Piraeus, Greece

We'd never visited Greece, so we were looking forward to docking at Piraeus, the port of Athlens which we did around 0700 hrs.

With so much to see and so little time (I call these visits sheep dip tours) we signed up for a hop-on-hop-off bus and did a visual of some parts of the city with a long stop at the Acropolis.

As there were three ships visiting, there were far too many tourists. We were bumping  into each other on stairways and trying to take a photo without someone walking in front of you was a challenge. I'm a bit of an impatient old bugger who hates queues and doesn't do crowds well, so it wasn't my best day.

The architecture and engineering is amazing given the era. Huge heavy plinths have been raised and installed above stanchions with great precision. And what magic enabled the craftsmen to create hard marble stanchions that are perfectly cylindrical with series of evenly spaced symmetrical gougings throughout their length?

I'm sure there is much more to the human story than historians know or have revealed to us.

It always bothered me in Egypt that of all the hieroglyphs, there is not one schematic diagram with measurements and mathematical calculations although both would have been critical. I wonder whether the artefacts were built by a much earlier race of extraterrestrials or advanced human beings and later peoples added the hieroglyphs. We'll probably never know.

What we do know is that they must have been stunning before time and the elements degraded them.

Robin
Off to Valletta, Malta