DEFCON 2

Athens is a city where at every step you make, you trip over a stone full of History and stories. Or at least it is like that in the city centre. As we were going to stay there for three days, we decided to take it easy and relax. In other words, the first day we didn’t do anything but walking calmly around the city.

As for the second day, the plan was to take a ferry to Delos. The island of Delos is like a museum itself. Sleeping there is banned, so trips must be made in the day from Mikonos. And according to our guide, it was possible to do in a day from Athens. Well, not exactly… Schedules for the boats didn’t match each other and we end up in Mikonos without being able to go to Delos until the next day. We couldn’t allow ourselves that, so we just spent a few hours in Mikonos –itself a great place for holidays- and came back to Athens. So another day of not doing anything -but spending 8 hours in a couple of boats and staring at the sun.

With these precedents, the third day was supposed to be the good one. The Acropolis was waiting for us. Thanks to my Press card I didn’t have to pay for any entrance. But even if I had to pay for it, I think it would have worth it. The Acropolis is awesome, especially when you are close to it. Not so much the museum, that is worth skipping if you live or go to London. For starters, you can’t do any photos inside and then, there isn’t that much to photograph once there. Much of the originals are in the British Museum –which is free and allows photos. So the only thing worth seeing is the place itself, not the museum.

In our last night in Athens, the rain appeared again in the form of an electric storm. Being in Athens, watching the Acropolis just a few kilometers from our hostel and with all that thunderstorms, lightings and show of power of nature outside, you couldn’t but feel like a terrified ancient Greek asking for forgiveness to Athena or Zeus.

But it was time to leave. Just before doing so, I met in the hostel two guys doing a sea Interrail, by boat. They were studying Adventure Media in England –got to get more info on that, but unfortunately I could only exchange e-mails with them because our train to Salonika was waiting for us.

The initial plan was to go directly from Athens to Istanbul (23 hours by train) but apparently there was a problem with the railways. The Greeks said it was a matter of the Turks, the Turks will say it was the Greeks. Bottom line, we had to catch a train to Salonika and then a bus to Istanbul. So we spent our last night in Greece in Salonika, doing nothing but walking and relaxing by the sea –there is actually nothing much to do there.

And the day after, Istanbul awaited us with Barney Stinson.