Hang on Athens we are coming

Wednesday 27 April – Athens

As usual Airports and flying is a pretty boring time and totally in contrast to our time in Shanghai where we seemed busy the whole time and when we weren’t we were that tired we only wanted to sleep.  We flew out on an Airbus 346 from Shanghai and although a shiny new plane did not have as much room as the Boeing 777-200 we had left Auckland on.  For me I could never quite get my legs comfortable. 12 hours to Munich a 3 hour wait and then 2.5 hours to Athens on another Airbus A321.  We decided to take a cab (fixed price E350] to our hotel as it was raining and a bit chillier than Shanghai.  We were the only crazy’s  in shorts but hey we were on holiday.  The King Jason Hotel was not up to the Shanghai standard Renee.  You may lose some points on this. You had to stand on the loo to shut the door but it did have a much more up close and personal feel.  You had to run the taps for 10 minutes to get the water hot.  Cosy but had every thing we needed.

We booked in about two and the headed out to check out the sites.  Totally different, much older buildings and pretty run down.  Narrow streets and heaps of graffiti, we found a Metro and headed to a busier part of town.  Metro similar to China but you purchased your ticket by time. E1.40 for 90 minutes of  travel.  You had to validate your ticket before starting and the 90 minutes started from then.

Emerged from the underground to rain and started walking through a shopping area. There were few veranda’s and difficult to avoid the light drizzle.  It cleared up after about 15 minutes.  All pretty low rise and older but funny enough similar shops to what we had seen in Shanghai.  It is a small world.  We found a flea market and poked our way around there for a couple of hours.  Mostly leather, bracelets, shoes and the norm but there was a couple of bike shops.  We picked out a restaurant for tea which had a name resembling ouzo and had some really nice food.  I had an Anchovy fry-up and  Margaret a pasta dish and we shared. Ngaire  had a crepe with cheese and other stuff and Doug had a pork knuckle. All the food was really good and the guy kept bringing out ouzo’s for us to try, plus we were given free bread and a chocolate type crepe dessert.. We brought the first one which was ouzo, the next tasted more like whisky and the 3^rd was one that apparently the people from Crete drink like water all the time and don’t get drunk.  It tasted bloody awful and explains why the Gambitsis folk may have left Crete.

After eating we ventured away from the restaurant with map in hand to find our hotel  and as we were all again very tired and we were being picked up at 6am to get down to our ferry we hit the sack.  As we are hopefully coming back to this hotel in eight days we decided to each leave a bag behind and go light on our Greek Island adventure.  I also did manage to get my first posting onto the blog and check my emails before crashing.