{"id":74,"date":"2011-04-29T04:55:09","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T16:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2011-04-29T04:55:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T16:55:25","slug":"hang-on-athens-we-are-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/2011\/04\/29\/hang-on-athens-we-are-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Hang on Athens we are coming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday 27 April – Athens<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t we were that tired we only wanted to sleep.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We decided to take a cab (fixed price E350] to our hotel as it was raining and a bit chillier than Shanghai.\u00a0 We were the only crazy\u2019s \u00a0in shorts but hey we were on holiday.\u00a0 The King Jason Hotel was not up to the Shanghai standard Renee.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You had to run the taps for 10 minutes to get the water hot.\u00a0 Cosy but had every thing we needed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We booked in about two and the headed out to check out the sites.\u00a0 Totally different, much older buildings and pretty run down.\u00a0 Narrow streets and heaps of graffiti, we found a Metro and headed to a busier part of town.\u00a0 Metro similar to China but you purchased your ticket by time. E1.40 for 90 minutes of \u00a0travel.\u00a0 You had to validate your ticket before starting and the 90 minutes started from then.<\/p>\n

Emerged from the underground to rain and started walking through a shopping area. There were few veranda\u2019s and difficult to avoid the light drizzle.\u00a0 It cleared up after about 15 minutes.\u00a0 All pretty low rise and older but funny enough similar shops to what we had seen in Shanghai.\u00a0 It is a small world.\u00a0 We found a flea market and poked our way around there for a couple of hours.\u00a0 Mostly leather, bracelets, shoes and the norm but there was a couple of bike shops.\u00a0 We picked out a restaurant for tea which had a name resembling ouzo and had some really nice food.\u00a0 I had an Anchovy fry-up and \u00a0Margaret a pasta dish and we shared. Ngaire\u00a0 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\u2019s 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 3rd<\/sup> was one that apparently the people from Crete drink like water all the time and don\u2019t get drunk.\u00a0 It tasted bloody awful and explains why the Gambitsis folk may have left Crete.<\/p>\n

After eating we ventured away from the restaurant with map in hand to find our hotel\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I also did manage to get my first posting onto the blog and check my emails before crashing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t we were that tired we … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}