That translates to Eureka!  It was originally said by Archimedes while he was taking a bath.  NO!  Not for that reason you dirty minded folks!  He realized that weight could be measured by water displacement and was reputed to have run through the streets naked shouting Heurika!

So does anyone know, with the above reference, where this post is talking about?

Athens, Greece.  This was our next stop in the Schengen Area and we spent a crazy week trying to jam as much as we could into a very short amount of time.

We based ourselves in Athens instead of trying to cram in a few days on one of the many islands in the area and I’m glad that we did it that way.  We’ll have to come back to Greece as there are just too many sights to take in during a short weeks stay.  I think that the island of Santorini deserves it’s own month!

Really though, in Athens alone there is just so much to see that we had a hard time figuring out how to approach it!  We found ourselves in a lovely Airbnb rental that included pickup/dropoff from the airport, and excellent proximity to transport as well as coffee shops and supermarkets.  The coffee shops were a necessity as we still had to do school and needed wifi for that 🙂

This is a photo of the kids on our first day out.  It was smokin hot as we climbed all around the Theater of Dionysus on the Acropolis.  Grace saw this piece of random stone and decided it would be cool to keep it….and then rethought that and said ‘Let’s just all touch it and take a picture!”.

We went to see the Temple of Olympian Zeus as well.  It’s staggering to think that this amazing sight once had 104 of these huge pillars and took a total of 7 CENTURIES to complete!

Of course we had to go to the Parthenon …

While we were there we were also able to see the Erechtheion, which was once a temple dedicated to Athena.

During one of the days we were just wandering around, we ended up at Syntagma Square right as they were performing the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  It was impressive to watch the two guards perform their steps in unison.

I want to remind you all that it was incredibly hot in Athens during our week there.  We drank our weight in water every day that we went out and dealt with the younger ones complaints of death by sweating!   But we made it….our days out were interspersed with touristy sights and walking through neighborhoods.  We encountered the National Gardens  which offered a lovely shady respite during one extraordinarily hot afternoon.  And on our days spent doing school we searched out all the wonderful local foods we could find.  My favorite was anything bourek.  Bourek is a type of pastry made from phyllo dough and filled with anything from cheese and minced meat to veggies.  The ones from the local coffee shop were filled with feta and I could have eaten them for a month.  Plus they were cheap and filling 🙂

It was a full week in Athens and there was so much that we didn’t see.  But we are beginning to realize that we could travel the world for our whole lives and never see it all.