2 days of trekking in Athens...

Thursday, January 10, 2008 – 2:57AM

Now that I’ve settled into my Athenian apartment and such, I’ve been able to do some sight seeing within the Athens city limits. My study abroad program buddies and I walked around these past two days and saw some crazy things—like the pack of stray dogs that followed us home… and the young boy who played accordion and little girl who swung a slimy toy rat around and asked for money and in return gave us packages of Kleenex tissues… and the ridiculous-driving cars and mopeds/motorcycles who clearly obey no traffic laws (if there even ARE any traffic laws in this city!).

One (possibly unfortunate, for you) thing is that I did not take any pictures of anything these past two days as we trekked around Athens. My reason for that is what I saw reminded me 100% of what my brother Mike and I discovered nearly 3 years ago when he and I traveled to Athens and other parts of Greece for Spring Break of my senior year of high school. So if you would like to see Athens through pictures that I (or my bro) took, check out his website at KotsisSkiClub.com and click on Other Pics & Videos, Pics, 2005, and find the Greece trip! Honestly, the city looks exactly the same as I’ve seen it on January 10, 2008 as I did on March 27, 2005, with the sole exception of seeing random Christmas or Xristouyenna decorations around the Syntagma area that are in the process of being taken down. Classic slow Greeks, eh? It was cool walking around and noting all the landmarks that I’ve personally seen before, such as Hotel Omega which Mike and I stayed at in 2005, the farmer’s market, the Temple of Zeus, the Parliament Building, the National Gardens, the Olympic Stadium, Pangrati, Monasteraki, Plaka, Syntagma, Mets, among others. Later on the trip for our classes, we will be going to the Acropolis to see the Parthenon and also to the Archaeological Museum (which Mike and I both did, but I will take my camera with me and theoretically remember more things that they teach us, and caption the pictures).

For our group, we are all staying in 3 different apartment buildings. Four guys are in one room in an apartment on Stillponos Street (mine), all the girls are in 4 rooms in an apartment a little farther up on Stillponos Street and closer to the Athens Centre (where our classes will be), and the remaining four guys are in another apartment that is relatively a lot farther away on Eufranoros Street. Yesterday we stopped by the other guys’ apartment, and it is freakin AMAZING, compared to our apartment room and what the girls say theirs is like. The other guys have a TV, a living room, couches, chairs, a kitchen table, other chairs, and they are able to steal wireless internet from within their apartment! None of the other apartments our group is in has ANY of these things! They got lucky, and we all got the shaft :( Either way, I am posting pictures of my (shabby?) apartment building and of the Athens Centre sometime today.

Later today we will be having our first classes of the term: Modern Greek Culture & Language at 3:15PM followed by Byzantine History at 5:30PM. They should be interesting… I’ll report on that another day; for now, I sleep!

MANNY OUT