ATHENS

Our plans in Peloponnese changed completely for this big natural disaster that Greece has suffered. Esparta, Korinthos, Micenas... they have to wait for another occasion.
We decided to stay in Krestena during the days of the fires to helped our friend Kostas, in case the fire arrived; the fire that is seen in the previous blog entry, it was extinguished, but another one arrived, and stopped just 300 meters from the house, we thought that it would arrive, even we prepared the house for the fire while airplanes and helicopters flew over Krestena throwing water... helicopters evacuating people... firemen, policemen, military, the press!... Krestena was a chaos for a day, the sky was red, yellow, and was raining ash continually. This was the aspect of the sky, in the afternoon in a day without clouds, just smoke...


Finally the fire didn’t arrive to Kostas’ house, but thousands and thousands of hectares were destroyed, and Olympia, two days after to have been there, it was devastated by the fire...

We went directly to Athens; here it was waiting for us a couple of "work" days, we chose Athens to do the preparative of our next phase, Middle East. What more time had taken us, was the Syrian visa, up to three times we had to go, they asked us for a recommendation letter of our embassy; but at the end, there were no problem, we have a month of stay, and it cost 23 € each. Due to our life style (never stop), we spent the time in Athens with a lot of calmness. We went up to the Likavitos hill, with nice views of all the immense city; we also saw the guard of the government with its ridiculous shoes with pompom...


And of course the temple of Zeus, and the Acropolis; it was sad to see the Parthenon in works, but from some years ago it is in repair, because it is in very bad state.

For the people who want to visit Greece, is very important to carry the student card (ISIC), we keep saying it because we have not paid anything, even in the Acropolis.

The exit of Athens was very disappointing, it keeps being impossible to travel by our way in this country. We chose the best place for hitchhike, the Athens exit toll of the highway; probably a 10.000 cars pass in front of us in the 4 hours that we stood there, and no one stop for us. We decided to finish our days in Greece traveling by train, which is not expensive.
In Thessaloniki, we met a great couple, Alexis and Catherina; he has a big dream, which is to travel like us; with them we went around the city seeing many Roman remains; and even we gave our first round by boat of the journey.