I woke up at about 4AM (my body clock was all messed up, of course), and with sleep nowhere in sight, I took a walk up to the Acropolis by myself. Of course the main area was all closed off, but there was plenty of other cool stuff to check out in the darkness. A sat up on a big rock overlooking the whole city for an hour, and on the way back to the hotel got to see the city waking up.

This was the day that Jim Morris was supposed to get in touch with the people providing the recording truck, and go get everything set up. As it turns out, for some reason, the recording truck people decided that they’d wait until the next day. Jim was kind of pissed, since that was the whole point in him coming over a day earlier, but it gave him a chance to hang out with the rest of us. With so few things going as planned in this business, it’s amazing most stuff works out as well as it does. Sometime later in the day, we all got out and walked over to the Olympic stadium. It’s quite a work of art, and it has a lot of steps you can climb. While I was up at the top row, I took a picture of the Acropolis, which you can now see in the background of the “Alive in Athens” cover art. When we came back down, we found Tom talking with a few locals hanging around at an outdoor bar next to the stadium. (Since it was winter, we were about the only tourists around). We all stood around and had a nice conversation, and before we know it, it’s three hours later. After about the fifth time that Jim said how hungry he was, one of the guys we were talking to, Nino, said “Ok, you all come over to my place and I’ll make you a nice dinner”. If someone says that in the U.S., you pretty much run the other way as fast as you can (and Jim almost did). But we figured it would be reasonably safe, so we walked to Nino’s apartment, where he proceeded to make one of the best meals we’ve ever eaten. We had a great time, and we invited him to the Iced Earth show the next night, but it didn’t seem like that was quite his thing.

Overall, I was very happy to have this time in Athens before the band got there, as it gave me a chance to see the area a bit more “normally” than I would later on when the band joined us.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 1999 at 11:19 am and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.