Athens

Athens is hot, dirty, polluted, and filled to the brim with people. However, the people are surprisingly friendly and English is commonly known, so it makes traveling a little bit easier. For such a large city, there's not much to offer tourists. A few museums and the Acropolis are really all the city has to offer, so most people just stay a day or two.

On the museum front, Athens only has one museum that anybody goes to see, the National Archaelogical Museum, which has all the old sculptures and pottery that they've managed to find in the Greek ruins of Athens. It is unfortunate that I visited this place last in my trip around Europe since the art here precedes anything else I've seen and therefore appears much cruder and less refined. So even though I got a lecture from an archaeologist that I shared a room with about looking at the art as "developing" the way you would look at cave drawings, I wasn't really able to appreciate it.

Athens does have a large amount of ruins lying here and there around the city, but like the Palantine in Rome, most of it is just building footprints and an occasional pillar. The Agora and the Ancient Agora were such places, old Roman markets that were destroyed and rebuilt many times over. The Temple of Olympian Zeus stands by itself, where only about 10 pillars remain standing but still give an impression of the great size of the temple.

And finally there's the Acropolis, one of the possible seven wonders of the modern world. Acropoli are collections of buildings that stand higher than the rest of the city, and many ancient Greek cities had them. But Athens has the Acropolis with a capital A, because it had several temples, all dedicated to Athena (hey, it's Athens). This includes the great Parthenon, which, as you can imagine, is a large temple. I went to the Acropolis twice, the first time when I first got to Greece, and the second right before I left. The first time I was not impressed at all because it seemed to me like there wasn't much left to the ruins, which were covered with scaffolding and were lucky to be standing upright. But after seeing other ruins around Greece, of which virtually nothing remains, I was able to look at the Acropolis with new eyes and see that what is left is really quite an accomplishment.

Well, this marks the end of my trip. I spend the night at the airport then head back to Munich for the third time and then on back home.