For thanksgiving I went to Athens, Greece with my friend Claudio. Our trip went pretty well, but Athens, in general, wasn’t a city that struck me as an amazing city.
My knowledge of the international phonetic table and Russian helped a lot to read the greek letters that is their alphabet, but I am not for sure Claudio or I learned any greek words during out trip…which is kinda sad. I guess that was due to the fact that most people spoke English to us (which is usually what happens when I travel).
We arrived early afternoon. We got to our hotel and settled in a bit. But because it is winter time, the sky got dark really early…which means that there isn’t much to do with regards to tourism. We just decided to walk around the city a bit, then finding a place to eat dinner.
We saw some storefronts, a guy selling corn on the cob on the street, a market, a cool, strange woman in the stairwell of a metro stop, dark alley lit up by street lamps, various graffiti around the city, and a store called things.
We finally decided on a restaurant to eat at in a more trendy area of the city (though in general the city looked pretty run down). The restaurant was very good, the best one of our trip. I had chicken kabob with vegetables and pita which was very tasty. We also ordered an appetizer called fava; a pea puree. The fava was so good!!! Look it up on the internet on how to make it!
The next more I took a few photos from our view outside of our hotel window.
We headed out and made out way to the acropolis!
On our way we saw many stands selling a kind of bread in the shape of a circle. I didn’t try it, but it sure looked very similar to the bread that I saw in turkey.
We saw a man looking rather down on his luck on the street.
There was a stand selling these old cassette tapes. After I took the picture the man at the kiosk yelled at me a bit for taking the picture.
We found a huge meat market. We went inside and found this man selling some kind of drink.
I love this little girl. Who knows what she was trying to do?
In the meat market, one of the stands had this stuffed animal sheep standing on some railing in their shop.
We got outta there quick and made our way closer to the acropolis. There was a man that was walking briskly past us with some contraption to carry some drinks.
Of course I trip to another country wouldn’t be complete unless I took some pictures of a stray cat. This one was very friendly to me!
Old things around everywhere!
We started our ascent to the acropolis when I saw this awesome plant with cool, yellow ball like flowers.
The view of the city was actually starting to look pretty nice. The view of the city and the surrounding area isn’t that bad at all.
We made it to another view point on the way up and we saw that we were getting closer and closer to the acropolis. Little did I know beforehand that the acropolis was actually on top of a very high hill.
Claudio and I took some pictures of each other.
There was much to see in the area of the acropolis. There were many rules to follow too, as well as a lot of scaffolding interrupting our views of the place.
The views from up there were pretty amazing. We could see some columns down below that didn’t look so big from up high, but we found out later that down below these columns were actually pretty impressive in size. (it is where the temple of zues used to be).
The area of the acropolis was pretty cool and I really tried to take it all in; all the history.
We made our way down and made our way to the temple of zues area.
The sky was beautiful, the weather was warm, and the sights that we saw were cool.
There was this old woman sitting on a bench that caught my attention.
Off to lunch. We went into an organic grocery store to ask the store worker if there was a good organic restaurant nearby. We were in luck! He directed us to a place just a couple blocks down the street from his store.
The food there was really good. We also had some fruit shakes. The English menu though caught my attention when it said roasted manure. Does anybody know what that is?
All around the city we saw medium to large sized dogs. Most of the time though they weren’t walking around getting into trouble, they were always sound asleep on the pavement or in the grass. It was really an interesting phenomenon. I mean there were sleeping dogs everywhere in the city!
This was the main square in the city…I think. We caught the train here the next day (when it basically rained all day) to the port. It wasn’t anything spectacular really, but it was nice to walk around there a bit.
On our way back to our hotel we saw some cool greek statues that were situated high in the air.
Then we ran into a fashion shoot!
Athens was definitely getting ready for the holiday season. There were Christmas things up everywhere! They also had these stores, many stores, that only sold Christmas related things and decorations. These stores were JAMMED packed with stuff. It was way gaudier than any Christmas store to be found in the united states. Another surprise for me about this city.
The last day was rainy as I mentioned earlier. We just spent most of the day in this one museum, which was supposedly one of the most important museums in the whole world. I guess I would have to agree, it had some great sculptures. I actually learned some things while walking around.
Overall, Athens was just ok for me, but of course a person needs to go there. I really wish we would have taken a day to visit some of the nearby islands or at the very least get out of the city a bit to see the countryside. Next time I guess!
And I suppose that many of my readers have seen the recent news about the riots in Athens. During one evening, we actually saw a protest of 1000s of people walking the streets of downtown Athens. Their protest seemed pretty peaceful though.
