Greece - The beginning of the end of Europe
Trip dates: March 14, 2017 - March 22, 2017
Greece was our last country in Europe - hence the beginning of the end. We spent about a week in Greece split between Athens and the islands of Santorini and Milos, so hold on to your britches as Euro Trip is almost done!
Before I get to Greece though, we had quite a story leaving Croatia. This is pretty much a travel rant, so if you don't care, proceed down to the Good Greece Stuff.
Typically, when we fly, we avoid checking our two carry-on sized backpacks (ok, they can get a little heavy/fat compared to airline standards, but always fit in a standard overhead bin) and 2 day-packs that are just smaller backpacks. For the first time this whole trip, an airport employee check-in agent (didn't work directly for the airline) in Dubrovnik made us check our carry-on backpacks for our flight to Athens (with a layover in Istanbul). We hate, hate, hate having to check bags on multi-leg trips as that is the most common way for bags to get lost in transit.
It's not worth getting into it, but we politely argued with the lady for quite some time, with some shuffling and repacking of our bags, but it was a foregone conclusion that she wasn't going to budge and we ended up having to check them. grrr
"Your bags will be fine, don't worry" - Famous last words from the check-in lady. Last words because we'd never see her again, not that we did anything to her.
Lo and behold, we land in Athens and our bags don't show up! That might be one of the worst feelings: standing there at the carousel and seeing all the other passengers leave with their bags one by one, then finally the conveyer belt shuts off and you know you're screwed. Lishan and I looked at each other, really? Why are we not surprised?
Turns out, our bags were left in Istanbul and never made it on the flight to Athens. Thanks lady in Dubrovnik and Turkish Airlines. Our Turkish track record is not so hot, especially given the blizzard events in early Jan that stranded us in Bangkok for a few extra days. Good thing we have to fly them a bunch more throughout the rest of our trip!
Luckily, the bags did arrive the next day as promised (with much fretting on our part), with the only casualties being one of my luggage locks getting lost (just gone off the zippers) and a body wash that popped open in my toiletry bag that resulted in my entire bag smelling of argan oil. The latter was pretty much my fault, but I'd like to think that the body wash leaked out even more because of the extended time that I didn't have it. Yeah, I'll go with that.
Greece Stuff
OK now that that is all over with, on to the rest of Athens!
We took the metro train from the airport to Syntagma Square where our hotel was located. It was pretty straight forward, and we got a slightly better deal to buy 2 round trip tickets to the airport since we'd be heading back in a few days to head to Santorini (something like 18 euros per ticket).
Athens was a pretty big change in terms of what we’d been used to in Croatia. It was crowded and dense, yet also super spread out. There were people and vendors everywhere, including very pushy ones (but they’d back off faster than those in Istanbul). It reminded Lishan a lot of Cairo, with car noises, honking, vendors, and people bustling everywhere. It’s probably a bit unfair to Athens since we just came from Croatia, where we really enjoyed how not crowded it was and all the beautiful views of the water and great natural beauty everywhere.
For the first time, we also used the Rick Steve's audio tour app on our phones to help guide us on a walking city tour as well as to visit the Acropolis. We generally like to take our own time and explore, but we know we miss out on details, so we gave this a shot since we were both very interested in ancient and contemporary Greek history (thanks for the suggestion Glowoo!). We actually really enjoyed using the free audio guides - it gave us relevant information without dragging on too long, Rick only made super corny jokes once in a while, and the app was easy to use. It did get background killed due to taking HDR pictures once in a while, but that's more of an Android issue than anything else. We did run into much older travelers using it that made us feel... less... hip, but you can't win 'em all.
One of the coolest parts was when we went to the Church of Panaghia Kapnikarea on Ermou Street (big pedestrian street), where the audio guide was explaining the different behaviors that people would do as they entered, such as kissing the various paintings of Jesus, lighting tapers, etc. As soon as he finished talking about it, we saw Greeks come in and do just that! It helped us appreciate the culture and what we were seeing just a bit more than if we had just seen it without explanation.
On the way up to the Acropolis, the Rick Steve’s tour also took us through the tiny neighborhood of Anafiotika. This quaint neighborhood was very cute and reminded us more of what the island life in Greece was like, with narrow winding walkways, brightly colored doors with white cave style houses, and stray cats galore. We probably wouldn't have walked through there otherwise, so another bonus point for Rick Steve!
When we got to the Acropolis, we were sadly a bit underwhelmed. A lot of the statues and metopes are missing due to being broken, stolen, ‘appropriated’, or under repair. It was still cool to see the Parthenon in person, but big sections were covered in scaffolding and there was construction material everywhere. It was hard to appreciate the sheer size and architecture as a result.
For dinner that night, we wanted to eat somewhere not as touristy so we ended up at To Kati Allo, which was more of a local joint. It was a pretty small place but the people who ran it were very nice and cooked up some mean lamb chops.
We were flying out to Santorini on our second day, but we had the morning still to see Athens so we went to the Acropolis Museum. Unfortunately, half of the museum doesn't allow pictures, and it's really confusing when they do and do not allow pictures. They need better signage!
The lower floors of the museum were lots of recovered and restored art, vases, statues, etc. It got a bit overwhelming to be honest and we ended up breezing past a lot of them. The upper floors had the actual vase lady pillars from the Erechtion as well as numerous metopes pieces and statues from the Parthenon. It really conveyed how impressive the statues and metopes were, since they recreated many of them utilizing existing, remaining pieces along with plaster models from other known pieces (either molded from actual pieces or recreated based on historical art).
There was a video we watched that traced pieces of the Parthenon that were "collected" by the British and their voyage over sea, land, trading hands, etc. that was quite interesting. It's sad that there are many original pieces still being held by the British and won't be returned to the Greeks. See articles on the Elgin Marbles if you want to learn more - it's still controversial today.
The Acropolis Museum is a worthwhile stop if you're in Athens; the building architecture was cool in itself. Overall though, we feel like the museum could be organized a bit better. The top floor (the Parthenon) was definitely our favorite floor and made our trip to the Acropolis Museum worth it. You could probably spend a lot more time in the museum than we did, but we'd recommend going just for the Parthenon floor.
After the museum, we grabbed a super yummy and relatively cheap lunch nearby at Smile Restaurant. The price and convenience of souvlaki/gyro sandwiches and fresh vegetables in Greek salads were very much appreciated after the expensive Croatian food we'd been eating! It was also interesting that the most common gyro/souvlaki we saw was pork and chicken - we didn't really see beef/lamb which is more common in the states. The lamb we saw on menus was usually more chops or ribs.
Later that day, we flew out to the islands for a few days. But since we also popped in to Athens on our way back out for a night, I'm including those other details here too for brevity's sake. The night we got back from the islands, we went to a restaurant that was near Monastiraki station since we were taking the metro from the Piraeus port and needed to get off there anyways. Plus, they were supposed to have good lamb and this was likely the last good chops I'd have for a while!
When we got back to our hotel, we got upgraded (yeahhh Expedia gold+) to the sweet corner suite (get it?) that had a wrap-around balcony that was wicked. Too bad we only had it for the 1 night, this was probably the nicest room we'll have all trip!
Our flight out to Istanbul on the way to Johannesburg was not until the early evening the next day, so we took the opportunity to go see the Temple to Poseidon at Sounio. It was only about 40 minutes south of the Athens airport. So on our last day, we took the metro back to the airport and rented a car for a day (though we returned it only a few hours later). Because our rental was so short and the rental agent was a cool guy, we got upgraded to an Audi A3 cabriolet (convertible)! Lishan had never been in one with the top down, so we took advantage of the beautiful day to let our hair billow in the breeze. My hair has gotten pretty long so my hair did also billow.
The Temple of Poseidon was quite pretty and in a very scenic location, but it's a small stop for a day trip. It was a good way for us to kill a few hours but it would need to be combined with other sights for a true day trip from Athens. Apparently, there is also a way to take a bus from Athens to get there that is super cheap but it takes quite some time.
All in all, we spent about two full days in Athens (1.5 days on the way in, .5 days on the way out). It felt enough to see the big sights, though if we pushed, we probably could have done it all in one busy day. But it was nice to be able to take our time and not feel too rushed. If you’re a super Greek history/mythology buff, you could probably spend way more time in the many other museums that are around but we are not, so our time felt good.
Our visits to the islands are up next! Santorini and Milos both felt very different from Athens and from each other, and we took so many pictures, so stay tuned for those.
At the time of this writing, we're actually in South America already - eek we are missing all of Africa for blogging - but we're going forward as fast as we can! Hope everyone continues to enjoy reading through our travels and are inspired to either check out these places someday or are reliving their own memories.
