Greece, Part 1

Okay, so I know that some of you really want to hear about Greece and here goes the beginning at least:
We arrived around 7 Friday night to our hotel after a very short flight in a VERY SMALL plane from an EXTREMELY SMALL airport. The airport in total is maybe the size of Wallmart, and had two gates with three flights leaving besides ours that evening. What I could see from the window (Valbona had the window and we were only slightly in front of the wing) was beautiful, and Athens was just spectacular. And huge. We left small, we came into something incredibly large. Since it was evening, the lights were just starting to come out and the city was just starting to glitter a bit. Our taxi had taken us through lots of small winding streets, which we found were common to Athens and finally arrived at our hotel. I loved the elevator, but I don't think any of the pictures I got did it justice--there was also a wooden spiral staircase that was very pretty, but the old iron elevator was very nice and worked smoothly unless we happened to stick our hands to far out, then it would stop wherever it was (we didn't do that often).

Our room was teeeny but it was very clean and when you looked out the window you could see the acropolis, so that was very nice. We wandered around that first night in a square that we ended up visiting just about every day, got our bearings a bit, and had some very greasy souflaki/soufflache (if you need to know what one of those is, go here: www.kojaxsouflaki.com/fr/menu.htm).
We'd gotten a tourbook but decided that we didn't want to pay 50 euros to go on the Athens sightseeing tour, so we decided we'd start with the Acropolis the next morning. Hotel breakfast was small but that was good since we didn't want to eat a huge amount, and really if I had wanted to be stuffed I could have eaten more. Overall, the only complaint we really had about the hotel was that they didn't change our towels/sheets, they just fixed them up and made them nice each day.

Anyhow, the Acropolis is just the name for the area, there's the Parthenon, the Erechthenion, and the Propylaea, plus a museum and an entrance to Mars Hill (the Areopagus). After a reasonable walk but not a terrible one, we reached the top and got a spectacular view of the city. It reminded me a bit of climbing the mountains in Xining, except the mountain here was higher and the city was much larger. The ruins were amazingly huge and it was neat to image what the city must have looked like when the buildings were standing and not in ruins--though for things in ruins, they were in remarkably good shape. We were there well into the afternoon and then took a break from sightseeing to go eat ice cream and nectarines and to sit/lay down in our hotel. And that, for the moment is where I shall leave you. I'll get to another update another time.