So I went down to the lobby of the hostel to sign up for a trip to a nearby city. Supposedly this place is very picturesque and worthy of a two-hour journey out of the city, so I had planned for today to be a day outside of Athens. The only problem is that when I went down to the lobby, it turns out that it was canceled due to lack of interest. I asked the guy if he thought that I’d be able to find the tour someplace else and he said that he doubted it because of the general strike that was going on now. Hmmm… a general strike? Apparently so because all the buses and metro weren’t running, the airport was closed and a host of other services were suspended for the day. That being said, I had to find something else to occupy my time. So I headed towards the Acropolis and instead of turning left up the hill, I went straight, straight towards Constitution Square. This is one of those centers that many European cities have, they all usually have historical significance to the city and Constitution Square is no different, it was the place for many of the big political events in Greece’s recent history. When I got there, there were police everywhere, and not just normal police, but police dressed in riot gear. So cool.

I waited there for the riot to start, but after about three minutes of waiting and with no rioters showing up I decided that I’d watch it on tv… if it was going to be televised.  For about an hour I just walked around going to different places that I wanted to see. There were so many places that I went, I don’t think that I’ll write about them, but I’ll show you the pics of the day, or a good chunk of it at least. There was one thing that I saw that for some reason really struck me as being cool, it was a street lined with orange trees all full with oranges.

About noon the sun came out and showed Athens, and more importantly, the Acropolis in a completely different way. Where it was just okay before now it was stunning to look at, if you’ve ever seen the movie Taps, there’s a part where Tom Cruise in a “psychotic fit” is firing a machine gun out of a window and he looks towards the camera and screams, “It’s beautiful man!” Well, that’s the way I felt with my camera taking photos of the Acropolis; it was absolutely beautiful sitting on the top of the hill being lit up by the sunlight.

After taking close to a ga-jillian photos I decided to walk to the sea. I had a map and knew which direction to go, but I didn’t know what street I was on. The map said one thing, and the street signs said something else, and since I couldn’t seem to match the names I eventually gave up and decided that I’d do it tomorrow.

I got back to the hotel at around 1:00 and rested a bit before going out again.

At this point I spent the rest of the day just wandering the souvenir shops and walking around the Acropolis. Not very many photos the second part of the day, but all told I walked about 15 miles today (according to my gps), and took about 143 photos…