“You don’t leave because you have somewhere to go, you leave because nothing is keeping you there.”
– Megan Leavey (2017)
Go-Date: Day 36, Wednesday Feb 27.
Lessons Learned: Find a spot where the locals eat and check it out. I don’t mean a bunch of 50 plus aged guys who wear Stalin mustaches and 2 weeks of Bradley Cooper growth on their chins, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, playing cards, drinking Ouzo and talking about the weather, politics, the Turks, and the good old days. Find the millennials. Guys and girls, especially if there are groups of women eating there, or better yet a woman dining alone in a crowded café’. It won’t be on a fancy street, probably more of an alley than a boulevard, and it won’t have a tout trying to get you in the door. If its crowded, find a table back by the kitchen and prepare for greatness. Food that will knock your socks off.
Regrets: We walked past Opos Palia (Which means ‘Papa Steve’ a local café 1 block from the Acropolis Museum) at least a dozen times in the two weeks we spent in Athens. It was always crowded. We never stopped in. That was a mistake. Even if it has a homemade sign out front, graffiti, and just looks tired. Three nights in a row it was packed (weeknights) and we began to suspect that this wasn’t a tour bus drop-off.
Last look at a great city
Okay, we returned to Athens on Friday Feb 22 and it was like returning to your old neighborhood. Unfortunately, sometimes you really can’t go home again. We really didn’t like our new apartment. It was dark, no balcony, cold, you really couldn’t open the blinds because we were right on the street (wave hello to the nice man wearing a trench coat looking into our apartment), and there was no view. Day 1 in town the weather was great. After that, not so good. It’s been cold, windy, cloudy, and you really didn’t want to go out in it. Katie and Sean were due in, but their flight was delayed about 14 hours so they lost an entire day in Greece due to travel difficulties. So this was turning out to be a bummer.
They finally arrived at about 3 AM Sunday morning after 36 hours of travel. They promptly went to bed. I stayed up because Texas Tech was playing Kansas in basketball. I told you we love this YouTube.TV and the HDMI interface into the IPAD. It was great. Especially since Tech whupped em by 29 points. The down side is I didn’t get to bed until around 5:30 AM. There would be hell to pay for that.
We had a great time with Sean and Katie, and I think they tolerated us. We went to the Acropolis Museum together then they braved the Acropolis top with howling 25-mph (12.5-kph) winds and a chill index in the lower 40’s (6 cel). Nobody was blown off and they spent the evening in a roof-top bar. I’m sure Katie has posted pics on Facebook.
We’ve done about all we wanted here, save visit the National Anthropological Museum (did it), Philopappos Hill (did it), and the Byzantine Museum (was closed). So we had two days and one night after Katie and Sean left for Rome to explore other spots in Athens. This is a big city, and the pulse really intensifies outside the Plaka and Monistriaki neighborhoods. We didn’t need this much energy, crowds, traffic, noise, and peddlers. So we returned to friendlier confines (avoiding Monastriaki Square, which was jammed with tourists on a Tuesday afternoon). We don’t know where everyone came from. Sunday its empty (weather wasn’t great) and Tuesday its packed (much better weather) but it’s still February.
Tonight, we take the overnight ferry to Crete. We leave at 9 (21:00) and get in at about 6 AM (6:00). We have our seasick medicine in hand.
Here is the photo journal of our last days in Athens.
