Athens: Day 3

I woke up a good while before the alarm again today, probably around 7 AM. We went to the Hellenic American Union for a lecture at 9:30 with a professor in foreign policy, I believe. He talked about Greece from the early 1800s when they were ruled by a monarchy, to 1974 when democracy really began. It was actually really interesting, much more so than I had expected, but it was so hard to stay awake just because of my lack of sleep, and the speaker was not quite enthusiastic. We got a break halfway through the three hours and took some coffee and cookies up to the roof for another nice view of the acropolis.

Afterwards, we all split up for lunch. I walked around with four girls trying desperately to find a sandwich shop. We circled the block and ended up finding a place right around the corner from our hotel. It was really chaotic and I wasn’t sure the employees spoke English, so I just pointed to something that looked the most like a gyro. I’m still not sure what it was … I think lamb with a sweet, cream-cheese-type-sauce, tomato, lettuce, and mustard. Interesting. We just ate in bed during our break because it was too hot outside.

Around 2 PM we walked back over to the acropolis for our special appointment at the new Greek Acropolis Museum. Apparently this is a really big deal because it’s only been open for two weeks and “the whole world is talking about it,” according to our professor. The glass floor was built upon an old Athens neighborhood, so that was pretty cool to see. There were still steps and seating areas in tact. The museum was neat – tons of original statues and remains from the acropolis/Parthenon. Some of them had been very much restored. What amazes me about these objects is that, first of all, they’re still in tact, and second of all, they were found at all. Some of them were from 400-500 B.C. That’s crazy! As cool as it is though, there are thousands of artifacts, so after the first 100 they all start to look the same.

As we were leaving the museum, there were men trying to sell us parasols. Well the police sped up on their motorcycles and the guys just took off at a sprint. The police chased them but they ran through the bushes and out of sight. It was totally bizarre to see, but completely relevant because just this morning in lecture we were discussing the rising issue of immigration in Greece. There are 600,000 – 700,000 male, illegal immigrants and the government can’t really do anything about it because it’s hard to catch them, and even if caught, Greece officials don’t know where to send them back to because they have no papers. A lot of it is due to the Iraq war because tons of immigrants fled to Greece. I found it all very interesting. I might even take a foreign policy or political science class this year.

So then we were free for the rest of the day. About 12 of us went to an outdoor café for some coffee. Today I went with the Cappuccino Freddie, which I liked much more than the Nescafe Frappe – this was much sweeter. Sarah (my roomie) and I walked around for a bit … bought some wine and little notebooks for our tours. It was a really nice day, but again very hot at 100 degrees. We came back to the hotel for a few hours to cool off, rest, and get clean.

About 14 of us met at 9 PM for dinner. Tonight we just walked down the street and got take-out gyros for 2 euro, and brought them back to eat on the rooftop with some wine. Once we got kicked out, headed down the street to the same place we picked up our dinner, and sat down for some drinks. We just got red and white wine for the table, but it was awful, tasted like water. Ripping off the stupid Americans again …

Tomorrow is a morning lecture and then a tour of the ancient Olympic stadium!