One day in Athens is not enough. We decided to get the Hop on hop off bus rather than go on tour and wait for others to keep up hopefully we would see more by ourselves. The ship was docked in Piraeus which is seven miles from Athens and the Piraeus bus connects with the Athens city bus making it easy to get into the city. Our first stop was the Acropolis along with hundreds of others. It is quite a sight to see but of course there is scaffolding around the Parthenon, the restoration has been going on since 1975. We saw people from the ship tour and they had already had enough of waiting around and their tour went for eight hours. We took a free walking tour offered by the bus and heard about Socrates 470BC and his thinking which is still used in education today where saw a cave where he may have been held and finally poisoned 399BC. We did go away from the Parthenon and see places we probably would not have seen if we went ourselves but it took up a lot of our time. Our next stop was Hadrian's Arch and the Temple of Zeus on which construction began in the sixth century BC and was not completed for 638 years. After the fall of the Roman Empire the temple was quarried for other buildings in the city. Despite this you can still see the immensity of the building and get an idea of how grand it would have been.
We took the bus around the other city sites without getting off as we didn't want to get caught up in peak hour traffic and miss the boat.