Sunday is tour group day in Athens

Obligatory Acropolis

Decided to take another weekend away. My goal was simple: a fairly cheap nonstop flight that would give me enough time in the city to have a day and a half on the ground. I wanted within Turkey, but I couldn’t find one.

Finding flights that fit that criteria is harder than it seems like it would be, because it takes forever to get to the airport sometimes. There are two airports, one on the European side and one on the Asian side. That one is hard to get to, so it’s difficult to plan evening flights from there. It can take around 3-4 hours to get to the airport.

The other airport always has the metro system, but I have to get to the metro, which takes either a cab or a walk to the bus stop and then a bus. Once on the metro, though, it’s a solid but reliable hour to get to the airport.

Anyway, all this means is it’s harder than it should be to find a flight leaving after 8 p.m. from IST or 9 p.m. from SAW. Lots of the flights I found to areas I want to go – Macedonia, Albania – leave around 7 p.m., which would mean having to take an hour or so off work. That wasn’t the plan for this particular weekend. Other flights left at decent enough times, but the return flights were something like 9 a.m. on Sunday morning, not leaving enough time on the ground.

Reminded me of Bootstrap Bill

With those parameters, I couldn’t find a flight to a place I hadn’t been to, so I plunked down $150 and went back to Athens. I went once before but was in Peace Corps at the time, so I didn’t exactly splurge. Of course I went to the Acropolis, then, though, so I didn’t feel the need to go again this time. First of all, you can see it from anywhere in Athens, and second, I went in 2009. The thing dates to 2000 B.C.; I didn’t think it would change enough in eight years to warrant another visit.

Besides, when I came before, the Acropolis museum wasn’t open and it is now. It’s got a lot of the artifacts that had been excavated from the site, and it was pretty phenomenal. They don’t let you take photos, though, so I have no proof I went.

One of the friezes from the side of the Parthenon was in there – a long scene made up of panels carved out of marble. Each of the panels had a scene continuing where the one before it left off – soldiers, chariots, cavalry riders. It was interesting that each of them was in a different pose, angle, emotion or otherwise. All were unique, like the single one out of the whole thing that was facing the “camera.”

Is this a pornstache or what?

Since I can no longer roam museums in Istanbul, it was nice to do it in Athens, and I went to three. One was in the old Parliament building and honestly, I had no idea what it was about except that all the portraits of men featured funky mustaches. The other was the archaeological museum. I hadn’t realized went the previous time until I stepped into a red room with a bronze sculpture of a little boy riding a horse. At that point, I knew I’d been before but there’s so much to take in that it’s like new anyway.

The museums were crawling with people. Not individuals, though. They were seething with tour group, moving in packs and blocking aisles all over all three museums.  I’d hit two museums in mornings and was flabbergasted at the number of tour groups.  Viking itself had to have, oh, about 356. The tour leaders with signs – most of them Viking, it seemed, though I also caught a Gate 1, familiar to me because that’s who I used for my trip in China – led groups with an older average age but there were classes upon classes of youth, too. Soccer teams, uniform wearing, name-tag bearing kids from elementary to high school.

Trying to maneuver amid such a living throng got complicated, as every placard, it seemed, had someone with a little microphone holding court, with lots of earphone-wearing subjects nodding and aahhing. Lots of sheep, following their Viking shepherds, and I was trying to weave around a bunch of them in the pasture, except the pastures in this case were displays wide enough to accommodate 2-4 people back to back, but not 15-30 of them.

But it was nice to see tourists again. Istanbul’s tourism has been hit so hard that I forgot what crowds were like. I got jostled around, stared at and had lots of sad-looking people try to sell me this or that on the street. One man was so decrepit-looking that when I bought my dinner, I bought extra for him, but I couldn’t find him on my way back so I ate it myself. I’m really not a sucker for people who try to sell/beg, but that one got to me, but he disappeared.

So now it’s back to the real world and no more vacations planned until May. We have three holidays in May, but so far I only have plans for one. I’m trying not to rush it. And really, I am kind of relieved to not be going anywhere next weekend. There are a couple projects I need to get a handle on at work and I look forward to settling in.