gyllintoursKoukaki
This is the best time of the year to visit Athens, our taxi driver said. The weather is nice and not so much tourists. That sounds good because I thought it could be too cold in early November.
We stayed in the apartment called Athens near Acropolis. It was a nice apartment in the area of Koukaki. We found the apartment on Booking.com. Nearby we hade everything we needed. It was walking distance to everything and we had cozy restaurants, bars, supermarkets and bakery close by. We had been able to take both metro and buses but chose to walk to everything we visited
Ancient Greece
From Koukaki you can walk up the Filopappou hill. We came the wrong way and strolled us along small paths and guessed which direction we should go. I had read before that you should go up there in the morning or in the evening when it’s not so hot. It was probably wise, I thought, when the sweat ran into the forehead. There were plenty of ruins, some angry dogs and beautiful views on the road and we also got exercise so I do not understand why the others complained. At the top, we saw a small turtle and admired the Parthenon. The thought of going down and then going up to the Acropolis cliff did not feel so appealing at that time. The road down the hill was both quick and well signposted and we took a quick stop at Socrates prison as well.
We took a stop at a cafe with views up to the Acropolis cliff. After that it felt quite right to walk up to Parthenon. This was a much larger tourist destination. There were sales outside and the number of visitors significantly more. From the Acropolis we could see the other sights and decided that we not have to visit everyone. You should always save something so that you can travel back again.
The Acropolis Museum is down in Athens nowadays. If you think it is uncomfortable to walk on a transparent floor you should walk along the walls. I think it’s a little bit scary so i preferred the wall. On the floors further up, there were a lot of beautiful.
We went to the Agora and Attalos stoa the day after. From Agoran we could look at Partenon from another perspective.
Food and drinks
An important part of life is eating and when you are in other countries it is exciting to try local dishes. I booked the Athens Small-Group Food Tour on TripAdvisor and even though we have been to Greece many times before, much of what we got to taste was news for us. The guide was very committed and we got to taste a lot of different things. We appreciated the second half of the tour most because the first half contained a lot of sweets while the other half included food like meze, ham, herbs and gyros
Museum of Illusions
Last day we wanted to do something before it was time to go to the airport. The museum of illusions seemed to be fun so we went there. There were a lot of children so the noice level was high inside the museum. It was perhaps not as big as I had expected but it contained a lot of fun things to do and we were very pleased that we had chosen to go there.
