The trip: Part 4 (Athens)
Day four
We said goodbye-for-now to London and hopped an early flight to Athens. We flew over the Alps!
Then we embarked on a sweaty, crowded two-hour subway ride to our hotel.
We stayed at the Fresh Hotel, an ultra-modern place with lots of hot pink everywhere. When we got up to the room, none of the lights worked. We flipped every combination of switches we could think of before Kim finally called the front desk and said, “We need someone to come up and show us how the lights work.” The woman laughed at us and said you have to insert your key card into a slot in the wall before the electricity will work. (Is this a thing now? They might think about mentioning it at check-in so the guests aren’t made to feel like morons.)
We took a walk though the Plaka, which is the very touristy area surrounding the Acropolis. And when I say touristy, believe me. It was unreal. Block after block of young guys selling the same fake designer handbags, dime-store toys and cliche Greek souvenirs. And yet it was interesting. Unlike anywhere else I’d ever been.
Athens was kind of fascinating. Some areas of the city were pretty cosmopolitan, with upscale department stores and sushi restaurants and people walking around in suits. We were staying in the more “gritty” area of the city, with the outdoor meat markets and pet shops with caged pigeons on the sidewalk. But even there we saw many sanitation workers cleaning up trash and hosing down the sidewalks. Everything was very clean. But everything was also covered in graffiti. Everything. Here was one recurring theme:
Athens was also full of stray dogs. They just roamed around, crossing busy streets, sleeping on sidewalks. Many of them had collars, though they didn’t seem very interested in people. Most of them were really fat.
We took a short tour of the Plaka on the Sunshine Express, a little open-air trolley thing. It was sort of surreal how around every turn there was some new piece of astounding ancient history. There were ruins just right there, in the middle of town, like it was no big deal.
Dinner that night was seafood risotto at Palea Athina, which was our first opportunity to try octopus, which we loved!
Then we wanted some dessert and coffee, so we stopped into a deelish-looking patisserie called Chatzi. It took 30 minutes for the girl to explain to us in broken English what everything was. This was also the first time we noticed how expensive food is in Greece. The pastry I originally picked out was $18. (I chose something else.) The thimbles of cappuccino were $6 each. This came to be a running theme during our visit, and we considered it a major victory the next day when we got normal-sized coffees for only $4.











































