New friends and good coffee
Tuesday, September 13th: Athens, Greece
After catching up on sleep, we got up and headed to the Philopappos monument on Mousion Hill. We walked through a park with emerging views of the Acropolis, admired the houses with the rooftop pools, passed a turtle crunching in the desert bushes and continued making our way through the park.
We observed an old church and the Socrates prison as we got deeper into the park toward the Acropolis. We strolled through new neighborhoods lined with restaurants and shops. The day starts late here in Greece where we didn’t see breakfast being served until close to 9:00 AM.
It was around noon and we still hasn’t had anything to eat, so we were on a mission to find a place for lunch. We stopped at Sabbas and had a plate of meat (two types of pork - gyro and kebab), a pork gyro and a side of tzatziki.
We’re also quickly realizing our world history classes back in high school were not sufficient to contextualize the ancient sites and ruins embedded throughout Greece. We’ve been spending a good amount of time on Wikipedia.
We went back to the AirB&B to quickly freshen up and make the drive toward Kefalari to visit Christina. Liz fell asleep early on the 40-minute drive while Matt continued to navigate the Athens traffic on his own. We arrived at Veniero and met up with Christina, her husband (Dave) and her kiddos (Cleo and Pericles). We enjoyed a couple of hours of company, shared some appetizers and enjoyed a Greek freddo cappuccino and pink grapefruit soda. Pericles slept through most of the visit, but Cleo was wide awake and attentive, though a tad shy at first. Christina brought us a wedding gift of two bottles of Greek wine.
After they departed, we wandered around the neighborhood and went grocery shopping (coming out with $60 worth of groceries for about half the price, including a half kilo of feta cheese for $4).
We drove back to the AirB&B and walked to our new favorite local gyro shop. We are still learning the menu offerings and prices (souvlaki vs. gyro vs. kebab) and got a box of pork gyro meat and a chicken gyro wrap.
Accommodations: AirB&B, Filopappou, Athens
