(written 17:47, 9/5/2006 in Spisské Podhradie, Slovakia)
Once again the next morning we caught the trolley bus into town - a quick and quiet way to get around town for not much money. No included breakfast at this hotel, so we needed to find some of our own. For this we ended up sharing "one" breakfast at a little café, which consisted of honey and yoghurt (a greek favourite, and one we grew to love very quickly), bacon and eggs, juice and coffee.
The first target for the morning was the obvious one - we walked up the hill to the Acropolis. Like most of the really touristy places we visit, I won't bother saying too much about them because pretty much everything has already been said.
Suffice to say we wandered around for an hour or so, took a photo for a group of Germans which necessitated me putting down a book only to have one of our tickets to this and many other sites blow away over the edge down far far away, enjoyed the lookout at the far end and managed a few relatively tourist-free photos.
The tickets we had purchased (and now lost one of) gave us access to plenty of other sites across the city, so we set off in search of some of them. A nice walk along a promenade Dionysiou Areopagitou later, and we were at the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Nobody seemed to stop us handing over one ticket and walking two people in, so we went for a look. This place would have been amazingly huge, with 104 columns originally. Now only fifteen remain, one of which is fallen down and really gives perspective to what a creation it was.
Like most places, we enjoyed getting lost and re-finding ourselves in the tiny backstreets far more than the huge obvious ones, but eventually we found some market streets and had a bit of a look. Savas served us some cheap gyros for 3euro as opposed to sitting down elsewhere and paying 24euro like we saw plenty of people prepared to do. In fact, everywhere was very full.
Some more tickets were begging to be used, so we chose the Ancient Agora, as it had looked pretty amazing while we were up at the Acropolis earlier. This is a huge area of rambling pathways, temples, churches, and the impressively restored Stoa of Attalos, housing the museum of finds on this site and others. It also told quite a bit of history of civilisation in the area.
Being a big city and us having only given it a day and a bit to explore, we were soon off again to take in some shopping streets, and eventually located Compendium Books, where we purchased Lonely Planet's Eastern European Phrasebook - something very useful for the pile of strange languages which lay ahead of us. We had a bit of a read of this at a nearby café with a drink, then a wander through the National Gardens before deciding to call it a day and catch the bus back to the hotel.
Cheap dinner came from the supermarket across the road, including some cheese that the non-English-speaking deli guy was happy to let us try when he couldn't explain what it would taste like! Was much better than our last attempt at cheese which had ended up with the local stray cats in Náfplio.