Day 78: Exploring Athens

This was my one full day in Athens. Since the Parthenon museum is closed Mondays I'm planning to visit the Parthenon as well as the museum on Tuesday morning before my flight to Istanbul. After so much time in Rome then visiting excavation sites around Greece I wasn't too keen on spending my day at more ruins, so I decided to spend the morning just hanging out and exploring the city. Since my hostel is very close to the Acropolis I decided to climb up there first to search for inspiration...


Ah! Inspiration!

I worked my way towards Lycabetus Hill following random streets, and of course documenting the good street art I found along the way. The street art in Athens is a bit weird. Most cities have small areas with graffiti and street art - often hidden away in alleyways and other out of the way areas. In Athens, it's *everywhere*. I guess painting over it is futile, because even the main shopping areas are tagged everywhere. It feels like you're walking in the slums, but feels completely safe at the same time because there are pedestrians all around. I'll do a seperate post with some of the art from town.

Once I got to the base of Lycabetus the actual hike up was very fast and easy since they have a winding path of steps up the slope. It probably only took me 10 minutes to walk up, and the view of the city on all sides was an upgrade of the view from the Acropolis.



I wanted to visit the National Archaeological Museum when it opened at 1:30, so I had some lunch and checked out some shops around the museum until then. The museum had 4 major sections on sculpture (yay!), prehistoric finds, pottery (less yay) and a special exhibit on the Antikythera Shipwreck.

I loved the sculpture section as usual, and can check a few more pieces from my art history class off the list of ones I've seen in person now.



A lot of the pottery was very similar, but it had a nice big collection of pieces from Akotiri, which was interesting since I had visited the site where they were found on Santorini.



The special exhibit was pretty cool too. It had the famous Antikythera Mechanism (google it!) and lots of media on the analysis of it and different mock ups that had been built from the scans of it. The sculptures were neat as well, as the parts buried in sand underwater were perfectly preserved while the exposed parts were eaten away by the water and sea life, creating these eerie Two-Face (as in the Batman villain) like characters.




After the museum I finally got a haircut at some tiny Albanian barber's place for 4 euros. I wandered through the big park in the city and quickly checked out Hadrian's Arch and the ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus nearby.



That was about it for the day.