Athens, Greece

When you think of Athens, images of ancient ruins, beautiful and friendly people, vibrant culture, great food, sports, dazzling beaches, etc. It is none of those things. It's dirty and oppressive, with a horrid public transport system, ugly concrete buildings, overpriced food, and finding a good hostel is like attempting to turn straw into gold. Yes, they do have the Acropolis with the Parthenon as its highlight, but this is, expectedly, overrun by tourists and has so much scaffolding and so many cranes all over it that you can't look at any part of it without feeling you are in a construction site. Views of the Acropolis are top right and bottom left. The Parthenon is bottom right and top left is just some other part of the Acropolis.


There are a few other old things around the area, like Agora's Temple of Hephaestus, my favorite thing of the city.

Athens sucks and it, by far, is my least favorite place I've been to, on this trip and perhaps anywhere. Below is a typical sight in the city, trash piled into an abandoned building.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Details:
Getting from Ios to Athens is easy enough due to the travel agents showing excellent timetables outside their shops. The trip on the high speed is 5 hours and costs $71/51€. When you arrive, the metro ($1.40/1€) is closeby although you can only go for a little ways at the moment before it prematurely ends and they shepphard you onto a bus, hopefully going to the same area. Mine, luckily, did. I stayed the first night at Athens Easy Access, a zoo of a place that had decent rooms, free Internet, and a terrible but free breakfast ($25/18€). The next night I stayed at Athens Backpacker Hostel. This place has nice rooms, but only the wifi is free and the staff is completely incompetent at giving directions, despite what I had heard ($35/25€); it is really close to the Acropolis though. Trying to get anywhere in the city is almost hopeless. Just take a taxi if it isn't right by a metro line, they are fairly inexpensive for Europe.