Last night we made it out to Pan's apartment in central Athens with his two roomies Dimitrios and Yiannis. Dimitri is on the left and Pan is in the middle. What a cool apartment and they are all very cool people! Again, we feel lucky to have met them here during our last nights in Greece ( and Europe for that matter) Both Pan and Dimitri want to plan similar trips as ours leaving everything behind to travel for an extended period.

We spent last evening sipping strawberry daquiris and chatting about everything from travel to religion and couchsurfing. Pan had a wedding to go to for the first part of the night, but then we met up at a neighborhood bar and stayed out until 430am!! It was the longest Troy or I had been out in a very long time, and the funniest thing was that neither of us felt tired because of the great company we were in :) Needless to say it is 230pm here now, and all of us just woke up an hour ago :-P

Pan and Dimitri were so much fun, and they even bought us drinks...which we tried to fight, but it was useless..They are very generous hosts.

Today is another scorcher, and I think Troy and I will get a frappe, stroll around and find some shady bench outside to watch the day. I LOVE the greek lifestyle ;-)

Yesterday we saw the Acropolis, which is just as fantastic as it looks in the pictures. I learned from Dimitri, however, that the original appearance of the Parthenon and other ancient Greek structures were not white but colored brilliantly with yellow and red. It is a misconception that the Ancient greek buildings were all white! Amazingly many of the sculptures found in the area were preserved in the museum, many of them 2500 years old!!!

We saw Zeus' Temple ( not in the Acropolis), the theater of Dionysus where plays by Sophocles were performed, the famous temple to Athena with the sacred olive tree ( which legend says was planted by the god Athena after Poseidon/Neptune struck his trident to create the sea), and of course the Parthenon which had extensive scaffolding for its restoration. Ironically, the restoration efforts are to correct previous restorations which used improper materials, and actually ruin the marble over time.

We did get a few cool pics without the scaffolding, and they can be found at the pic site.

Hard to believe the European whirlwind leg of our trip is over, and tomorrow we will be flying through the middle east and arriving in the far east!