I am splitting this trip into 3 parts - 1 Athens, 2 Zakynthos, an island in the Ionian Sea and 3 Milos, an island in the Aegean Sea which are basically the three places where we stayed the nights. From these places, we took tours and cruises to other places.
We booked our flight to Athens with Oman Air via Muscat. The flight was convenient and the food served on board was delicious
The entire first day went into the travel to Athens. We took the local metro from the Athens International Airport "Eleftherios Venizelos" to reach our stay near the Akropolis metro station. Most of the signboards are in Greek and we needed help to finally decide on the line we need to board.
Finally, there are two trains that start from the metro station at the airport. One is the suburban railway and the other is the blue line. You take the blue line to get from the airport to the city center. The blue line goes till Aghia Marina and you should be able to identify this word even in the local language. I am attaching an image of the Athens metro line for ready reference.
I have taken the image from the below link,
https://designinglife.biz/how-to-get-to-hostel-dioskouros-from-athens-airport/
Akropoli on the red line is the closest to all the historic monuments and there are a lot of hotels and airbnbs. You change the blue line at Syntagma. The directions in the metro are easy to follow.
On day 1, we took a walk on Makrigianni street where food joints are open till at least till mid night.
We started in the morning at around 9 AM and went to the Acropolis first. There is a queue to get the tickets into the museum and I would strongly suggest that you book the tickets online to avoid wasting time standing in the queue. There is a ticket which lets you visit some 5 - 6 places and I would suggest people to take that as most of the places covered in the ticket are must visits. Once we entered the place, we were overwhelmed by what we saw and its better to see than to read.
Most of these places are within 2 - 3 kms from the Acropolis and its a pleasure to walk around the city to reach these places.
There is one place which we couldnt take photos of but is a must visit - The Acropolis Museum. For someone who is interested in knowing the history of Athens, this place can easily take up half a day or more. Spread across 3 floors, the Acropolis Museum houses the ruins from Acropolis along with other artifacts from various excavations across Athens.
We had our Lunch at To Kati Allo - which I read somewhere translates to "Something Else". The place has a fixed menu which is written on the board outside and the prices are very reasonable. A sumptuous meal for two costed us roughly 16 Euro.
For dinner, we ended eating from local bakeries on the Makrigianni street as we weren't very hungry.
We ended our day by taking the metro back to Athens Airport for we had an early morning 5 AM flight to Zakynthos and I, much to the dismay of my partner, didn't want to travel late in the night in Athens. We reached the airport by 1030 pm and spent the rest of the time taking a nap in the airport.
To be continued with our stay at the Ionian Island of Zakynthos.
