Athens

Athens covers a huge area. There is no downtown with high rise buildings. The city just flows up from the seafront in a continuous wave of shops and cafes and coffee houses.

Divides to go around the hill of the Acropolis.

Fills the valley, and splashes onto the distant hills to the North.

The Acropolis is the main tourist attraction. It broods over the city in every direction.

The vertical, defensible hill the Acropolis sits on had natural springs and caves, attractive real estate from the most ancient times. Here is what the hill top looked like at its height of power, rendered through the miracle of legos.

And some photos of the hill top today.

There is, of course, history literally lying all around Athens.

It gets almost humorous to read the inscriptions on the well-marked sites: we were building an air duct for the subway and found this .. we were excavating to build this building and found this .. we built this museum and found all this, which we are still studying ..

The area west and northwest of the Acropolis is one giant ancient historical site with ruins everywhere, just out in the open.

There are good museums. They make you marvel at how advanced and wealthy the Greeks were both so long ago and for so long. They make you sad that mainly only fragments cross time to reach us.

Athens today.

Bright blue skys. Troups of tourists, even in December. Crowded streets. Grand open spaces. Significant buildings. Parks.

There is a long quiet avenue up to the Acropolis that affords a good walk. It goes all along the west and south sides. Around the area of the ancient ruins.

The best area of the city is east and north east of the Acropolis, a nicely crowded area of clean streets, cafes, shopping of all kinds.

The area near the waterfront has quiet residential areas, boulevards and plenty of city. For me it was not particularly interesting nor compelling. This is not really a European city. I kept feeling that I was perhaps in South America. The waterfront itself is blocked off from the city by a limited access motorway.

The new investment of the recovery is happening to the west of the downtown. New office buildings, distribution. Big box shopping, auto showrooms. All automobile based.

There are some very bad areas in this city. Some in the North. One around the central market and in both directions downhill. Broken black dirty pavement. Trash. Graffiti everywhere. Goods hanging above and stacked out into the sidewalk like a bazaar. Seriously impoverished people wandering around. My hotel is in this area. The first night I arrived after dark and wandered out to look for some dinner and into this area and was shaken by the poverty and dirt.

Café life is big here. Especially on the avenues where the tourists are likely to go.

My hotel was a quiet retreat up above the streets.

The only restaurants I could walk to were either fast food and or low grade tourist fare. So, many days I would go through the fish market, buy a fish and take it to one of the restaurants that would charcoal grill it. Simple and fresh and delicious.