Day 4 - Singapore to Athens

We arrived into Athens just after 9am, K was craning her neck from the plane window to hopefully get a glimpse of the Parthenon but all she could see was a giant Ikea. 

Our taxi swerved in and out of traffic at 130 kms an hour, we think because it is a set fare he wanted to get us there as quick as possible, we were fortunate that our Airbnb in Plaka allowed us to check in early.

As K has an interest in Greek architecture, especially in columns she had made a list of all the sites she wanted to see. What we didn’t expect was that they would all be so close to where we are staying and every corner we turned brought us to another incredible ancient site. We visited Hadrian's library and the Ancient Agora purely by stumbling upon them. 

It’s quite like being in Cairo and discovering the pyramids are in the city not out somewhere in the distance as you have imagined, or walking through the middle of Vienna and seeing a Lipizzaner crossing the road in front of you as the stables are in the centre of the city. 

The weather was superb, we were pleased to leave the humidity of Singapore behind and instead of having temperatures in the low 20's that we expected they were in the high 20’s.

We always like to start our visit in a new city with a “free” walking tour as you get a good overview of the city and usually some history, local information and useful recommendations as well. We joined the 5pm tour and had a great guide who entertained us and filled in a lot of history and background over three hours. It took 9 years to build the Parthenon and the current restoration complete with scaffolding has been going on for 34 years, the only time the scaffolding has been taken down was for the 2000 Olympics. 

We went to have dinner at a place our guide recommended which we finally found after getting hopelessly lost, compounded by a touch of jet lag and a night trying to sleep on a plane. We shuffled home having seen a lot more than we had planned for our first day in Athens.