May 2, 2009 – Day 128 – Athens, Greece

The National Gardens in Athens are dreadfully boring. Although admission is free, there are essentially no flowers except a few small rows of pansies and petunias by a couple entrance gates and around the base of a monument. Mostly it’s just a park with dusty paths and over pruned hedges on the verge of death. There is a filthy little fish pond with turtles too but the water is so dirty that you can’t even really see the fish but only a few orange darting spots below the surface. The turtles just hang around on the rocks that are oddly stacked in the middle while pigeons hop from one turtle shell to another, completely oblivious to the fact that they are standing on top of a (very unhappy) fellow creature.

Flowers and the fence

We watched the brainless birds for a bit until one finally leapt from a turtle to a real rock, and in propelling itself to its next target, knocked the turtle off its rather high rock and sent it crashing into the rock below before finally landing with a plunk in the water. He was swimming fiercely away, clearly pissed, running over a couple fellow turtles in his path. Poor guy!

Turtle Taxi

The only other interesting thing in the gardens is a miniature zoo. Actually it more closely resembles an American barnyard than a zoo. It has billy goats with big crazy horns, chickens and roosters, a lonely sad looking mule who seems to stand all day facing the wall of its tiny shed, a few fat sleepy cats (mysteriously residing in the chicken pin), some ducks and a cage full of parakeets.

We like goats!

Since we were so close, we made our way over to check out Hadrian’s Arch and the Temple of Zeus just beside each other. The arch was nice but a little less grand looking than it must have been when it was first built. I have a feeling that if Hadrian could see him arch today he would be very disheartened to see all the indifferent lanes of traffic zooming by and the advertisements visible through the arch on the buildings that now create a rather ”modern” backdrop.

Hadrian's arch

The Temple of Zeus is more interesting. All that remains are 15 columns and a rather small piece of what was once the roof that was supported by these massive, sturdy columns. It would have been quite an impressive sight in its day.

Temple of Zeus

Temple of Zeus detail