Saturday June 25 Athens Adventures

Greek Diary Saturday June 25
It is finally here!! Opening Ceremonies begin at 8pm, doors open at 5:30.  That is our focus today and we can’t wait! We have our outfits all planned out, Red, White and Blue all over the place.  For our morning activity we go to visit the Benaki Museum,, an outstanding museum founded in 1931 by Antonis Benakis, the son of a wealthy Greek who made his fortune in Egypt.  It is housed in an elegant Neo-classical mansion which was once the home of of the Benakis family. The collection contains a diverse array of Greek arts and crafts, paintings and jewelry, local costumes and political memorabilia that spans over 5000 years, from the neo-lithic to the 20th century.  Charlotte’s favourite thing was seeing all the religious articles and the costumes, Danny’s was  the offering ships and the offering people, used by folks when they made offerings.  Jerry liked the clothes, and noted how much more the Greeks were influenced by the Turks and Moroccans than by the western Europeans, and I loved the crown molding in all the rooms, the bridal bed, and the beautiful display cases, which were set up to show the artifacts in the case, and then paintings that showed the artifacts in use in their time period hanging behind. Cool!
We headed back to the acropolis area and hit our favourite gyro stand for our 3 Euro gyro lunch special. Met up with the DeVries folks and got the phone, stopped back down at the Plaka  at the store where Vicky was holding the SO items for me at a discount! And then home. We were looking forward to a movie in the AC, but there was another power outage, so we laid around and relaxed. We got dressed and ready to go and headed out. The main street near the stadium was closed and the street was swarming with folks heading to the Marble stadium.  Kallimarmaro Stadium is a huge marble structure set in a small valley by Ardito’s hill and occupies the exact site of the original Panathenaic Stadium built by  Lykourgos in 330-329 BC!It was first reconstructed for gladiatorial contests during Hadrian’s reign (AD 117-138), then was rebuilt in white marble by the wealthy Roman benefactor Herodes Atticus for the Panatheniac games in AD144. In 1895 a wealthy Greek made a big donation to rehab it on time for the first modern Olympic Games 5 April 1896.  During 2004 it hosted the marathon finish!  We have great seats and the people are filling it up-the air is magical, the athletes are lining up, the original music composed for the event is playing as the city darkens around us. Words cannot describe it, I cried at least 10 different times and during both the tribute to Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Tim Shriver’s speech I was bawling(so was Danny) fireworks, pageantry, singing, Stevie Wonder, Molly on the big screen, story of Odysseus acted out by dancers, people on stilts flying boats, doves, the whole shebang ended at 1am! Not kidding!  Jerry and Charlotte headed home at about midnight and were well away when the final fireworks were shot off and the torch lit. Danny and I stayed till the bitter end and then happily(and smugly) walked back to our apartment in 10 minutes!