Aegina

Aegina. It's the closest island to Athens and is the first island that i visited here in Greece. It's very easy to get to, you just take one of the many ferries they have per day to there and it's lots of fun. There's not a lot to do, making it really only worth a day trip in my opinion.

You arrive in the main port and you immediately you see that the feel of the town is much different then Athens. There's no cars running by at high speeds, no honking, not as many motorbikes, making it fairly quiet. It's a nice little town, aptly named Aegina town. Those clever Greeks, they're so original :-). On the island there are two main places to go. One is the Temple of Apollo, the other, the Temple of Aphaia. Both are really impressive. Aphaia was my favorite personally. The bus station hardly deserves the name. It's literally a shack with a guy selling tickets. They barely spoke any english, making it difficult to figure out where to go/what to do. Not my idea of fun. We ended up having to take a taxi to Aphaia, which only cost 15 Euros, which isn't bad split 2 ways, but more expensive then the bus which was 1.20 Euros. Oh well.

The Temple of Aphaia was built by the Aeginatians (sp? the people of Aegina) around the 480's BCE. This temple is remarkable as it has two stories of columns, which i've never seen before in a Greek temple. You start to see it later when the Romans develop the arch, but not at this time. It was a beautiful temple, heavily restored to give vistiors an idea of the temple. The museum houses a large number of the finds, including some very helpful historical information on Aphaia/the area and the excavations. While some of the building was carted off by a guy from Bavaria (i think it was Bavaria), it was actually a good thing, as the locals were using the limestone in their kilns to make paint. So he in fact saved the temple, or at least the important stuff. Not bad.

The Temple of Apollo is in a far less well preserved state. Instead of a number of columns, there is only one. This one column is badly damaged, the rest were all melted down (again i think) by the locals. There are also remains of a Byzantine church built in the same area which is always cool, but all the signs were in German/Greek which made figuring out what things were a little difficult. Seeing as it's so close, it's not a bad idea to visit, but it's certainly not the most spectacular place in Greece.

The rest of the time we wandered around the town, visiting shops (most of which were tourist oriented) and enjoying the town. I wasn't overly impressed with the town or island, to be perfectly honest, but it's certainly worth a day trip. It also would work well as a jumping off point to get to other islands.

I'm almost caught up with my trips. Myknonos/Delos were this past weekend, and then i'll be caught up, till my next trip :-).