We took SkyEurope flight at 12:00 and arrived at Athens at 15:15. The weather was nice, much warmer than Vienna. I was first impressed by Greek letters. I have been studying math for many years, and it was the first time that I saw so many α, β, ε, η used in real life other than just for math problems. You can see in this picture how “Vienna” is written in Greek, very interesting, right?

Next, we asked for the transportation to go to the city center. Basically you can use:

either bus X95 (€3.2)
or metro (€6)

Of course we students chose the bus. It took us to Syntagma station in the very center of Athens. From Syntagma, you can take metro to go to your hotel/hostel which was Neos Olympos Hotel for us. Our hotel isn’t in the city center; therefore we needed to use the metro a lot; and because we would be staying there for 5 days, a good solution was to buy the 7-day ticket (€10). FYI, a one trip ticket is €0.8 for the metro and €0.5 for the bus.

We took the metro to Larissa Station and from there; we walked south along Deligiani Street and it took about 10 minutes to get to the hotel. This is a small and cheap hotel which costs only €14 per person per night. You can have buffet breakfasts in the next restaurant with the price of €4, from 8:30 am to 11:00 am. I think that it’s cheap for tourists.

In a group of 4 guys, we booked a 4-bed room with an ensuite bathroom which is very convenient since we can live our stuff in the room without worrying about losing anything. The room is also cleaned once in 2 days, which is really nice. You have towels, but neither soap nor shampoo. Don’t expect a perfect bathroom with this price. However, I satisfied with the hotel. Oh, and you have free connect to the Internet. They put 2 computers on the 4th floor. The connection was very fast, but those 2 old computers were very slow. You can bring your laptop and use the cable to connect as I did. Remember that there was no wireless connection.

In the evening, we went out for dinner and had a quick look near Acropolis. There were not many choices for dinner and we entered a fancy restaurant. The usual price for an acceptable portion here was around €10, but the food was really nice. See how happy Yansen was with his Kalamari dish. Mush, Sadnan and me took Chicken Souvlaki, a typical food here.