Finally in Athens...

After a marathon trip, I finally arrived in Athens. I left Rome at 7:30am yesterday morning, took a train to Bari, an overnight boat to Patras and then another train to Athens, finally arriving at 6:30pm. The train from Patras was certainly interesting... there were a bunch of backpackers all waiting for the same train to Athens. Halfway, the train stopped and we had to get onto a different train, which had a sort of a Y shaped line - we started on one limb and Athens was on the other, but to get there we had to go down the trunk and then back again. We were all very confused, but the Greek people on the train told us to stay on the train, so we did. We made it in the end.

Unfortunately, after arriving at my hostel, I discovered that it doesn't have a kitchen. I was fairly sure that they referenced a kitchen on their website, but apparently not. That's not great - apparently a lot of Greek food includes eggplant (aubergine), which makes me very sick, so I was hoping to self-cater to avoid the possibility of not understanding what I was ordering. The hostel is a converted hotel, where they've just taken the double beds out of the rooms and chucked in two bunk beds. It's also in the red light district, and stinks of cigarette smoke. I met some other tourists who are staying at a different hostel, so I might find out how good theirs is and leave this one if theirs sounds much better - hurts to have paid for 4 nights, but I'm tired of crappy hostels.

I've been a-plotting, and it looks like I can do the things I really wanted to in 3 days - tomorrow I am hoping to visit the Acropolis/Parthenon, and it looks like Delphi and Mycenae are both about 3 hours away in a bus (in opposite directions from each other), so I should be able to do two day trips for about 20 Euro return each (tour bus tours are 85 Euro each minimum).

Time for bed perhaps.