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<\/a>There are some advantages to having been in Athens four\u00a0\u00a0times in three For me though the advantage was that when we had free time in the afternoon, I knew what I wanted to do\u2014and I had some unfinished business from May.\u00a0\u00a0I had, for one thing, never walked around the Acropolis hill; I had gotten halfway last May, only to realize the wondrous sites closed at 3\u2014I realized that at 3:15, so I hit them first.\u00a0\u00a0Our guide had mentioned the With an hour and a half remaining, I took the subway to an area of the city that housed a number of museums.\u00a0\u00a0One that I really wanted to see was closed on Tuesdays, and I decided I would visit either the Cycladic Art museum (I think 1100 BC), or the Byzantine and Christian art museum, which I\u2019d visited three years ago before I had been to Constantinople.\u00a0\u00a0What I decided was that I would go to the first one I came to\u2014since I had barely But probably the best thing about having been to Athens as often as I have of late is that I did not feel compelled to stay there longer, which is why I\u2019m writing this 180 miles away, in the second largest city in Greece, Thessaloniki, eagerly awaiting a guided tour tomorrow that will add to my knowledge of the Greek world, the Roman world (one of the co-emperors with Diocletian made it his headquarters), the Byzantine world (it was the second city of the Empire), the Venetians, the Turks (Mustafa Kemal, who turned Turkey to the West after World War I, was born here)\u2014in short, more of what we\u2019ve seen for the last two weeks.<\/p>\n<\/a> years. For one thing, it means that even if we went to the same things, I might pick up something new.\u00a0\u00a0For example, did you know why the Olympic Stadium was built where it was?\u00a0\u00a0Reputedly, it\u2019s where the runner of the first \u201cMarathon,\u201d coming to announce the victory over the Persians, blurted out the victory\u2014and literally died.\u00a0\u00a0And as often as I\u2019ve ridden the metro in Athens (one of the few places with no graffiti), I\u2019d not really paid attention to the excavations, which are part of the d\u00e9cor; dig anywhere in Athens, and you\u2019re back in the 6th<\/sup> century BC (when Athens had sewage disposal pipes, a system lost on medieval Europe).\u00a0\u00a0Or you might get taken somewhere new, like the Orthodox Cathedral, which would have been more impressive had it not been under wraps.<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>Agora (marketplace) as worth a visit, since it was not only a sprawling ruin, but a well-designed museum, and you know how hard it is for me to miss a museum.\u00a0\u00a0In addition to the marketplace, it had temples (which became churches, and in some cases became mosques), with a lot of reconstruction.\u00a0\u00a0It has the largest Doric column temple in existence today.\u00a0\u00a0I also had time to visit the library of Hadrian, a first century AD emperor who spent a lot of time adding to the monuments in Athens .\u00a0\u00a0He built a triumphal arch that marked the division between the Roman and Greek parts of the city, and completed the Temple of Zeus (with its enormous columns) that had been begun 500 years earlier!<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>enough time to waltz through\u00a0\u00a0I came (happily) to the Byzantine museum, housed in one of those 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century palaces that dignify Athens almost as much as its ancient ruins.\u00a0\u00a0The exhibits included some discussion of how the Parthenon was transformed into a Church, and a nice history of icons in the Orthodox Church (for about a century, the controversy over their acceptability threatened to blow the Orthodox church apart).\u00a0\u00a0I had time enough to buy the catalog, and get back to the boat for our closing ceremonies.\u00a0\u00a0Cruises tend to end with a filet dinner and baked Alaska, and this was no different.<\/p>\n