Greece Is The Word!

Yep, and it wasn't until we got to the check-in that I found out!

Bec had worked out a brilliant itinerary, using all of the available time to see not just Athens, but some Greek islands too, with a clever combination of booked and "open" nights so we could be flexible and stay longer if we found somewhere great. Which we did - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm going to be brutally honest here and say things started out pretty badly. They usually do when there's a 4.30am alarm clock involved. And sure enough, we missed our flight from Gatwick to Athens. But we managed to get ourselves onto a later flight from Luton, another airport on the other side of London. In six hours' time. So after a leisurely breakfast, we headed into the capital, and despite having no real idea what we'd do to kill the time, we actually had a really great few hours. But that's for another blog post.

Many hours later, we arrived in Athens, and made our way across the city to the Dorian Inn Hotel in the Omonia district. We had the usual trouble finding the place - it's easy enough to get to the right Metro station but once the escalator spits you out topside, you're clueless which way to go next. We ended up walking all four sides of the (slightly dodgy) Omonia Square before working it out. And in the meantime, my trusty green suitcase celebrated its 13th birthday by losing one of its wheels, making it about as manoeuvrable as an oil tanker in a sea of custard. But we got there.

The next day we ventured back to Omonia Square, intending to hop onto the Metro and check out all the tourist spots - the Acropolis, (original) Olympic stadium, etc. But the square was completely gummed up with people, and there were tapes and policemen keeping people back from the road. What was going on? Well, although at first I thought the people of Athens were staging a huge parade to usher in my 30th birthday, it turns out that March 25 is Greece's National Day. This parade was without doubt the biggest I have ever seen - thousands of troops, policemen, firefighters etc, including huge rumbling bits of heavy equipment and marching bands.

It went on for at least two hours - wave after wave of people marching in the very peculiar Greek way - arms swinging above head-height - in uniforms, wetsuits, even fireproof outfits and bomb-disposal armour! It was crazy!


Of course on the down-side, everything in Athens, including every tourist site, was shut for the day. D'Oh! So we couldn't get up on the Acropolis. But we could get pretty close: