The sites of Athens

We arrived in Athens Wednesday afternoon. We checked in to our hotel, which is wonderful, and decided to take a walk in to the city center and towards Plaka, which is the historic district of Athens. It's a very neat part of the city and really is the tourist center of the city. Also, all the well known monuments in Athens are right around this area. We started Thursday morning with a walk to the Acropolis where we saw the Parthenon (pictured above), Erectheion and The Temple of Athena Nike. We then visited Hadrian's Arch, the Theater of Dionysus, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Panathianiko Stadium (the stadium for the first modern Olympics in 1896), the Congress building and Parliment building. Since these sites were all so close to one another, we were finished with site seeing by lunch. At lunch we finally had some authentic Greek dessert: baklavah! I think we both enjoy the authentic Italian dessert, gelato, more. We also visited a little liqueur and ouzo bar where we both had a small class of flavored liqueur made right there in the bar. It was a really neat place because the high walls were lined in hundreds of colorful bottles of liquers. In the evening, we took a cablecar up to the top of Lycabettus Hill, the tallest hill in Athens.