Our Very Stressful 2nd day in Athens – Our First Full Day in Greece

We are staying in a hotel near the downtown area in Athens. Our hotel staff informed us that the bus stops were just a two minutes walk across the street.

After exploring our hotel neighborhood on foot for an hour, we bought a 2 day Hop on Hop off bus tour pass in order to see and learn about the history of this great city.

We did the hop on /off bus tour in Lisbon, Portugal two years ago and enjoyed it, so we did it again this time in Greece.

Each passenger on the bus tour was given a pair of earpieces. We could plug it into the bus' sound system and listened to the explantions about the different points of interest as the bus was passing by them. We sat in the red line tour bus for the entire ride to get an overview of the city of Athens.

There were about 15 bus stops on the red line. After going through the bus tour once, we decided to get off at the foot of the ACROPOLIS to visit this world famous UNESCO site!

There seemed to be a lot of visitors heading up to the Acropolis. We thought we would go there a little later in the afternoon when it would be less crowded as a lot of curise passengers would have gone back to their cruise ships by then.

We took a walk in the Acropolis area and saw many restaurants, cafes, souvenir, handicrafts and gifts stores lining both sides of the street. It was lively and filled with visitors.

We stopped at a store selling lots of Greek souvenirs. I was looking at the gifts while a woman dressed in a long skirt and a scarf in her late 50’s approached me trying to sell me a big white tablecloth.

It was a nice handmade one but I didn’t want to buy anything and declined politely. This lady kept following me for a little while but I said no. Then she disappeared into the crowd and we continued to turn into some alleyways leading up to the hill.

We also stopped at a couple of jewelry stores browsing over the beautiful necklaces and rings made by local artisans. The weather was pleasant and the climb up to the hill was gentle.

We continued our walk and passed by a children’s park and came to an area looking like a village with some traditional Greek houses.

Some houses were a little modern while some looked like the houses we saw in children’s book. This scenery was enchanting!

I was captivated and I lost myself in the beautiful sight of this delightful and rustic neighborhood.

These houses looked so cute! Who would expect these little rustic houses in the middle of a big city!

 

 

  I couldn't stop taking pictures of these adorable houses and I was enjoying myself so much!

 

 

Then all of a sudden, as if being awoken from a trance, I suddenly felt something was wrong. I turned around and looked at my backpack; I was horrified! Both the outside and the inner pocket zippers of my backpack were opened!

The inner zippered pocket was where I kept my wallet containing both of our passports, credit cards and all our cash. My wallet was stolen which meant all our valuables were stolen too!

  We were beside ourselves, O NO! This was only our second day in Greece. How were we going to survive without anything?

  RT, at the Bottom of Acropolis, Athens, Greece

  042026