The Temple of Aphea and The Hotel Attalos

On the 9th, we awoke mid-morning and packed up our things, then headed off with our day packs. I wanted to see if we could visit the Temple of Aphea, which was supposed to be on a hilltop near our hotel, before we checked out around noon.

We climbed upwards through town and encountered some interesting insects, plus a very annoying P.A. system mounted in a pickup truck. Eventually, after getting turned around a little, we found our Temple, and headed there. It is the Temple of Aphea, supposedly a nymph, the offspring of Zeus and a mortal who is said to have moved to Aegina Island, and was worshipped only there for many years as an invisible deity, who was turned such via the aid of the local population.


Temple of Aphea on Aegina Island.

We wandered the temple and gift shop for a time before returning to our hotel, and enjoyed very much the chance to view an ancient site on its own, in its austere beauty, before joining the tour where we knew we would learn the more technical details and history of the sites we were to visit.


Temple of Aphea.

We left the temple and returned to our hotel to collect our bags and check out. They were wonderfully understanding and even declined to charge me for our first missed night of stay, which was very kind of them.

After we had our bags packed, our ancient host even took us the kilometer into town in his tiny blue MiniMoke (it looked like this one).

If you've never seen a MiniMoke before, just visualize the bastard child of a Jeep Wrangler and a Power Wheels car. It would look like this.

It was an adorable vehicle, and reminded me of Chet's Jalopy, from the Hardy Boys novels. We reached town in one piece (thankfully) and hopped the bus to the other side of the island, where we took another Hydrofoil back to Piraeus.

In Piraeus, wiser for our delay with the train system, we elected to take the Metro, and a mere 70 cents got us all the way into downtown Athens, where we disembarked and headed for our hotel, the world-famous Hotel Attalos. Just a block from Monastiraki metro station, Attalos' rooftop bar offers one of the best views of the Acropolis available anywhere in the city, especially at night, when the brilliantly lit sandstone of Greeces ultimate monument serves as a beautiful reminder of the power and endurance of the Hellenic Empire.

Upon arrival, we enquired after the group, which we assumed had already arrived, deposited their baggage, and headed for the Acropolis. We were surprised when the message at the desk for us was a little different than expected: "They will be arriving later."

How much later?

"Sometime after midnight."

So that was a bit of a shock. It turns out (as we discovered later via some detective work and the AirFrance online flight status report system) that they had missed their morning flight out of Paris for Athens, and this had left them stranded in Paris until that evening.

We prepared the space as best we could for their arrival, checked out a local web cafe, and got dinner at a wonderful little taverna in the heart of Psiri, the district just west of Athinai Street. We would return to it twice more before we left Greece. There we discovered one of our new favorite Greek dishes, called yaritolou politiko, it was a pita covered in Greek Yoghurt and Red Sauce with strips of very tender beef. It was excellent, and we highly recommend the dish to anyone else visiting Athens in the near future.

After dinner, we returned to our room and waited for the arrival of my parents and their students.