Wednesday – Athens
This morning, we arose to find (with some relief) that we were still in Piraeus, and I had my first tour escorting duty, which was to the centre of Athens, to visit the Ancient Acropolis.
It was another early start, so we grabbed a quick breakfast to be down on the quayside in time to guide folks onto coaches.
At around 8:30am, we set off through streets that were uncommonly quiet (Athens is not noted for quiet streets). Our guide explained that this was due to it being a Greek National Holiday, and that there would be a parade through the centre of Athens later in the morning.
Enjoying the relative peace, then, we headed towards the centre of the city, pausing only briefly for a photo stop at a large open stadium; the location of the first modern olympics.
The guide pointed out lots of buildings, old and new, and told us lots of interesting facts about Athens and Greece. Olympic and football stadia were closely followed by the last few standing pillars of the Temple of Zeus. Police were gathering along the route of the impending Holiday Parade as we, finally, arrived at our destination at the foot of the almighty rock in the centre of the city known as The Acropolis.
Our guide was very good, I have to say; her facts were interesting enough to keep everyone engaged, but not so frequent as to be a boring monotony. She showed everyone where the meeting point would be, for after our visit, and kept everyone together for as long as she could. There was an old man sitting near the entrance to the Acropolis, wielding massive banners telling us that he has a brain tumor and not long to live, whining and trying to extract money out of passers-by. Our guide told us not to worry; that he’s been there for the last fifteen years, and he’s absolutely fine…
Once everybody had been issued tickets, we joined the long queue of people up the steps towards what must be Athens’ most famous, iconic monument. There are actually several temples atop the almighty rock, above which no buildings in the city are allowerd tower above (hence, no buildings are allowed to be built higher than 8 floors). The most famous of these is The Parthenon. Despite the fact that, these days, it sports a bit of a scaffolding overcoat, it was reassuring to see that the scaffolding had moved, and was slightly less than the last time we saw it a couple of years ago. The restoration of this grand old building is a slow and expensive process… it’ll look great when it’s finished, though!
The views of the city, from the the Acropolis, are nothing short of spectacular. Unfortunately, although it wasn’t particularly cold, it was rather windy, which discouraged us from staying there for any longer than we absolutely had to. I’m pleased we managed to see it again, however (both the Acropolis and the view); both really were quite magnificent.
We had roughly an hour and a quarter of free time before having to make our way back down to the meeting point at the foot of the hill; navigation was easy with Tumor-Man providing a useful waymark.
We were back on the Minerva by lunchtime. Passing through Security wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been the day before, but when we finally reached our cabin, I realised, with some annoyance and frustration, that I’d managed to leave the cabin key in one of those large plastic trays that security officers make you put all your precious belongings into before allowing you to pass through the portal. I managed to retrieve it, but not before battling my way through the one-way doors back into the security zone, much to the disapproval of the personnel there, and frantically trying to explain to a mountainous, non-english-speaking Greek officer what had happened.
After lunch, we returned to the terminal to make use of the free wi-fi there. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work for me at all (which is one of the reasons why the blog posts are a little bit late), but Tracey managed to connect and do some stuff. As we’d left the ship, we noted that the all-aboard time for passengers was posted as 15:30pm, which gave us plenty of time to do what we needed (well… Tracey, at least…). As we were sat in the terminal, however, we distinctly heard the sounds of an emergency drill taking taking place upon the ship. We were in the process of packing our laptops away and heading back to the ship as the unmistakable six blasts of the emergency horn rang out. Slightly confused, I checked the time on my watch… it was just gone three o’clock. As we boarded the gangway, we ellicited black looks from the Security officer there. We asked if there was a drill, to which he replied ‘yes’, and that we should be attending. We pointed out that all-aboard time by the gangway was showing as 3:30pm, but that didn’t make him any happier; he simply told us that the drill was in the daily programme, which we should had read, and that all passengers are legally required to attend… Oops!
In the hopes of heading-off any black marks from our passenger drill incident, I delivered a10-minute introduction along with the other lecturers, in the Darwin Lounge at 5pm. I was told that it wasn’t something I was obliged to do, but when art tutors in the past have done it, it has proved to increase interest in their workshops.
At 6:30pm, we were asked to attend a party for Singles (mingle mingle… free drinks…), followed almost immediately at 7:30pm by an entertainments, lecturers and tutors get-together (that’ll be more free drinks then). The social whirl continued on well into dinner, when we joined the lecturers on what we dubbed the ‘Naughty table’, before watching the singer and pianist do their first gig of the cruise in the Darwin Lounge.
After that, all we wanted to was sleep.
