Made it to Athens

Today (Sunday) we made it to Piraeus, the port city for Athens, where we embarked on the Viking Neptune.  It was a long 25-hour journey from home to get to here.  We sat 3 hrs in the plane on the tarmac in Atlanta due to delays caused by thunderstorms.  Our layover time in Paris was originally supposed to be about 3 hours, so we made our connector flight there with minutes to spare, and then sat in our plane for an hour in Paris due to heavy fog.  At least we had a healthy lunch at the Atlanta USO

 

 Moon pies, one of the basic food groups!

My leg didn't appreciate these long flights, hopefully it will hold up for the upcoming excursions...tomorrow we walk around Athens for about 3.5 hours to see the sights.  Our circadian rhythms are definitely out of whack already, and tomorrow they go on reverse daylight savings time (moving the clocks one hour ahead!)

Viking does a good job with immersive experiences at foreign ports.  This afternoon in the ship's theater they had a professor from the U. of Chicago talk about the golden age of Greek civilization (the grandkids know all that better than I do), when the Greeks were competing with the Romans, Persians, and Spartans for domination in this part of the world.  The ancient Greeks had a major impact on the concept of democracy, influencing Jefferson, Adams, Madison, etc in setting up our form of government.  And their architecture can be seen in the Supreme Court building, etc.  

Tonight we attended a musical concert by local musicians playing traditional Greek music, very pleasant to listen to while they showed amazing videos from around the country