Delphi! (the beginning)

Well if you thought that yesterday was an adventure… it totally was. But today was too, in its own, unique way. As you may remember, today was the day that we had planned to go to Delphi. As such, we got up at 6:00 to catch the 7:30 bus. Sounds simple. And yet.

Problem number one: most of the maps of Athens, including the ones in our books, don’t cover the area of town that the bus station is in. Caitlynn’s sister was able to point us in the right general direction, and the guy at our hotel desk was able to speak in vague generalities, but overall, we had very little information. Googlemaps was not particularly informative either, as everything is (predictably) in Greek.

So we got up, headed off, and got off the metro at the stop that Google suggested was closest. We knew that there was going to be a little bit of a walk, so we just started asking people for directions. Unfortunately, people didn’t always know what we were asking, which lead to a 30-40 minute brisk walk through Athens.

We finally discovered the bus station around 7:27 AM. Katie went sprinting inside to try to get tickets, asked a lady what to do, turned around, and sprinted out of the station to platform 10. She claims that it was like the Amazing Race. Very dramatic. Long story short, we made it. We were pretty sure that we had gotten our morning workout in though.

Three hours later, we arrived in Delphi. We were able to check into the hostel when we got to town, but we couldn’t get to our room since it was being cleaned. So, we dropped our luggage and headed to the archaeological site.

We were soooo wrong about the walk to the bus station being our morning workout. The site at Delphi is basically carved out of a mountain (I’ll post pictures). So getting to the top was quite exciting (it reminded me of Laki in Iceland – except that Laki was actually easier to climb, because it’s not covered in worn down marble steps – I swear that I’ve now learned my lesson with the flip flops), but also quite exhausting. And by that time, it had started to get really, really hot.

The ruins were very neat. A lot of it seemed to be relatively intact. We were able to see the Athenian treasury building, a large amphitheater, a stadium (at the very top), and the floor plan for the temple of Apollo (an a whole lot of other used-to-be-buildings). Since we were relatively worn out after the site, we decided to go back to the hostel, do lunch, maybe take it easy for a few hours, and then go back for the Delphi Archaeological Museum and general shopping.