Athens

Standing in front of the eastern facade of the Parthenon.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Travel tip: If you ever visit Athens in the summertime, and take the trek to the top of the Acropolis, make sure you do it in the early morning. The heat later in the day will wipe you out. We went early and the temperatures were still in the lower 90s.

Our flight on Tuesday from Paris to Athens was one of the nicest flights I have ever been on. There were "so many" passengers of this Olympic Air flight that each had our personal row. The flight gave me some time to work on my Paris journal. Not sure when I'll have more free time to write about the last three days in Paris, but I will get to it.

Riding on the Athens Metro system is a downright treat. It looks like it was totally renovated for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games so it is very modern and clean. Bottom line: it is a much nicer Metro system than what we found in Paris. Keep in mind that Athens has only three lines compared to the multitude of lines that Paris has. The Paris system is also much older.

It was about a 40 minute Metro ride from the Athens airport to where we are staying, close to the Acropolis. When we emerged from the station, and looked to our right, we could see the imposing view of the Acropolis. Turning to our left we found ourselves at the Hotel Attalos, our home base for the next two days.

Today, Wednesday, we worked our way to the top of the Acropolis. Once we got to the western facade of the Parthenon, Brian Merrill and I began recording a short stand-up of the importance of the site. We were interrupted by a worker who asked us what we were doing. After showing IDs that we were from a university and were only shooting for classroom purposes, he let us complete our shooting. We decided to next go around to the eastern facade so we could be in better light. We had barely started shooting when we were interrupted again by two more workers. They seemed to have more clout and told us that the only way we could shoot video is if we went all the way back down to the main office and get official permission. Initially, those in the main office wanted us to delete all scenes where Brian was talking on camera. After they saw the scenes they changed their mind. Their main concern was that we were attempting to promote a commercial project or deface the antiquity of the site. So with a lesson learned, at each of the next few sites we asked permission if we could record video inside the site. We would ask permission again to record a standup if a worker was close by. By doing this we didn't have any additional problems the rest of the day.

A long day with a lot of walking in the heat made the welcoming air conditioning of our hotels rooms very inviting. On Thursday some of us are going on a bus ride to Delphi, the Oracle of the ancient Greeks.