Home again, home again

 

One last group shot on the balcony the day before going home

I am currently writing from the comfort of my own house, having successfully made the return journey last Tuesday. It was... a very long day of travel. Up at 5am (Greece time), plus almost 11 hours of flying (with a small layover in Heathrow), meant that it was a real struggle once we made it home to stay up long enough to try and regulate our bodies to Nova Scotia time (and remain both lucid and civil in the process).  But we did it!  Now, let's go back to the last couple of days in Athens, to try and clue up the last of the trip.

In Monastiraki Market

Sunday was our second-to-last day, but we also knew it was going to be the hottest day of the whole trip (with highs forecasted of 43 decrees C). We decided to head early for one last stroll through the Monastiraki market area (we'd been twice already, but had read that it is much different on Sundays, with loads of extra vendors setting up along side streets), followed by a trip to the Acropolis Museum (which would be a lovely air-conditioned respite as the day grew unbearably hot). 

Market scenes - I tried on some beautiful clothes at this shop, but didn't end up getting anything

Typical offerings

Hazel had to use the washroom, which was a nice excuse to grab some cold water and espresso at one of the many market cafés

Though we did end up buying a few last items, I have to say there was not much difference between Sunday Monastiraki and the other days we'd gone.  There were some tables selling antiques that had not been there before, but otherwise it was the same shops we had poked around previously.  My guess is that it was just too hot for Sunday business as usual, but of course I don't know that for sure.  I suggested we go in search of a guy we'd passed by on the very first day we'd been to Monastiraki (directly after having endured the Acropolis Trials), who was selling handmade paintings:

Mostly watercolours, I thought it would be so much nicer to have a handmade painting of iconic Greece-related scenes, rather than a postcard or some such.

Walking along the sidewalks, passing by loads of beautifully-painted buildings

Alas, after trudging through the now sun-soaked streets, we found that our painter had decided not to set up shop.  Again, my guess is that it was just too hot.  And it was also too hot for us. By the time we arrived at the end of our failed quest to buy a painting, morale was very low, and there were some tears and dizziness, and general heat-related unhappiness.  We found our way back to the metro, and rode it to the Acropolis museum stop, but when we saw the queue to get in there, there was a very quick and decisive vote in favour of calling it quits, and trying the museum the next day.

Waiting at the "Akropoli" stop after having ditched the museum

Hazel leans on Linden as our subway train pulls up

Monday was the last full day of the whole trip.  We had bought 24-hour transit tickets the morning before, so we made sure to get out of the house in time to use them before they expired.  No problem!  We walked to the Victoria Station as usual, cleared the gates, and rode the metro all the way to the Akropoli stop in order to have try number two at the Acropolis Museum.  However, when we tried to get through the exit gates, our tickets would not work.  They had, apparently, expired while we were in transit.  Does that not seem like a ridiculous flaw in the system?  There we were, trapped inside the metro, with no way to even purchase new tickets if we wanted to.  Clark tried getting the attention of someone who looked official at a booth on the other side, and also tried buzzing the intercom system, both to no avail.  "Let's just ride the tails of someone going though!" both Linden and I urged, but Clark was nervous (perhaps due to the signs everywhere stating that if you are caught with unvalidated tickets, you need to pay 60 times the price of the ticket as punishment).  So... we just wandered around the metro archeology exhibits for awhile, trying to look inconspicuous.

Luckily, the exhibits that are scattered throughout the subway system are actually quite interesting

Finally, Clark just went for it, and he was free! Me and the kids followed suit, and exited the metro, no problem - there were, as it turned out, no metro police lurking on the other side, waiting to pounce on us. But it did make for a tiny bit of illicit excitement to start the day.

There's the Acropolis in the background, which you walk by on your way to the museum

Heading to the front doors, this time with almost no queue.  Success!

The Acropolis Museum is new since I was last in Greece.  It sits at the base of the Acropolis proper, and is built over a site that they started excavating in 1997. 

They left this excavated piece of the city to wander through, and built transparent floors over top (houses, baths, latrines, sewer systems - VERY interesting to see!)

Of course, this old well (or well-like structure) has become a receptacle for people's wishing coins 

The museum proper was very pricy (it cost the same for our family as getting onto the Acropolis itself - 60 Euros), but it was incredibly well done. The first two floors have loads of Acropolis artifacts, plus a movie you can watch, gift shops and a restaurant and café, and other neat exhibits.  And then the top floor is built to be a replica (in size and shape) of the parthenon - complete with pillars,  and a full, wrap-around representation of the friezes and other statutes and artwork that would have originally adorned the outside.  (It is my understanding that some are original, and some are replicas - a mix of getting destroyed or "taken" to places like Britain). 

The Caryatids, close up and personal!

A view from the second floor, looking down at the first (where you were not allowed to take pictures)

A very cool lego exhibit, depicting the Acropolis

Check out the details!

I couldn't capture everything, but Elton John was performing at one of the theatres, Gandalf was riding in with a carriage... it was so much fun!

From the top floor  of the museum - here is a model the Parthenon

Statues and friezes, all to scale and positioned as they would have looked on the Parthenon

Even the pillars were placed in the same spots.  It was a pretty great concept for a museum exhibition

Having brunch at the nice (but expensive) museum restaurant. The placemats are an outline of the Parthenon structurally, looking from above

Trying to get a selfie with the actual Acropolis in the background.  It's quite something to have the museum built in a place with such fantastic views of the ruins themselves.

A slightly different vantage point

Taking a rest on some of the cool benches

It was too hot to walk back home from the metro station, so we managed to catch this bus, which took us almost to our doorstep. It was such a nice reprieve!

After returning home on Monday afternoon, we spent the rest of the day packing, tidying, and just generally readying ourselves for the day of travel that was ahead of us. It was, as I said at opening of this post, a very long day.  You can start to feel claustrophobic spending so many consecutive hours crammed into your tiny little airplane seat.  But the kids rocked it (Hazel was starting to lose it by the end of the last flight - it was, after all, past her bedtime by Greece standards - but one final lollypop saved the day with an hour left to go. Thank you, raspberry-flavoured Chupa Chups.)

On our very last flight of the trip! An almost 7 hour flight, but the last one, none-the-less. The boys were a few rows behind us. 

Check out those wind turbines in the ocean!  

And that, my friends, is the end of our epic European adventure.  It was quite a whirlwind! Now that we are on the other side, I would say that three weeks was about a week too long (with three kids, that is).  We could have gone home after our 2 weeks in Albania, and it would have been just about right.  This, of course, is coloured by the fact that we got to do so much less in Greece than I had envisioned.  If I had had any inkling of the heat wave and the incredible wildfires that were to await us, I would have absolutely steered clear.  

But it wasn't a total loss - the things we did manage to do were pretty cool, and even just navigating the metro on a daily basis was a fun adventure. Plus, we were lucky that the fires did not affect us directly - there were whole islands that were evacuated while we were there, and accounts that I've read of the experience were very harrowing. Plus - and this is the real kicker - nobody got sick the whole time we were away.  This absolutely blows my mind.  So much travel, so many queues and museums, public transit, escalator handles, and other enclosed spaces with tonnes of other people around; so many days in the super intense heat; one five-year-old who always seems to have her fingers in her mouth, and one 11 year old who obsessively touches every surface he can possibly touch, and somehow we all stayed healthy.  That is the biggest win of all. 

Now, all that's left is to beat the jet lag, which is, for some reason, so much worse on the return than it was on the way there.  I have literally been dragging myself through the last few days, willing myself not to mess everything up by napping. But I think we're starting to normalize. 

Thanks to everyone who came along for the trip virtually! Now that I've gotten back into the blogging swing of things, I really do plan to try and update pretty regularly - I'm sad to have big chunks of our lives from the last year and a half missing, so I'm going to try my hardest to make it a priority.