of the fruit in the juicer and push down. So I was standing there all blonde and American, just staring at this machine and pushing the fruit repeatedly, when finally somebody who worked there came over and asked me if I had pushed the button yet.
"...what button?" I asked, all blonde and stupid.
He remained silent, and just slowly reached over and pushed the giant red button on the side of the juicer.
"Whoops! I didn't see that!" I tried to laugh and not seem as stupid as I looked. "Now, can I just use these green fruits?"I gestured toward the greenish orangeish balls.
"...the oranges?" He asked, giving me a look like he thought it was a trick question.
I giggled stupidly. "Oh, are these GREEK oranges?"
You guys, he started laughing. Like, HARD. Because this is what I thought were Greek oranges:
I'm not kidding you when I tell you everybody there was laughing at me. Granted, there were only like 8 people around but they were all laughing at the dumb blonde American girl who didn't know what oranges were. BUT THEN I JUICED THEM AND IT WAS DELICIOUS SO WHO'S LAUGHING NOW? Still them.
THEN, we headed over to The Acropolis. Keith thought it was weird that I wanted to take a picture of the steps leading up to it, but hello, it's PRETTY. And pictures like this are why we have 3,000+ of our trip just on my phone.,
The first place we saw was the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. This theater was build in 161 A.D. and was used for concerts, then at some point it was destroyed and it became a ruin, and then in the 1950s it was restored and it's being used for concerts again. There was a concert happening the night before that we heard when we were walking around in the evening. We both wish we had been able to go to a concert there because don't you think that would have been incredible? The theater was still being cleaned up when we were there, which you can see by the stage and all those black bags on the steps.
To be honest with you, I have no idea what this next picture is of. It was something right after the theater but I'm too lazy to ask Keith or to put a lot of work into googling it. It's pretty though, right?
We arrived to the Acropolis right when it opened, which was at 8:00am. It was already packed!! Like I said earlier, one of the best things to do when you're a tourist is to arrive to the busy places as early as possible. The Acropolis is all being restored so there was scaffolding everywhere, but was still incredible.
Below is a view of Athens. Did you know there are almost 4 million people who live in Athens? It's huge! I was blown away but all of the homes we could see from the Acropolis.
In the distance you can see the Mediterranean Sea!
"Give me your face," was something I said quite a few times on our honeymoon. Usually he did it without complaining.
The Parthenon was just to our right. There weren't too many people at the top yet!
View from the Parthenon.
The Parthenon had a lot of scaffolding on it as well. I wasn't aware of much of the history about the Parthenon or the Acropolis so I really enjoyed reading all the signs they had about each ruin.
Below: To the left is the Propylaea, which is where we entered. In the middle right is the Temple of Athena Nike, and to the right is the ende of the Parthenon.
The Temple of Athena Nike. We read about how Athena and Poseidon had a contest for the city. They both had to create a gift for the city and Poseidon created a salty spring and Athena created an olive tree. Obviously, Athena won the contest and that's how they got the name Athens.
*All historical facts based either on my foggy memory or the slightly unreliable facts found on Wikipedia.
Another of the best things we did was take a selfie stick. Selfie sticks get made fun of all the time but they're super useful! We made fun of ourselves every time we pulled ours out but I have no regrets. Without the stick we wouldn't have been able to take cool fautographs like this one!
After the Acropolis we went to the Agora, which was a marketplace in Athens. There's a museum that works really well for kissing pictures.
There are lots of busts. If you're immature you giggle inappropriately every time you say the word "bust."
This is something famous. If you look closely you can see the hole in my tongue from when I had it pierced.
Next, we went to the Temple of Zeus.
In the background you can see the Acropolis.
Next, we walked past the Arch of Hadrian. The arch is said to divide Athens into the new and the old city. It was so strange walking along a busy street and then all of a sudden seeing a famous ancient ruin! I loved it so much!
Next up was the Panathenaic Stadium. This stadium was built in 566 B.C and housed the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, and then again in 2004.
The marble stairs which took you up and down the stadium were SO STEEP. After an already long day of walking I was really struggling.
I'm pretty sure some really famous butts have sat in those very seats. #classy
We got to walk through the tunnel that all the athletes get to go through, and it just made me think of Gladiator when all the fighters are in that tunnel behind the gate waiting to fight for their lives. I'm so deep and introspective, right? It has been pretty warm and humid all day and this tunnel felt so nice and cool! Plus it looked nice and cool. Win-win.
This is the Olympic torch. I didn't know this until we saw it, but apparently the Olympic torch always begins here in Athens! I never thought about where it began, before, and now I have so many more questions about how they transport the flame and everything but I'm not going to ask them here. I'll just google them later.
On our way back to the hotel we walked through a Grecian flea market. This was the first place that we saw the weirdest trinkets: penises. There were penises EVERYWHERE. They were wooden and were varying sizes and they were on keychains, bottle openeres, statues... like, everything had a wooden penis on it. If anybody knows why these penises are everywhere please let me know. I didn't take any pictures of them and I'm not posting any pictures of them on here because I get weird enough search terms as it is, but if you're dying to see them you can click here. You're welcome?
Then we walked through some traffic.
By then it was around 3-4pm and we were both beat. We headed back to the hotel to rest for an hour or two, go get some gyros for dinner, go to a hill to watch the sunset, and then go back to the Acropolis once it got dark so we could take some night pictures.
At 8:30pm Keith nudged me and said, "I think we missed the sunset."
At about 10pm we got up and decided to go to the rooftop bar of the hotel to cash in our "drink voucher" we'd been given upon arrival and then go back to sleep. The rooftop bar was beautiful! They had this cool mural and water thing....
fancy tablecloths...
...and from where we were sitting we could see the lit up Parthenon!
Our drink vouchers were actually just for juice. I thought we were having another language issue (similar to the issue with the green oranges from breakfast) when the bartender asked us what kind of juice we wanted, and then we both realized that we actually only got free juice. He had peach, I had strawberry, and I would have paid $5 for that strawberry juice. IT WAS AMAZING. I also had chardonnay but the juice was so much better. I'm drooling now just thinking about it.
I'm trying to decide how to blog about the rest of our trip. There are so many stories and pictures and adventures and I want to give details about everything, but is that overkill? Do I even care? Maybe just a little.
Have you ever been to Greece? Are any of my facts totally wrong? Was this boring?