Amateur Traveler episode 832. Today the amateur traveler talks about

marketplaces and ancient marketplaces, a republic and a cheeky emperor, really

public bathrooms and skin-eating fish as we go to Athens, Greece.

Welcome to the amateur traveler. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. Let's talk about Athens.

This is Chris again and rather than interrupt the guest, I've got a story to tell you because a funny thing happened on the way to recording an episode about the Peloponnese in Greece and that is the episode got so long,

more than an hour and a half long, that I've cut it into two pieces.

And this is the first piece which is just about Athens. And then next week we'll talk about the Peloponnese

Peninsula. I'd like to welcome to the show Sally Jane Smith, a travel writer who has come to talk to us about a region of Greece.

Sally Jane, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Chris. It feels quite surreal actually to be sitting here after all these years

of listening to you on my walk to work.

Well, I appreciate your listening.

What region of Greece are we going to talk about today?

So today I'm going to focus on an itinerary that starts in Athens because that's where most people will enter Greece and then travels along the eastern half of the Peloponnese and a couple of the Sironic islands. So this is a collection of sites you can see

quite comfortably in about nine days traveling by bus, metro and ferry. Of course you can

stay longer but with these nine days you can have a satisfying experience of what this region of Greece has to offer.

Excellent. And when we say the Peloponnese, we're talking about a peninsula or an island depending on how one defines it these days which is the

southern third of Greece starting in Corinth.

Yeah so if you're looking at a map of Greece there is a peninsula that sort of looks like a hand that's stretching down towards the Mediterranean.

It looks like it's a four-fingered hand or a thumb and three fingers.

And the area I'll be focusing on are the two fingers

that are closest to the mainland, so that's Laconia and Argyllis.

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