Chuck Hillig's Travel Blog

Well, I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling over the next 6-7 months so I thought that I'd better re-activate my travel blog. The last time I posted anything here was way back in 2006 when I was traveling through SE Asia. Feel free to read my entries back then about my earlier adventures through India,Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines and Hong Kong. This time (at least for the next six weeks), I'll be traveling through Greece and Turkey.

Wednesday, October 02, 2013

After being awake for over 35 hours straight, I finally crashed for about 12 hours of restful sleep.  In the morning, (after three cups of coffee) I walked to the neighborhood flea market which materializes every Wednesday only a few blocks for Craig and Athenia's home.  Half of it was dedicated to an incredible array of fresh fruits and vegetavbles and the other half was focused on everything else that you might find at your local Walmart.   In the afternoon, the merchants would all dismantle the entire market and move absolutely everything to another neighborhood in one of the suburbs surrounding Athens.  Next Wednesday, it will all re-appear right here again.   In the afternoon, I took the Metro to downtown Athens and spent hours walking through the narrow streets all lined with shops, stalls, restaurants and tourists.  I saw the Acropolis but thought that I wouldn't expend my limited energy to making the climb today.  However, I checked out the open amphitheater of Dionysus at the base of the cliff and even stopped to have my bare feet cleaned of its dead cells by a lot of very friendly...and hungry...little fish.  You sit on a bench and dangle your feet in these aquariums and, within 10 minutes, your feet feel entirely rejuvenated.  It's called, appropriately, fish therapy.   Later on, I enjoyed  a plate of Moushka, a traditional Greek dish of eggplant and minced meat with a glass of red wine before heading home on the Metro.   There are a lot of ruins everywhere in Athens, and they are the home to a legion of feral cats who sit on the empty chairs at the many outdoor restaurants looking to beg for scraps.  I was saddened by the incredible amount of graffiti that's been tagged all over Athens.  You can hardly find anything vertical that hasn't been defaced by spray paint.  :((   Tomorrow looks to be a bit rainy so I'm heading for one of the many famous museums in downtown Athens.   More later as it unfolds....

1 Comments:

Blogger jet boy said...

graffiti is like weeds in a garder i think. and athens, i came of age there and it was wonderful.

10:19 AM  

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