Acropolis museum / Plaka / Syntagma

Got out of Embassy with my new passport at 11:40. caught a taxi for 4 euros to the museum. Young English speaking driver. Caught the tour just in time. Will return to visit the Acropolis on Saturday on our last day. Took a break to have some tasty salads in the museum. Then took some time to wander Thru the Plaka (big tourist area below the Acropolis - lots of shops, cafes, etc - lot of outdoor dining venues) with our tour guide to a small place offering delicious baklava (best I've ever had) and Greek coffee ( not a fan of it). Afterwards Janet and I wandered the area on our own for a few hours finally finding a rooftop terrace restaurant at Public, a huge super electronics/bookstore/restaurant overlooking Syntagma Square where we had a view of the parliament building in the background and the changing of the guard. Had a tasty avocado bruschetta with poached egg on top - tasty. Got chilly so headed down to get a closer look at the guards. (See video). We decided to hoof the one mile back to the hotel. Now we have to get our stuff ready for the motor coach tour. Sure is a relief to have the passport fiasco behind me. Astounding how bad the pickpocket situation is here. . Had another member of our group almost have his pocket picked in the metro today. Some good advice here (and yep, I went to this particular police station) . http://muslimtravelgirl.boardingarea.com/what-t…. Also, and something I didn’t even think about was contacting Allianz who provided me with travel insurance in helping me out with my situation. Gate1 did the same thing and even took the further step of escorting me to these places personally. It will be interesting to see if Allianz will cover the cost of replacing a stolen passport or any phone calls necessary to cancel cards, etc. That’s probably in the fine print somewhere. I noticed in the link above that the girl suggested cancelling the cards using Skype, which is excellent advice. In my rush to shut mine down, I called the 800 number directly so it will be interesting to see what those calls are going to cost me. There was probably some international phone number I was supposed to call. (I do have Verizon’s $10/day Travel Pass plan, which after reading a bit further should cover those phone calls which is nice and as it turns out, the Travel Pass does cover all these international calls).Read more