This morning dawned fresh and semi-clear so I took the Red line Metro to the Syntagma Station and walked over to the Parliament building to see the colorful changing of the guards.  Two high-kicking guards would march in and replace two others who had been standing at attention for the past hour.  All four of them would then do this stylized ritual of high-strutting kicking in slow motion for several minutes before the change was complete.  Kind of silly but fun to watch.  I then walked through the beautiful National Gardens to the famous Panathenaic Stadium, the site of the first Olympic Games in the Modern Era in 1896.  It's the largest stadium in the world made from marble, and, when filled to capacity, can seat 60,000 people.   Dozens of people were rehearsing a dance for the arrival of the Olympic Torch which was on its way to the stadium and scheduled to arrive there on Saturday.  Eventually, it will find it's way to light up the 2014 Winter Games in Russia.   If you climb to the top, you can get a very nice view of the Acropolis a mile or so away.   I headed on over to the Temple of Zeus (or what remains of it) and got some nice pictures of these impressive columns.  Then it was on to check out the very impressive new Acropolis Museum which houses a lot of the sculptures and stonework found in and around the Acropolis.   Since the weather was clearing up even more, I decided to finally make the climb to the top.  It's the quintessential Athens experience and not to be missed.  They've been doing a lot of reconstruction on the pillars for the past several years so there's always a lot of scaffolding around, but I still managed to get a few nice shots of this iconic structure.   I noticed that, even up there, I saw a lot of large, unattended dogs just lying around.And, of course, there were also a number of the ubiquitous feral cats of Athens posing for the tourists, too.