Athens

Athens was a great prelude to the following 12 days of island hopping. It set the scene with ruins aplenty, delicious gyros, the blazing afternoon sun and the most incredible sunsets. 

We are now convinced Greece offers the best sunsets - while also harbouring a deeply set phobia of sunset-chasing which we did every single day of our 2 week long trip.

When we weren't stuffing our faces with gyros or searching for peaches, we were visiting ruins and hiking up mountains (my bad).

Here's the Panathenaic Stadium for a sweet 2.5 euros - thank you NTU for the student card sans an expiry date.

I'm not sure why I even included Mount Lycabettos into the itinerary. I mean, I ran 50m in the office yesterday while rushing to submit documents and nearly got a leg cramp. Must have been going through a particularly fitspo/inspirational moment while I was planning for the trip.

The hike up was very, very warm with no sign of a breeze, but a fitspo does what a fitspo must and so I kept going.

To be fair, the view was insane. I felt like I could see all of Athens from up there.

We baked for 2 hours while camping for the sunset so thankfully, it sunset was ace. If not I probably would have thrown a fit after all that walking.

So glad Sandemans is in Athens because they're pretty much the only walking tour I trust, and this too was great. To the uninitiated, Sandemans is a free walking tour company (mostly in Europe) and the guides are remunerated based on tips. This means that the guides have a larger incentive to interact more, tell more interesting stories and share more about the city. In short, they're far better than the fixed fee tours because they're far more interesting than a man reading off a script. 

The peaches were mad cheap - 99 cents euro/kg, and super juicy. I haven't found a better peach since.

Tada - the famed Acropolis which has strict rules on student passes and requires them to have an expiry date. So for the first time in a long time, I ended up with an adult ticket. 

But ok la full price for a temple that's withstood wars and nature's wrath over a course of 2400 years, I'll take it.

I'm terrible with night photos so here's a lousy one of our first ever open-air cinema experience (with the Parthenon overlooking us) at Cine Thision. I watched Victoria and Abdul (I, not we, because Jia slept through most of it) with the cool night breeze, wishing I had a nice warm gyros for company too.