Athens, Greece

Today ended up being a semi-lazy day, but I'm going to call it a good one. Stuffed myself on the free hostel breakfast (bread & jam w/ tea), then set out to conquer Lycabettus Hill. It's only about 900 feet tall, but that puts it about 400 feet higher than the Acropolis, and it was mostly uphill from my hostel just to get there too. And the slope is pretty steep--I wimped out & stopped at benches a couple times on the way up--but the view was worth it. You could see Athens spread out in every direction, and down across the Acropolis out to the Aegean Sea... very impressive. I spent awhile up there reading (Dante's "Inferno") to try and let some of my sweat evaporate, then hiked back down a slightly different route & back to the hostel. Lunch was part of a leftover giant pretzel thing from yesterday, and then spent awhile on the hostel computers: catching up on blogs, making sure my remaining money was where it needed to be, and talking to Brittany on Facebook.

After that I was bored, so I went out wandering again. I ended up going down through part of the flea market (where you can buy just about anything), up between th Acropolis & Agora, and then on my way back towards the hostel to find something to eat I ran into the Hansens (Chris farms outside of Mansfield, and Shirley works at the bank I used to). What are the odds of that happening? So we sat down for a beer, talked for an hour or so, then went our separate ways. I ended up getting a beef gyro (good stuff, once I picked off the tomatoes) at the same place. Total cost for food today: €1.80. I may go back for another one a bit later though, no telling when I'll run into good cheap food like that again.

Tomorrow, it's off to Rhodes! I'm really looking forward to that, although I think I may have booked a day too long there as well... oh well, nothing I can do about that now. Mostly I'm dreading getting off the island; my flight leaves at 07:00, which means I should get there no later than 06:00, which means I'll probably have to set up a taxi ahead of time. Frown.

Right now I'm just burning time until my nook recharges, so I'll probably take a short nap. After that it'll be time for another gyro, check to see if any of the computers is open, and then... something? I'll figure it out when I get there.