Yassas! Athens in a nutshell

 

Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well!

I promised to come back as soon as we left Italy and here I am reporting the first official branch of our trip directly from the ferry for Chios :)

On Monday evening we took the Superfast ferry from Bari to Patra through Igoumenitsa (17 hours). It was so cold outside that we ended up spending the whole trip sleeping (Stefano) and reading Kerouac (me). 

 On The Road is my book at the moment :)

It rained in Patra and in a couple of hours we already saw the most important parts of the city. So we decided to get a coach to Athens straight after our more than deserved souvlaki (in a pita for Stefano and hero bread for me).
The sight from the coach, though, was a real spectacle. We had the sea by one side and the hills from another, and they magically switched sides as soon as we passed Korinthos.
We approached Athens in the evening and we stayed at the hostel Zeus in Sofokleus, a few meters from the ancient Agora and Monastiraki.
I would actually recommend it as it was the perfect compromise of quality and price (9 euros per night in a 4 bed dorm, clean, discreet, and the staff was really friendly. They even do bar crawls all together at 10pm every night!) and you can reach almost everything in no time.

 

Wall art at Zeus' is quite...unusual. But we had a great time :)

Athens is relatively cheap (for us, it really was!), we managed to eat excellently

for no more than 12 euros including appetisers and drinks. On Wednesday though, we wanted to spoil ourselves a bit and we had ouzo after dinner. 20 euros was the highest bill we paid so far for meals.

Kalamata olives are our current obsession.

You can't talk about Greece without mentioning ouzo. Like French pastis and Italian sambuca, it goes wonderfully down your stomach, but don't do more than two at the time :)

WARNING: The following part is not veg-friendly. If you're vegetarian, vegan, or just easily shockable, you can skip this part.

I woke up on Wednesday morning and I found Stefano looking at me, fully dressed and the largest smile on his face I ever saw.
“I just had the best coffee in the world! And the meat and fish market…you have to see it!”
So i dressed up in a record time and he took me to drink Turkish coffee first, then we went to the Agora Market.
Growing up in city-like towns, I have seen meat and fish only in plastic boxes on supermarket shelves.
It was quite shocking then for me to see whole chickens hanging from steel hooks or calf and pig heads ranged on counters as decorations.
Not mentioning the shark head in the fish area!

Spice nook next to Agora

 

Turkish-style coffee. We will talk later about this :) 

Tea varieties exposed at Mokka cafe in Athinas

The Hellenic Parliament in Syntagma. Hats off for the guard!

Later on we decided to walk up to the temple of Zeus and Syntagma Square, then to Piraeus to book our ferry to Chios.
In Athens we also took the chance to see some friends, Stefano spent the afternoon with his fellow vaper Ioannis from Elcigart and in the evening we had a round of drinks with my friend Jim, bassist from Keepers of Jericho.
Today we spent most of our day gathering energies and right now we’re in the middle of the Aegean Sea on our way to Chios.

I know we barely saw anything considering the mole of stuff you can find here, but time was quite limited and so are our energies and our budget :/ but don't worry, we're planning another visit here...

Τα λέμε σύντομα for now!

Pics by me and Steve Genzo