Took today off work to head back to Athens and have a four-day weekend being a tourist. We also decided to swap out the rental car since our first month was up today, and the brakes really needed to be fixed. The plan was to get up early, drive back roads towards Athens until we needed to get on the highway to get to the airport, and then take the metro into Athens and pick up a new car on Monday.
And yet, despite that, we still stayed up way too late last night and got a later start than we wanted.
With the suitcase already packed and loaded, though, we made a quick exit, stopped in town to get coffee and a tiropita from the corner bakery, and got on the road!
(I didn’t take a picture of the tiropita but I’ll still put a language block …)
tiropita | τιροπιτα | cheese pie
I like a savory breakfast. I like a handheld breakfast. I don’t think you should regularly give me a big square slice of a giant pie made of a dozen layers of crispy phyllo dough stuffed with some sort of tangy fresh cheese, with all its potentially crumbly shards of broken-off phyllo, especially while I’m driving, but in this case, I was pretty proud of myself, as I was able to order the tiropita, answer the question with the correct yes/no answer (which is a trick in itself), and would have gotten out without outing myself as non-lingual if I could have just given her a second two-euro coin and not looked at her stupified when she wanted more than two euro for the slice. (It was €2.20, let’s not get crazy, it’s still Greece.)
(I was less proud of the eating but I managed to get most of it in my mouth.)
The route we took headed off the island towards Patras, a large town on the Gulf of Corinth that we came through on Day One, then skirted the gulf on a curvy route towards Delphi before heading overland towards Athens.
Patras is a choke point that you pretty much have to go through if you’re going east-west in Greece, since it has really the only crossing point across that gulf — a good-sized bridge that crosses the nearest land gap. You get some pretty spectacular views (and the town and the gulf) as you come down the mountains towards the city.
On the other side of town, we stopped at what we thought was a truck stop, mostly because of my tiny bladder, but we also took the opportunity to get some food before continuing our trip. The truck stop had a bakery with sandwiches and a grill with all manner of cooked foods — souvlaki, sausages, meatballs, a bunch of options, and appeared to be ready for a mountain of luncheoners to descend on what was (at the time) a completely empty cafe. I mean — stacks of skewers, some cooked, some still raw, but enough to feed a good sized office building, which was not immediately evident nearby. I got a souvlaki stick and a sausage, some fries and some beverages, and we snacked in the car, and while we sat there, a giant bus pulled up and let thirty people off who all headed into the truck stop! And then a second showed up just as we were getting ready to leave! So — at least now we knew how the lunch crowd was showing up — but we still have no idea why they were being delivered to this particular truck stop, or what the passengers were doing on the bus in the first place.
(We learned later that some bus tours from Athens do include a stop like this for lunch, but we still don’t have any idea what sort of tourists would be doing this in January, or even what tourist destination exists on that western coast of Greece.)
Renourished, we got back on the road, taking the path along the northern coastline of the gulf before arriving in Itea and deciding to postpone a planned stop in Delphi since we wanted to try and get to Athens while it was still light out. Dropped the car at the airport without any fanfare, and hopped on the metro train back into the city right at rush hour. Doh.
The stop for the hotel was Monastiraki, and the metro entrance dumps you directly into Monastiraki Square and Hadrian’s Library, which is quite the introduction to the ruins and ancient architecture that provide the city with most of the tourist attractions. The Library pulled H’s attention for a while, and then we crossed the square and checked into the hotel and dropped our bag before heading back out to find dinner.
The area around Monastiraki is full of tavernas offering Greek specialties to the tourists who pass through heading to or from the Acropolis, but there’s also a number of side streets with all manner of food offerings — Italian, Asian, hamburgers (!) — but after some miscommunication we ended up getting Greek fast food anyways, which was acceptable but not spectacular. Dessert, however, was spectacular — loukoumades, which are little fried balls of dough covered in honey or chocolate or some other sauce.
loukoumades | λουκουμαδεσ | tasty fried balls of dough
We decided to get the “traditional” toppings of honey and cinnamon for our first attempt, and quickly decided there was no reason to try any of the froofy “modern” toppings, as the honey was the perfect sweet touch to the warm little doughnuts.
Big plans for tomorrow — take advantage of the colder weather and head up the Acropolis and hope the clouds and temps deter whatever other tourists are in the city.