Catching up with 2018: Athens ~ Thursday, February 07, 2019

Last December I attended the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, to present a paper on visual formatting of speech-recognition results, in Athens, Greece.

There are lots of things to see in Athens that you already know about and don't need my blog to find pictures of. So here are a pictures of some less famous sights: Athens has a large metro system, which is efficient and fast, whose trains are sometimes quite graffitti'ed. A lot of underground stations have displays of artifacts that were discovered during excavation. There is also a light rail system with some nice trackage along the coastline, and I found a crew-layover shelter built out of a tramcar from Athens's original transit system. There are also lots and lots of trolleybusses, and there's a hill with a funicular to the top (I didn't make it to that one).

The Parthenon and other buildings of the Acropolis are being slowly repaired, and there are interesting cranes and a small narrow gauge railway to move stones around.

Aside from the famous truly ancient buildings, there are some medium-old buildings to see too. If you happen across an Orthodox church with the doors open and can take a look without bothering a service, it's definitely worthwhile to do so. There are a few neighborhoods full of older buildings that are now tourist zones, like the Plaka. Most of the city is relatively moderns but you can find older structures squeezed between--a lot of them seem to be abandoned, but are at least picturesquely falling apart.

The city is also full of cats. There doesn't seem to be a distinction between strays and pets in Greece; people just put out food for them and sometimes build little cat-shelters, and they take care of themselves otherwise.