Day 17/Cruise Day 4 Pireus and Athens

The previous night we went to a presentation supposedly about our upcoming ports of call. It really is a hard sell for the excursions. The presenter repeatedly stated how worthless it would be to go into Piraeus. “There is nothing there and the taxi drivers will pressure you to take a 100 euro trip to Athens. We decided not to take the advice, We left the ship at 8 am and discovered there was free high speed wifi in the port terminal. After checking email and Skyping Poland we walked into Piraeus. It is a lovely port city. And tour buses to Athens are reasonable. We walked through a nice neighborhood (because we got lost) then to the downtown main shopping area. Nice clean city. We got back to the ship at noon for lunch then took the organized excursion to Athens. By then the weather has changed and the sky got very dark, but we didn’t have time to go back and get an umbrella. It started pouring almost immediately after we got on the bus. We got a tour of the city from the bus and then we arrived at the Acropolis. It was still pouring so our guide gave us the explanation on the bus, but when we were ready to get out, the rain diminished considerably so we didn’t get soaked. After Acropolis, we went to Plaka where we had about 1.5 hours of free time. We walked up two streets and decided that this was a typical tourist trap and walked out of there. We found a nice café near the Acropolis museum and had fantastic grilled feta with tomatoes, olives and olive oil and delicious bread + beer and wine and we were happy campers. Overall we were pleasantly surprised by Athens. We heard that it was crowded and dirty and disorderly, and experienced none of it. The city we saw was clean, pleasant and pretty.
We returned to the ship in time for dinner. One of the Irish guys (the older one) didn’t show up, and probing his younger companion didn’t produce any results as to his whereabouts or their relationship. He just dodged our questions. We did however established for a fact that he (the younger one) is indeed involved in animal husbandry by tactfully asking if his part of Ireland is industrial or agricultural. He emphatically stated that it’s purely agricultural and most people are involved in farming and in sheep and cattle raising. The two English ladies told us some more about their travels and it sounds like they have been almost everywhere. You wouldn’t suspect it by looking at these two frail, soft spoken and mild mannered old women.