LastDayInGreece — Jim Winslett

In spite of the luxurious linens on the bed, neither of us slept very well last night due to new surroundings and lingering jet lag, so the 6:30am rouse from bed to get ready for our tour was most unwelcome. However, we learned on our last cruise that doing the first tour of the day rather than waiting for a later one, even if it means waking up early, pays off in spades. This would certainly hold true today.

We had a quick brekkie and coffee at the buffet. The buffet includes hash brown patties similar to those you get at fast food places. I was putting some maple syrup on mine (and if you haven’t tried that, you’re really missing out), and the lady next to me saw what I was doing and gave me a funny look, then noticed my t-shirt with the Canadian flag on it, and gave a slight nod of understanding. No words were spoken.

We hopped on the bus for our tour and left the port area in Piraeus (which I’ve been mispronouncing all this time as ‘puh-RAY-us’ and it turns out that it’s ‘py-REE-oos’) and went back into Athens. Our first stop was a sports stadium, which would usually be a yawn-fest, but this one is pretty amazing.

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Now I know that you look at that pic and you think, “so?” But hear me out… This is the Panathenaic Stadium… this was the site of an ancient arena that was rebuilt for the first modern Olympic Games, 1896. Still no? It’s the ending point of the classic marathon and it’s the place where the Olympic torch is handed to the host country before every Olympics. It has nearly 15 miles of seating. And?

It’s all made of marble. I shit you not. It’s 29,400 cubic metres (1, 040,000 cubic ft) of marble.

Back in the very early days, this site hosted the Panathenaic games, the ancient Olympics. However, those games were considered to be a religious event in honour of Athena so when Greece was switched to Christianity back in the 4th century, the games were abandoned, as Greeks were no longer allowed to worship the old gods… and so the stadium was also abandoned. The new stadium was built for the resurrection of the Olympic Games in 1896 and the money to rebuild the stadium was mostly from a wealthy benefactor named George Averoff, whose statue is out front. He looks a lot like Rob.

From the stadium, we headed past a few sights (which Rob and I had seen on our own already) and then ended up at the Archeological Museum.

Inside, there were some absolutely amazing artifacts. I won’t pretend to remember the specifics of everything we saw, but here are some highlights.

Lots of impressive statues. Most marble, a few bronze

This was my favourite piece. It’s carved into marble and depicts Hermes and the god Pan.

The star of the museum (and for good reason) is a bronze statue of Poseidon which was accidentally found when one of his arms ended up in a fishing net.

Remember I said earlier how waking up early and doing the first tour of the day paid off? This is what most of the rooms in the museum looked like when we went thru them:

…and just over an hour later, when we left:

One of the more interesting things was the Antikythera Mechanism - an 87 BCE era machine that predicts positions of the stars and planets and is generally considered to be the first-ever analog computer.

After the tour, we had some free time in the Plaka district, which we used to get another glass of that amazing lemonade from Athens WAS hotel. Then we went through immigration and got our EU exit stamp on our passports and set out to sea.

Lunch was smørrebrød, (Scandinavian open-faced sandwich), which was delicious.

We had dinner in the main restaurant tonight and were delighted to find that table #101, our favourite table on the previous cruise, was available. Rob had lamb shank and I had a fantastic French onion soup followed by Chinese wine marinated scallops and shrimp. Both were quite good.