28/4 - Sounion, Athens
This being my last day in Athens, I decided to visit Sounion, where the famous Temple of Poseidon was. For a minute I toyed with taking the 6:30am bus, but luckily I did the right thing and woke up at 6am to take the 7:30 bus instead of 5am. And a good thing too, since the site only opened at 9:30am.
Athens meat market. The plasma TVs can be seen.
A sign at the entrance of the Temple of Poseidon asked for visitors to be in proper dress. Huh?
View from the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion
Temple
Facade
Unfortunately, the temple itself cannot be entered anymore, misleading photograph in the Athens/Attica promotional booklet showing lots of American tourists sitting in the temple notwithstanding. This is probably to prevent people from doing a Lord Byron.
View of Guest centre
Side
Propylon
Fortress wall
An information panel at the site was sponsored by the 'Plant your roots in Greece foundation'. Hah!
I asked at the counter but the only other archaeological site in the area was the museum at Lavriot which was 5km away. Needless to say, I didn't go there.
Temple of Athena
This was down the hill from the Temple of Poseidon but not much was left. It'd probably have been recommended by the guidebook author.
Graffiti - including one from 1901!
On the bus ride back to Athens, it started drizzling. Gah.
I had neither the time nor the energy to do another day trip from Athens, so I decided to make good use of my status as a EU student and finish up some of the sites I hadn't managed to view during Exercise Minotaur, as well as retread old ground.
Roman bathhouse beside the National Gardens in Athens
Hadrian's Gate
Theatre of Dionysius, "the most ancient theatre in the world" or something like that
"Do not take any indecent or defamatory photographs on the site" - Uhh.
Asclepion, the sanctuary of Asclepius
View of theatre from the Eastern slope
Stoa of Eumenes
I'd visited the Parthenon complex on the Acropolis before, but it was always nice to tread on sacred soil again (especially when it was free).
Scaffolding - if anything there was even more than 2 years ago, on Exercise Minotaur! They must've taken it down for the Olympics and made up for lost time later. So much for the information panel bragging that they'd finished the restoration in January 2004.
Caryatids on the porch of the Erechtheion
Actually since so much restoration is going on, they should just take casts of the Elgin marbles and erect them on the Parthenon. That's what they did for the last Caryatid, after all. Hell, they should recreate Phideas' statue!
View from Acropolis. I forgot what the hill in the background is called.
At the Acropolis museum, you weren't allowed to take pictures of yourself posing with the exhibits. Perhaps this was considered indecent or defamatory.
The sign to the conservation lab says no photography is allowed and only authorised personnel can enter. I assume even authorised personnel cannot take photographs.
'Pig sacrifice' relief
Kore, end 6th century BC
Kore, 525 BC
Three Graces, start of 5th c. BC
Contemplative Athena, ~460 BC
Terracotta votive plague - 'Megakles is handsome', 510-500 BC
In the room where fragments from the West frieze were displayed, photographs of the British museum's 2 panels were shown beside those of the Acropolis museum's panels. The superior state of the first two was evident, but of course was not mentioned.
West Frieze - The Gods
2 of the real Caryatids [Someone: the first picture seems to be a bit sharper? but the second has better contrast on light and shadow. more vivid, rather; Someone else: at 1st glance the quality is - and should be - the same, but it is composition that matters. in the 2nd the lamp looks like sticked to statue's head, and another does not fit in the screen nicely]
Facade of the Parthenon
Odeon of Herodes Atticus
Acropolis Porch
The rock from which St Paul preached now has a proper staircase! So despite the drizzle I had no problem climging it. I wonder what the guidebook author would say.
The Athens/Attica promotional booklet said that a possible site to visit was Plato's Academy, but I couldn't locate it on the official tourist map. It wasn't in the map at the back of the promotional booklet either; the only indication of where it was was in the map at the start of the chapter it was under, where it lay somewhere outside the borders of the map - its general direction was located with an arrow pointing from the direction of the Partheon to the Keramikos - wth, they were trying to smoke me.
Socrates Prison Cell
Philopappos monument
It was intact till the 15th century. Wah.
I couldn't believe how much Crete reminded me of Malaysia. In fact, in some respects it out-Malaysias Malaysia. Mainland Greece itself resembles that country in some ways, but the island mentality must add to the "charm":
- Traffic lights (some of which don't even work) are suggestions for motorists, not instructions to follow. The only reason motorists obey them is not because they don't want to knock down or terrorise pedestrians, but because they fear crashing into other cars
- Road signage is worse: often there're no signs when you need them (eg To the airport - we ended up topo-ing in the general direction)
- Most Cretan road signs face only one direction - good luck to you if you come from the other direction
- The road layout can be poor - from the harbour of Heraklion we needed to join the E75 (National Road - main highway crossing the north coast of Crete) and we were directed to go in one huge round
- They only use one type of oil for cooking
- Cretan space is weird. A road sign indicating that Festos was 2km away was only 200km from the place, and somewhere else after driving for 5 minutes at 100km/hr, the distance to Pirgos plummeted from 6km to 5km)
- Greek toilets are like Indian toilets - you're not supposed to throw toilet paper into them since presumably they may get clogged. Even Malaysia isn't so backward!
- There were Malaysia-esque spelling mistakes, eg "Greek traditional recipy"
- On the last day in Heraklion, My brother in law and I went to an Internet cafe which was advertising CD and DVD "download parties". At first we were wondering what they were, but I happened to browse the "media" folder of my terminal, and found MP3s, anime and more (the movies folder was empty though). There was also a long list of file sharing applications available. Piracy is even more blatant and brazen than in Malaysia!
And the clincher:
A MALAYSIAN MANNIKIN
When I saw this I went "OMG". This is the first Malaysian Mannikin I've seen in Europe. What more proof is needed that Greece is to Europe what Malaysia is to Singapore?! [someone: You mean Malaysia is the cradle of your civilization?]
