Athens and Warsaw
Hey guys,
I've just enjoyed almost a full week off work, which is something I haven't done since snowboarding in Austria in February... yay!! I just flew into Lisbon for this weekends work but have got a bit of time to hopefully get a blog post up. Since my last post about Budapest and Bastille Day I've been to Athens for work, then on to Warsaw for a shortened weekend of work before heading back to London for my week break. Ghizlane has taken time off work so she was coming up to get some good London alcoholism... I mean.. culture for the first time.
To get the Athens stuff out of the way first, I can report that things went pretty well as far a migrations typically go. The weather was really a treat for me as northern Europe has had mid-20's temperatures (and lower) and tons of rain for the whole summer, but in Greece it was 40+ and dry as a bone - perfect Aussie weather. The really weird thing was that despite this intense heat, I didn't really get burnt much at all while lying near the hotel pool or walking around town, but I'll get into that more later. Oh, yeah, the hotel was nice with a good gym , a great pool and a nice bar/restaurant on the roof overlooking the Acropolis. No complaints there....
In terms of the migration, we worked fairly long hours Thursday, Friday and Saturday but managed to get everything sorted by late Saturday evening. This gave us our usual Sunday off so naturally on Saturday night we headed out to a non-tourist type area for some drinks. The place was basically a long street of bars/clubs somewhere down the near the harbour, but it wasn't that amazing. On top of that we almost got in a fight with some Greek boys because (omigod the horror of it all) one of the boys actually spoke to a Greek girl *faint*. Nah seriously they're pretty protective of the girls and we didn't really feel welcome like in other countries... oh well, perhaps it was just that area. We still managed to stay out until around 4:30am so hell, it couldn't have been that bad!
The next day nobody really got out and about until very late in the afternoon. I'd surfaced in the early afternoon and done some gym stuff etc, but the heat was pretty intense so I wasn't quite up to looking around town until later on when it was a little cooler. The hotel was quite central so there wasn't too far to go to look for things. Firstly I walked up to see the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which is just a ruin now. From there I wound my way through the old town area (called the 'Plaka' district) and checked out some of the little cafes and shopping areas.
While doing this my friend had also finally roused himself and was on his way to the Acropolis. I climbed up through some amazingly cute and tiny old streets of the Plaka to get up the entrance and lost about 2 litres of water on the way :). Still, the Acropolis is very impressive. At it's peak, it must have been the most amazing thing to see (especially since you can see it from basically anywhere in the city). I was a little annoyed though at the lack of guide materials there. I kind of tagged on to a tour of a group of Aussies but even that wasn't too good. Luckily I had a little guide book I'd picked up in London which was ok. The view from the Acropolis is pretty cool too, you really can't appreciate how big the city is until you are up there (it's big people).
After checking out the area we eventually got booted out just after 7pm (so a note for people visiting it, although the official closing time is 7:30pm, you'll start getting herded out around 7). From there we strolled back down into the Plaka and found a little cafe with a rooftop terrace where we could eat and watch the sun set. Greek food is a lot of souvlaki type grilled meats, but also there's the Mezze (almost like tapas) side of things where you can just order lots of different little things. Our dinner on the terrace was awesome both for the food and the view/sunset over the city. A cute little band was also playing Greek music in the lower garden terrace. As it turned out, we had been amazingly lucky because we were told about the 'best restaurant' by a taxi driver a day later - it was the same place :)
Monday was a pretty standard user support day without too many problems, but still it was quite long. We went out and had another look around Plaka and stuff, but that was about it. As I was compressing my workweek and flying straight to Warsaw on Wednesday, I chose to stay in Athens rather than flying back to Paris/London. This meant that on Tuesday I had a full day to look around.
Tuesday morning I got up pretty early to try and beat the heat, and just started walking. I'd signed up for a tour that night but cancelled early in the morning once I really looked it over while eating breakfast (it went to half the places I'd already seen). Almost everything is fairly close in the middle of town, so it's fine to walk. The first stop was the original Olympic stadium which has been restored. It looks pretty damn impressive actually so in the old days it must have been super amazing. After that I walked through town, particularly around the main park area to briefly look at the President/Prime Minister (whatever) compound and big law courts. How funny are the bobbley things on the guards feet, it's hard to take them seriously, even with the big guns they hold.... oh well. Still, I had to kind of sneak a shot of a close up one as I'm sure the guard would kick my arse if he knew I was taking the piss out of him... :)
On the way out of the Plaka I found the old ruins of the Roman Senate with the Tower of the Winds and the original site of a marketplace. This is pretty much right next to the major ruined/preserved area of Athens, the Agora. The big attractions there are the Stoa of Atalos and the Temple of Hephaestus both of which are pretty impressive. The Stoa has been restored and converted into a museum while the temple just stands there, doing what temples do and looking cool.... The other ruins around the site are fairly interesting to look at, but they're pretty badly degraded to the point where they isn't that much to distinguish.
From the Agora I walked around some of the main squares in the middle of town and checked out the older buildings and a church or two, before heading up to the non-tourist areas to see the market squares. The staple things sold are fruit/veg and meat (the meat sits out with very little cooling - ugh!) but there's plenty of cheap flea type stalls selling everything from books to plastics to household cleaning stuff etc etc. Finally I headed up to the main Archaeological museum to take in some of the history of the country.
The museum was really interesting and aside from the various sculptures and paintings that were quite good, the best thing I learnt was the actual expanse of the Greek empire before it got totally smacked down by a few invasions (most notably the Romans). It seems like they were basically the ones running the Mediterranean pre-Roman times but internal wars (for example with Sparta), a dissolution of the governing power (leading to internal laws) and the invading forces from the Orient all seemed to have taken their toll. If anyone out there knows history good and I've stuffed something up, please let me know.
So that was about the end of my morning run around as we ended up having to head into the office to install a new piece of communications equipment which we hoped would improve the speed the office connected to London with. Unfortunately there was a fair bit of tweaking required to get everything sorted so the majority of the remainder of the day and early evening was burnt up there. All that left on Wednesday morning before our plane left was time fro a quick gym workout, an hour in the sun, a bit of lunch and then a dash for the airport as checkout took so long because they stuffed up my bill!! Unfortunately I never made it to the local beach (only saw it at night), but honestly, it didn't look like much (aussie bias).
My overall impression of Athens? Polluted!!!!! Overall the city is really pretty ugly, quite dirty, massively polluted and feels a little more 'poor' than a lot of other cities in Europe. On bad days the pollution was so bad you can't see the hills surrounding the city, and the guys and I were able to spend hours in the sun yet barely get a tan (Budapest for example is in a similar geographic area, and I got fried nicely there!). The average street in the city is just a mass of apartment blocks with not much greenery or even nice architecture. Rather than preserving as much of the older stuff as possible (ruins etc) it seems like they've just flattened everything for housing. We also had trouble finding a nice decent place to go and hang out for a drink or a dance etc. Perhaps it's just summer holidays, but taxi drivers and locals all told us that no one stays in Athens for summer, you go to the islands (for like 30 euro return) for a weekend of fun.
But it's not all bad. With the Acropolis, some nice old ruins, some cool new stuff (probably courtesy of the Olympics) it all kind of evens out. The good areas really do carry the rest of the place though, so you can see all of those and hang in the Plaka shopping and relaxing for a few days, but that's about it. I have heard from lots of people that all of the action and the beauty is basically out on the islands (even the IT manager from the office said Athens is ugly and he hates it - he has an island house though). So if you guys are planning a Greek journey, I'd say spend 2 days or 3 days max in Athens, then island hop around (which is exactly what I intend to do sometime soon).
From Athens we took a short flight to Vienna, and from there a Turboprop plane (they still use planes with propellers?!?!!) to Warsaw. It was a decent size one though, so the trip was pretty good.
After getting into Warsaw quite late, there wasn't much to do except check out town quickly then hit the hay. The rest of the weekend was basically spent in the office as the migration actually turned out to be quite difficult. We worked around 36 hours in three days before I jumped on a plane late in the afternoon on Saturday and headed back to London to start my holiday! yay! A few hours later I was drinking a beer in a pub with Stoney, Matti and Ghizlane... ahhhh
The week off was awesome but I'll write another entry about that (maybe tomorrow). For now, I'll try to get this one up fast :)
Anka
I've just enjoyed almost a full week off work, which is something I haven't done since snowboarding in Austria in February... yay!! I just flew into Lisbon for this weekends work but have got a bit of time to hopefully get a blog post up. Since my last post about Budapest and Bastille Day I've been to Athens for work, then on to Warsaw for a shortened weekend of work before heading back to London for my week break. Ghizlane has taken time off work so she was coming up to get some good London alcoholism... I mean.. culture for the first time.
To get the Athens stuff out of the way first, I can report that things went pretty well as far a migrations typically go. The weather was really a treat for me as northern Europe has had mid-20's temperatures (and lower) and tons of rain for the whole summer, but in Greece it was 40+ and dry as a bone - perfect Aussie weather. The really weird thing was that despite this intense heat, I didn't really get burnt much at all while lying near the hotel pool or walking around town, but I'll get into that more later. Oh, yeah, the hotel was nice with a good gym , a great pool and a nice bar/restaurant on the roof overlooking the Acropolis. No complaints there....
In terms of the migration, we worked fairly long hours Thursday, Friday and Saturday but managed to get everything sorted by late Saturday evening. This gave us our usual Sunday off so naturally on Saturday night we headed out to a non-tourist type area for some drinks. The place was basically a long street of bars/clubs somewhere down the near the harbour, but it wasn't that amazing. On top of that we almost got in a fight with some Greek boys because (omigod the horror of it all) one of the boys actually spoke to a Greek girl *faint*. Nah seriously they're pretty protective of the girls and we didn't really feel welcome like in other countries... oh well, perhaps it was just that area. We still managed to stay out until around 4:30am so hell, it couldn't have been that bad!
The next day nobody really got out and about until very late in the afternoon. I'd surfaced in the early afternoon and done some gym stuff etc, but the heat was pretty intense so I wasn't quite up to looking around town until later on when it was a little cooler. The hotel was quite central so there wasn't too far to go to look for things. Firstly I walked up to see the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which is just a ruin now. From there I wound my way through the old town area (called the 'Plaka' district) and checked out some of the little cafes and shopping areas.
While doing this my friend had also finally roused himself and was on his way to the Acropolis. I climbed up through some amazingly cute and tiny old streets of the Plaka to get up the entrance and lost about 2 litres of water on the way :). Still, the Acropolis is very impressive. At it's peak, it must have been the most amazing thing to see (especially since you can see it from basically anywhere in the city). I was a little annoyed though at the lack of guide materials there. I kind of tagged on to a tour of a group of Aussies but even that wasn't too good. Luckily I had a little guide book I'd picked up in London which was ok. The view from the Acropolis is pretty cool too, you really can't appreciate how big the city is until you are up there (it's big people).
After checking out the area we eventually got booted out just after 7pm (so a note for people visiting it, although the official closing time is 7:30pm, you'll start getting herded out around 7). From there we strolled back down into the Plaka and found a little cafe with a rooftop terrace where we could eat and watch the sun set. Greek food is a lot of souvlaki type grilled meats, but also there's the Mezze (almost like tapas) side of things where you can just order lots of different little things. Our dinner on the terrace was awesome both for the food and the view/sunset over the city. A cute little band was also playing Greek music in the lower garden terrace. As it turned out, we had been amazingly lucky because we were told about the 'best restaurant' by a taxi driver a day later - it was the same place :)
Monday was a pretty standard user support day without too many problems, but still it was quite long. We went out and had another look around Plaka and stuff, but that was about it. As I was compressing my workweek and flying straight to Warsaw on Wednesday, I chose to stay in Athens rather than flying back to Paris/London. This meant that on Tuesday I had a full day to look around.
Tuesday morning I got up pretty early to try and beat the heat, and just started walking. I'd signed up for a tour that night but cancelled early in the morning once I really looked it over while eating breakfast (it went to half the places I'd already seen). Almost everything is fairly close in the middle of town, so it's fine to walk. The first stop was the original Olympic stadium which has been restored. It looks pretty damn impressive actually so in the old days it must have been super amazing. After that I walked through town, particularly around the main park area to briefly look at the President/Prime Minister (whatever) compound and big law courts. How funny are the bobbley things on the guards feet, it's hard to take them seriously, even with the big guns they hold.... oh well. Still, I had to kind of sneak a shot of a close up one as I'm sure the guard would kick my arse if he knew I was taking the piss out of him... :)
On the way out of the Plaka I found the old ruins of the Roman Senate with the Tower of the Winds and the original site of a marketplace. This is pretty much right next to the major ruined/preserved area of Athens, the Agora. The big attractions there are the Stoa of Atalos and the Temple of Hephaestus both of which are pretty impressive. The Stoa has been restored and converted into a museum while the temple just stands there, doing what temples do and looking cool.... The other ruins around the site are fairly interesting to look at, but they're pretty badly degraded to the point where they isn't that much to distinguish.
From the Agora I walked around some of the main squares in the middle of town and checked out the older buildings and a church or two, before heading up to the non-tourist areas to see the market squares. The staple things sold are fruit/veg and meat (the meat sits out with very little cooling - ugh!) but there's plenty of cheap flea type stalls selling everything from books to plastics to household cleaning stuff etc etc. Finally I headed up to the main Archaeological museum to take in some of the history of the country.
The museum was really interesting and aside from the various sculptures and paintings that were quite good, the best thing I learnt was the actual expanse of the Greek empire before it got totally smacked down by a few invasions (most notably the Romans). It seems like they were basically the ones running the Mediterranean pre-Roman times but internal wars (for example with Sparta), a dissolution of the governing power (leading to internal laws) and the invading forces from the Orient all seemed to have taken their toll. If anyone out there knows history good and I've stuffed something up, please let me know.
So that was about the end of my morning run around as we ended up having to head into the office to install a new piece of communications equipment which we hoped would improve the speed the office connected to London with. Unfortunately there was a fair bit of tweaking required to get everything sorted so the majority of the remainder of the day and early evening was burnt up there. All that left on Wednesday morning before our plane left was time fro a quick gym workout, an hour in the sun, a bit of lunch and then a dash for the airport as checkout took so long because they stuffed up my bill!! Unfortunately I never made it to the local beach (only saw it at night), but honestly, it didn't look like much (aussie bias).
My overall impression of Athens? Polluted!!!!! Overall the city is really pretty ugly, quite dirty, massively polluted and feels a little more 'poor' than a lot of other cities in Europe. On bad days the pollution was so bad you can't see the hills surrounding the city, and the guys and I were able to spend hours in the sun yet barely get a tan (Budapest for example is in a similar geographic area, and I got fried nicely there!). The average street in the city is just a mass of apartment blocks with not much greenery or even nice architecture. Rather than preserving as much of the older stuff as possible (ruins etc) it seems like they've just flattened everything for housing. We also had trouble finding a nice decent place to go and hang out for a drink or a dance etc. Perhaps it's just summer holidays, but taxi drivers and locals all told us that no one stays in Athens for summer, you go to the islands (for like 30 euro return) for a weekend of fun.
But it's not all bad. With the Acropolis, some nice old ruins, some cool new stuff (probably courtesy of the Olympics) it all kind of evens out. The good areas really do carry the rest of the place though, so you can see all of those and hang in the Plaka shopping and relaxing for a few days, but that's about it. I have heard from lots of people that all of the action and the beauty is basically out on the islands (even the IT manager from the office said Athens is ugly and he hates it - he has an island house though). So if you guys are planning a Greek journey, I'd say spend 2 days or 3 days max in Athens, then island hop around (which is exactly what I intend to do sometime soon).
From Athens we took a short flight to Vienna, and from there a Turboprop plane (they still use planes with propellers?!?!!) to Warsaw. It was a decent size one though, so the trip was pretty good.
After getting into Warsaw quite late, there wasn't much to do except check out town quickly then hit the hay. The rest of the weekend was basically spent in the office as the migration actually turned out to be quite difficult. We worked around 36 hours in three days before I jumped on a plane late in the afternoon on Saturday and headed back to London to start my holiday! yay! A few hours later I was drinking a beer in a pub with Stoney, Matti and Ghizlane... ahhhh
The week off was awesome but I'll write another entry about that (maybe tomorrow). For now, I'll try to get this one up fast :)
Anka
posted by Anthony Hawke at 12:39 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home