I headed up to the rooftop bar at happy hour around 7:30pm. Drank by myself for a little bit before finally breaking into a circle of canadians. Played drunk categories with about a dozen people. The bar is only open until 11pm, then they have to shut it down for noise so they send you over to the sports bar they own down the street. I was waiting for Michael to arrive as he was supposed to be in around 11pm. I left a note for him to meet me down at the sports bar. I was hanging out with this girl named Anna from New Zealand. The entire bar was full of young Australian except for this one large older guy who I guess just a local. I told Anna that he was my friend and if she wanted I could introduce her. She wasn’t buying it and asked what his name was…I said George because well it is Greece and the tour guide’s name earlier that morning was George. We walked outside and I started talking to him and asked is name…sure enough it was fucking George. Too bad I hadn’t made an actual bet with her but oh well. Nice guy actually and yeah it was the closest bar to his house so he just drank there. Of course they close at 12am and he was still not there yet so I headed to the next bar with the rest of the people there just to find out where everyone was going and then ran back to the hostel to wait for Michael. I found him in the streets walking towards where I was at. I practically ran past him on the street as his hair was much shorter than last time. So at that point we headed back up the street to the bar. I was drinking liquor tonight because the beer in Greece is absolute shit. So now I’ve been drinking liquor for 5 hours if your keeping track. My friend just arrived and I found out later we had taken some shots as the rest gets a bit fuzzy and we start doing absolutely stupid things as evidenced by our cameras the next day. Appearantly we danced for a while and hung out, then went to walk home but weren’t quite sure where we were at. My only orientation was from the walking tour I went on earlier that day and from the view of the Acropolis I could orient myself and find the hostel….so we went towards the Acropolis. I had walked around it that morning so I knew which path to follow…only thing is that they lock the damn thing at night. Rather than going back and finding some streets that led around it, we opted to hop the fence and head straight through it. Of course we were on the complete opposite side that I had been on so we ended up getting lost and headed up this path that led to The Cave of Zeus on one side (a dead end). Now this would have been a cool place to camp. Took some pictures and wondered back down. We ran into some dogs and they were nice so they followed us. We came across some other random people who asked what we were doing there but we just kept walking. We kept circling around and hopped another fence then found the path that I had gone on that morning, only thing is this one had a guard booth as it was the proper entrance. I was seriously going to crawl along underneath the guard booth but Michael advised me not to. So instead we walked back down and hopped the fence into the Temple of Agora and stood on top of some ancient column ruins and took a few pictures (Michael actually took his shirt off and posed like a statue). Back to the streets. We found a cat that was nice and let me pet it, but then the dogs (who were still with us) chased the kitty off. The dogs somehow knew how to get through the fences as we kept thinking the would get stuck on the other side when we hopped over but they never did. So, after like an hour of wondering around the sites of Athens by night, we finally walked to a street and around the Acropolis back to the hostel. I’m almost certain we would have wound up in jail were we to have run into the right guard. Woke up the next morning not knowing exactly how I got home until I pieced it together with Michael in the morning. Its good to have a travel compainion for the next week. We are heading to Corfu tomorrow for a week of beaches and partying. I asked him to bring me a Boston Red Sox hat but better than that, he brought me the one I had lost in May when I visit Phoenix…I left it in his garage or something. Sweet.
August 14th
Michael and I took the morning to go to the ferry port and refund the ticket I had purchased as we had decided we were going to Corfu instead of my original plan of going straight to the islands. That was supposed to take like an hour I figured, but it turned into 3 hours and much frustration. After all was done, we ended up back downtown at the market in Athens. Michael bought a knock off watch for 20euro that was really a knock off of a knock off and probably only worth like 2 euro but I guess it makes a good souviner. He also bought some "Roy Ban" aviator sun glasses. We had a gyro pita and it wasn't the greatest plus the waiter was pretty freaking rude. I had a bottle of water with me when we sat down at the "cafe" which was really some plastic chairs and tables in from of a kebab stand. He said I couldn't have the water here so I said OK, then...we are going to go elsewhere and I got up. He said we could stay but we had to put it on the ground....whatever. A chinese family sat down next to us and they tried to order but the waiter just kept yelling at them. He even brought out a picture menu and then they said they wanted 3 plates of gyro or whatever and he yelled at them because there were 6 chinese people and that they would have to order 6 things and drinks. I found this to be pretty typical of the Greek culture in regards to customer service and human interaction in general. Everyone yells at you and seems like they are going to fight you; plus, they have small personal space boundries.
After lunch I took him on the basic tour that I went on the day before (and saw a lot of the night before as well) only we headed up to the actual Parthenon. As soon as we got inside we ran into the 2 dogs that had followed us around the night before. They were lying in front of the Acropolis security office building....so basically the are the security dogs of the Acropolis but they are very friendly. We made our way up to the top and it was like most ancient ruins...large, impressive, broken into many pieces, etc. Great views from the top of course but the thing is kind of a mess with a mix of old marble, new marble, metal, cranes, piles of construction debris and trash thrown off the side. I like it better from further away I reckon.
After we had plans of going to the Colesium but it was a bit of a walk in the hot sun so we skipped it for the time being and went to eat dinner at a cafe and pick up some food for the overnight bus ride we had coming up that evening. We had 2 drinks at the rooftop bar then headed over to this other hostel across town where the bus picks up....
