It's my birthday

 It's my birthday today, and we moved a few miles out of Athens to the coast. It was an easy journey on the underground and then straight on to a bus, and we were there in less than an hour.

We were a bit early for check in so stopped for a glass of wine that came with free sort of flakey pastry straws. They were lovely and difficult to describe, but the sort of thing that they do for the technical test in Bake Off pastry week.

We did ask for a menu, but the waitress said that it was not very accurate so we just pointed to the table next door and said that we wanted to copy what they were having.

This evening we walked to the highly recommended local Mexican restaurant and had today's special - four tacos each and a wonderful frozen margherita.

Lycabettus Hill

 Slightly lazy day as all we did was walk up to the top of Lycabettus Hill.

To be honest it wasn't actually very far, but it is the highest point in Athens, with great views from the top.

Although I really enjoyed the walk through the hillside covered in prickly pear cactus and giant agaves.

There was also a cute little church at the top that I was going to say was quite modern for Greece, but then I looked it up and it was built on the site of a much older Byzantine church.

Of course it was.

Unstable pillars

The day started with another run, this time further than the last one, and expanded to include loops of the National Gardens.

Feeling quite tired we limited our sightseeing today, and were lucky because on the first Sunday of every month most of the ancient sites are free to enter.

We started with the Agora, which was the ancient marketplace.

It was the political heart of Athens from about 600 BC, and elegant residents shopped among the marble pillars. It all became ruined 2,000 years ago but was restored in the 1950's.

Most of the rest of the area is still ruined, apart from the Temple of Hephaestus which is the best preserved classical temple in Greece.

It looks very good from a distance, but the pillars are a bit out of line and could do with being pushed up straight.

After a quick stop for a gorgeous dark chocolate orange ice cream, we reached the Temple of Zeus. This was the largest temple on mainland Greece and 16 of its magnificent columns survive out of the original 104.

Unfortunately it was disappointingly mostly covered with scaffolding, and one of its columns was lying along the ground looking like a giant caterpillar.

We also popped into Hadrian's library, which required a lot of imagination, but we managed to line up a shot of the Acropolis in the background.

Panathenaic Stadium

After the fun of the National Gardens we went across the road to the Panathenaic Stadium.

The stadium was originally built in the fourth century BC, was used for hundreds of years for elite sporting events including fights with wild animals, but eventually fell into ruin.

It was rebuilt and restored ready for the first modern Olympics in 1896, and is also the finishing stadium for the annual Athens Marathon.

It is an enormous place that seats 68,000 people and obviously nearly everyone who visited today felt compelled to run around the track, and we were not exceptions to this rule.

We also sat in the best seats in the stadium that belonged to the king and queen of Greece in the 19th century. I pretended to give the thumbs down sign that they do in gladiator films, but that is probably in bad taste.

Machine hallucinations

Today we went to the National Gardens and Darren saw that they had a virtual reality exhibition taking place. Basically he had to download an app, and then follow the instructions to find the exhibits.

If you get it right you can then see the art on the phone's camera app, but not in real life. However, if I crouch, sit or stand in the right place then it looks as if it's real.

Does that make sense?

Lots of fun to be had and seen, this one is an exploding vase of flowers.

Best by far though was the floppy dancing Japanese man, and I tried my best to copy his moves without actually seeing him.

The gardens were okay too.

25,000 steps today

After researching the route yesterday, this morning started with a run that included two laps around the Acropolis.

It was a lovely mostly pedestrianised route, with views of the Acropolis on one side and the Agora (ancient market place) on the other. 

It was hard work on an undulating course, but obviously not as hard as the run by Pheidippides in 490bc. He ran the 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce victory in a battle, and was so exhausted when he arrived that he dropped dead. He then accidentally became the first of many millions of marathon runners.

Afterwards we went down to the port of Piraeus for a look around.

It had a huge working port, but also a couple of lovely harbours. I particularly like this photo taken by Darren.  I think that if any artist actually drew reflections of masts in the water like this, then people would think that they had drank way too much ouzo.