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bktheirregularHeat wave continues in Athens. Weekend was rather quiet, taken up with relaxation and some exploring of the city - oh yeah, and one important piece of shopping.
Normally, in my 'verse, "important" and "shopping" have a kind of magnetic repulsion thing going, but in this case, necessity was the mother of expenditure, so I headed out in the blazing sun and picked up a fan for the apartment. Made a major difference.
Sunday was taken up with some generic poking around the city. The country of Greece being predominantly Greek Orthodox, most everything is shut down on Sundays - like the saying goes, the town is dead. Not so much, the port of Piraeus, though. Activity seven days a week, there, so many of the businesses that support the operation of the port remain open on the day of rest. Observation was a little interesting; many of the slips were empty, probably because their usual tenants were out on the open seas. Some boats came in and did a fairly quick turnaround, though; time on the dock is time wasted, while time in transit is time earning money.
A number of types of craft come in and out of the harbor; some light hydrofoils, a few light catamaran-hull passenger boats, and I saw at least one ferryboat that looked like the big sister of the landing craft they used in World War II and people might have seen in Saving Private Ryan. (Fun fact: a lot of the Greek shipping magnates got their starts by purchasing World War II surplus.) The majority of the traffic, though, I suspect, falls into two categories: cat-hull car ferries and monohull car ferries. Cat-hulls are the high-speed ferries, generally taking passengers in airplane-like conditions (though there's more room to move around) and passenger cars on the cargo deck; monohull ferries are the more traditional design, with lower speeds but higher cargo capacity, and they normally handle freight truck and oil tanker traffic.
Got a ticket on one of the cat-hull ferries out to the islands on Friday, to visit family for a few days over the coming weekend. In the meantime, things chug along.
Normally, in my 'verse, "important" and "shopping" have a kind of magnetic repulsion thing going, but in this case, necessity was the mother of expenditure, so I headed out in the blazing sun and picked up a fan for the apartment. Made a major difference.
Sunday was taken up with some generic poking around the city. The country of Greece being predominantly Greek Orthodox, most everything is shut down on Sundays - like the saying goes, the town is dead. Not so much, the port of Piraeus, though. Activity seven days a week, there, so many of the businesses that support the operation of the port remain open on the day of rest. Observation was a little interesting; many of the slips were empty, probably because their usual tenants were out on the open seas. Some boats came in and did a fairly quick turnaround, though; time on the dock is time wasted, while time in transit is time earning money.
A number of types of craft come in and out of the harbor; some light hydrofoils, a few light catamaran-hull passenger boats, and I saw at least one ferryboat that looked like the big sister of the landing craft they used in World War II and people might have seen in Saving Private Ryan. (Fun fact: a lot of the Greek shipping magnates got their starts by purchasing World War II surplus.) The majority of the traffic, though, I suspect, falls into two categories: cat-hull car ferries and monohull car ferries. Cat-hulls are the high-speed ferries, generally taking passengers in airplane-like conditions (though there's more room to move around) and passenger cars on the cargo deck; monohull ferries are the more traditional design, with lower speeds but higher cargo capacity, and they normally handle freight truck and oil tanker traffic.
Got a ticket on one of the cat-hull ferries out to the islands on Friday, to visit family for a few days over the coming weekend. In the meantime, things chug along.