I swore never to show up in Athens again without a reservation.

I swore not to pack so much.

I swore not to eat a cheese pie every day.

I’ve heard that a lot of people will skip Athens entirely and head straight to the islands, especially if they’ve visited Athens before.  Maybe it’s due in part to my bad memory, but I always find it difficult not to spend at least three days in Athens.  The Acropolis still takes my breath away, and the sense of living history makes me want to linger.

When I walk through the agora, it’s with Socrates; in Keramikos, Pericles is still giving his famous eulogy for fallen soldiers; and Aeropagus Hill holds the echo of Paul’s “Sermon to an Unknown God”.

This time around, I visited the good works of a Roman emperor named Hadrian, who loved Athens at least as much as he loved Rome.  Hadrian’s legacy includes a beautiful library, a Tower of the Winds, a Roman market, and the completion of the largest temple in Greece –the Temple of the Olympian Zeus — that took 700 years to finish.

Athens just wouldn’t be the same without Hadrian.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

My first night in Athens, I walk the pedestrian promenade to keep myself from falling asleep too early.

Children play ball on the marble walkway, as they have for millennia, their voices ringing out in laughter from the shrubbery of the southern slope of the Acropolis.

A tightrope walker manages the distance between two trees, ten feet apart.

Elegant couples make their way down the Grand Promenade to a concert at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.

Flashes of light and a flurry of photographers follow the prime minister of Greece as he calmly makes his way through the ancient entrance gate. He has a kind face. It must be difficult to be a politician with such a kind face.

Designer blondes in tight white skirts and four inch heels stop for ice cream before the concert. Click, click, click… their heels on the marble steps.

An orthodox priest sings his haunting sermon down from the hills.

A man playing the lute greets me with compliments in Macedonian.

A young Roma woman sits near the entrance to the plaka, shaking a tambourine and singing an old slavic folk song. “Jovana, Jovana…” My heart tightens, and suddenly I want to go to Yugoslavia. But then I remember that there is no Yugoslavia. I tell myself that I’ll visit it’s ghost soon, but not alone; to go alone would mean certain heartbreak.

That night it rains, big sheets of rain that turn the marble walkway into a slip n’ slide.

The next morning, I make my way to breakfast.  Still half asleep and bleary eyed, I sit down to a rainbow over the Acropolis.

This is how Athens keeps me hooked.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

I’ve gotten more than a few messages asking about costs related to traveling to Greece, so I thought it warranted a blog post.

The good news: compared to most European nations, Greece is extremely affordable.

The bad news:  if you’re American, you’re still getting about .60 euro to $1.

Timing is everything.  Prices go down by as much as half if you travel outside of July and August.  Prices start their steep climb in July and reach their peak sometime around the middle to end of July.  The peak lasts a full month and prices drop again on September 1st.  Athens may be the exception, in that prices don’t change quite as much, but on the islands, timing makes a huge difference.

So here’s the nitty gritty on traveling to Greece:

Airfare

Airfare is dependent on where you’re flying from, so I’ll use the U.S. as an example that’s familiar to me. When I was searching for decent airfare last year, prices from the east coast averaged about $1,100.  A good travel agent or a thorough internet search will pay off.  A good friend who visited me last summer in Greece was able to get a ticket for about $700.  Europeans are lucky — they have a plethora of budget airlines operating around the continent.

Some sites to check out:

www.attitudetravel.com

www.airninja.com

www.ryanair.com/en

www.bing.com/travel

Accommodations

First things first:  if you’re going through Athens and care about location and cleanliness, book early.  Book early.  Athens fills up fast, no matter what time of year you’re traveling.  This is especially true of rooms  around the Acropolis, Plaka and Monastiraki.  If you’re like me and just want something cheap and are not averse to walking 15 minutes to reach the Acropolis, I would still recommend booking early.  I’ve shown up in Athens without a reservation after a long trans-atlantic flight and have always vowed never to do it again (even though I do).

On the islands, forget about hotels and go for private rooms instead.  Most private rooms are just as good, if not better than hotel rooms, and you get the added bonus of getting to know a Greek family.

When I arrived in Kythnos, I found a room for 30 euro, which turned out to be a bit higher than I paid on the other islands for the month of June.  The average cost for a single room in June and the beginning of July was 20 – 25 euro.  The price last August for a room in the Cyclades was about 35-50 euro.

Some things to keep in mind:

1.  Mykonos, Santorini, and to some extent Folegandros, are always more expensive.  Try to book a room before you arrive or you’ll end up paying a premium.  If you show up in Mykonos in August and someone offers you a room for 70 euro, take it — it’s not going to get any better.

2.  Rooms on some of the least visited islands can actually be a bit more expensive than average because there are fewer rooms on those islands.

3.  Americans, keep in mind that European room prices vary depending on how many people are in the room.  This worked out in my favor since I was mostly traveling alone.

It’s perfectly OK to show up on most any island (caveat:  Mykonos, Santorini, Folegandros) without a reservation.  Most people do this when traveling through Greece.  Your ferry will be met by a group of locals who will offer you all sorts of rooms.  You can bargain, within reason.  Don’t expect the price to drop by more than 5 euro or so.  Also, almost every island has a tourist office near the port and they’re a big help when it comes to locating rooms.  Just go with the flow and remember that things move at a different pace in Greece.

Car Rental

In the beginning of the summer, I was able to rent a car on the islands for about 20 euro a day.  Mind you, I always asked for the cheapest and smallest car.  In the middle of August, I rented a jeep for about 50 euro a day.  On September 1st, the jeep price dropped down to 30 euro.

The great thing about renting a car in Greece is that there are no hidden costs.  The price includes everything.  That means no extra costs for taxes or insurance.  Americans will especially appreciate this, since we get shafted on a regular basis by car rental companies in the States.

I was almost always able to get the price lowered just by asking if there was a better price.  I  think I brought up the dismal dollar to euro exchange rate once or twice.  Feel free to look around for the best price — you might be surprised by how much prices vary from company to company.

Ferries

Ferry prices are dependent on how far you’re traveling.  I paid about 12 euro for a one hour ferry between islands, and 45 euro for a trip of a few hours to one of the more remote islands.  To save money, skip the fast boats and stick to the slower ferries, which really aren’t much slower.  To save even more money, stick to steerage and don’t reserve a specific seat.  Most greek ferries don’t have classes, per se, and so-called steerage fare will give you access to the entire ship unless it’s a ferry with pullman seats or sleeping berths, which cost extra.  Use common sense though —  if you’re on an overnight ferry, it gets fairly chilly on the open sea and you can save yourself a lot of discomfort by booking an interior seat if one is available.

Food

Food in Greece is reasonably priced and very filling.  Greeks don’t skimp on portion sizes, and most entrees are sized for two people.

I spent, on average, between 15-20 euro a day on food.  On one especially thrifty day, I only spent 6 euro, so it can be done!

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll try to do specific posts on rooms throughout the islands.  It’s information I really could have used before my last trip, so hopefully it will help someone else out.

If you’re interested in keeping your travel costs down, yet still want a fantastic holiday in a breathtakingly beautiful country, I highly recommend Greece.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

I’ve been keeping abreast of the ever-changing situation but I have no right whatsoever to comment on it.  Things are never truly as they seem to be – that’s the one lesson I learned during my years of working internationally.  Despite what mainstream media would have us believe, there is seldom one source of blame or one avenue of salvation.  Here in the States we like things neatly separated into black hats and white hats, good guys and bad guys.  But this is a Greek story, not an American one, and Greek stories involve tragedy, gods, fate, and a chorus singing or weeping in the background.

My natural inclination is to always side with those marching in protest, because another maxim is also true:  the people in the middle and on the bottom are the first to get screwed when it comes to paying the piper.

Tragedy, fate, cue the weeping chorus.

So, I’ll leave all the commenting to the people living it–the Greeks.

In other news, I haven’t felt like writing anything at all lately.  Must be the winter doldrums.  Everything is grey and flat and all I can think about is leaving for a sunny, blue place.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

You might remember this post regarding my  60 euro fine with the Athens Metro.  Well, it’s officially been two months and I still haven’t heard anything.  Do you think that means I’m off the hook?  That must be what it means, right?

I sort of like the idea of an entire committee convening to discuss whether or not a fine should be paid, but if its all the same to them, I’d rather not pay.

I had the best of intentions, after all, and a kazillion other people made the same mistake.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone invented an intentions detector?

© 2009 – 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

© 2009 – 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Emboldened by their new prosperity, prestige, and power, Pericles and the Athenians began to pursue empire.  Despite their protestations to the contrary, they began to treat their allies as their subjects.  Ideologically committed to their own form of radical democracy, they saw it as their mission and their right to foster, or if necessary to force, this democracy on their sister states.

You either supported Athens, or you braced yourself to be her enemy.

Sparta rightfully saw Athens as a threat and came to realize that the two of them – Athens and Sparta – were on a collision course.  Their suspicions were confirmed when the Athenian Assembly declared war on Sparta and the Peloponnese after an impassioned speech by Pericles.

At the same time, the political enemies of Pericles sought to erode his power and topple him by attacking those closest to him.  His friend Phidias, ancient Athens’ greatest sculptor and the man for whom the golden mean was named, was thrown in jail for embezzlement and died not long after.  The philosopher Anaxagoras was indicted for teaching that the sun was a red-hot mass of metal, and not a god, and for treasonable correspondence with Persia.  Anaxagoras was condemned to death, but was saved through the intervention of Pericles.  Aspasia was also put on trial, then saved by Pericles.

Pericles’ meticulous plan to defeat Sparta took account of everything, except that which can never be taken into account.  One year after the start of the war, the plague entered Athens. It spread through the over-crowded city like wildfire, taking 20,000 lives in the first outbreak.

Pericles’ two legitimate sons from his first marriage died within a week of each other, and the Athenians saw their stoic leader cry in public.

Pericles himself died of the plague during the third year of the Peloponnesian war and the glory that was Athens died with him.

The democracy was left prey to hostile factions and reckless leaders who pursued their own advantage.  Traditional warfare in Greece was brutal but brief.  A battle might last only hours or even minutes.  When one side yielded the field, the other side declared victory, erected a trophy, and collected its dead.  The practical aim of war was to bring the enemy to submission, whereas in the Peloponnesian war – through the leadership of inferior men – the aim became to annihilate the enemy.  Any line between warriors and innocents, between young and old, was ignored.  War became indistinguishable from atrocity.

The Peloponnesian War lasted nearly 30 years, and in the end Athens lost everything.  Her prosperity and democracy, her people and her principles had all been fed to the consuming ache for empire.  The Golden Age of Athens was over, and the Greek world from Sicily to Asia Minor was devastated.

The Spartans sacked Athens, tore down its city walls, destroyed the fortifications of its port, Piraeus, and all but 12 warships were surrendered.  Athens was henceforth to be a Spartan ally and to follow the same foreign policy. Persia was finally allowed to establish an influence in Greece, something it had not succeeded in doing during all the military battles of the last century.

The future of Greece lay to the north.  The torch of empire, which eventually consumes every hand that grasps it, was passed to a young boy named Alexander, tutored by Aristotle, who is said to have slept with the Iliad under his pillow.

 (parts excerpted from Ancient Greece: an Explorer's Guide)

© 2009, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.