Author: dave

Light day today. Ended up staying up a little late last night and not getting up until nearly noon, and then just made a sandwich for breakfast and hung out in the apartment. H snoozed after breakfast some more so I watched Youtube videos by some guy who creates music sample packages for old instruments he finds and rebuilds, and old Casio keyboards and toys. I can’t imagine what I would ever use them for but they seem fun. But all that being said, gotta get our time right so we can take advantage of the upcoming weekend.

Tried a new place for lunch today, another counter-type place around the corner from the apartment. This one is a sort of pizza place with square pizzas that you can get a slice of, or a small calzone or piece of focaccia. I got a bolognese calzone and the similarity to a peinirli was not lost on me, but it was pretty tasty. It’ll be nice to have a new option for quick food.

After lunch, we wandered around to Tailor Made and got coffee and sat and chatted about videos, and making sure that we’re capturing these moments that mostly we’re still just experiencing — walking down alleys under the Acropolis, how modern graffiti is covering centuries-old columns — it’ll be things that will help evoke the feeling of being here when we’re just watching videos on Youtube.

Last stop was AB to pick up some soda. Back to the apartment. Arsenal play tonight!

It’s been two full weeks here in Athens. Walking down the street to grab lunch and seeing the Acropolis looming in the background somehow has yet to get old.

We decided late last night that we wanted tacos for lunch today, so we got moving (before noon!) and sat for lunch at Ancho. We got a special show by a roving band of musicians as they wandered through the ped-mall playing in front of the various tavernas. Must have been a dozen guys, various brass instruments and drums. There was a guy playing a tuba!

Then we picked up and headed to the other side of the neighborhood to get coffee and dessert at a place called Bless Me Father. (It’s the secret coffee shop that we ditched last weekend!) Coffee and brunch during the day, bumpin’ and cocktails at night. We’re too old to bump so we got coffee (a latte for H and a cold brew for me) and some profiteroles. It’s nice to have something sweet with the coffee.

I finally cooked for dinner. (We’ve made spaghetti and bolognese sauce a few times but that barely counts as cooking.) We brought American curry powder and chili powder with us this time, figuring that those featured pretty predominantly in the foods we like to make, but it’s easy and cheap to get “fast food,” so we really hadn’t put the effort into really cooking. But I had bought the stuff to make curry some time in the middle of the week and it was definitely the last thing “missing” from our diet, as it really hit the spot.

Time for the weekend. Wonder where we’ll end up!

It’s the weekend. Time to do some exploring!

Hoping to have better results than our first “exploring” outing in Tirana, I still turned us north out of the apartment, as that’s really the one direction we hadn’t explored. (South is Monastiraki and Ermou Street, where we go all the time; east is Syntagma and west is Psyrri and we’ve dipped toes around those.)

(Mostly I want to see if there are other options for fast lunches or dinners. Man cannot live on noodles / cheeseburgers / asian alone.)

We wandered up a pedestrian street lined with shops that felt a little more “neighborhood-y” than tourist-y. Not quite a specialized district though — some shoes, some clothes, a coffee shop — more like a bunch of shops for the residents living around it. Our first stop was when we noticed a counter that looked like it was selling little donuts and H asked me what they were selling so I read the sign:

ΛΟΥΚΟΥΜΑΔΕΣ & ΜΠΟΥΓΑΤΣΑ

Loukoumades and bougatsa! Yeah I can be on board with that. The place is called Krinos and they are a seriously old-school bakery, and I had pinned them on our map, but I hadn’t really looked at it before setting out — kinda the opposite of exploring, I guess. No English on the menu, old linoleum floors and tiny tables and chairs, and another service counter back in the back where they were frying hot loukoumades for immediate consumption. I got us a plate with “syrup” and a couple of drinks to share. They were lighter than the ones we had at the namesake place on Irini Square, and we both agreed they were probably more enjoyable.

Sweets though can only get us so far, so as we now knew we were on the backside of the meat market, we decided to go around the market to try out Mokka, a coffee roaster and cafe that offers ibrik coffee, similar to Turkish or Bosnian coffee, finely ground and brewed in a copper pot in a heated sand bed. We tried a couple different options, both were interesting and enjoyable.

After that, we took a short walk up to Omonia Square before deciding to loop back towards Syntagma. H had found another coffee shop to check out, which I’ll mention in a later post when we actually get there, because we got distracted by a photo stop and then our hunger and found a taco shop that looked straight out of Mexico City, and stopped for a much-needed meal.

The tacos were great. They even had jamaica so I’m pretty sure they’re actually from Mexico. We got an assortment of tacos and some guacamole, and all of them were delicious, especially the birria — that’s the ‘must get’ for the next visit.

By the time we finished up there, the coffee shop had switched over to ‘young people out to be seen’ mode and the music was bumpin’, so we zigged and zagged our way back towards areas we kinda knew. Even though H had gotten a margarita in the waning moments of our taco stop, we both agreed that more wine was in order, and we found a pizza shop that we had been recommended and it was still early, so we checked to see if we could get a table and some drinks. They said it was OK so long as we were out by 8:30, so we had about two hours — we ordered a pizza and a bottle of prosecco and I’m not bad about continuing to celebrate H’s new job. (And we were out by like 8!)

We wound our way around on the way back to the apartment, trying to avoid Ermou Street, since it tends to be insanely busy and very very touristy. We grabbed a little gelato from Da Vinci and took a seat on the steps of Agias Irinas, the church near the apartment, to eat and soak in the nightlife.

Lots of fun. Lots of new favorites, lots of places we’ll go back to. My phone says 5737 steps which is about half of a normal Paris day? Didn’t feel like it.

Was thinking about how little Greek food we’ve eaten since we’ve been back in Athens. One gyro takeout, one nice sit at Diodos, that’s been it. Need to resolve that this weekend. And it is the weekend, which I’m pretty happy about! Even if I just end up sitting in one of the cafes around the apartment for five hours.

Also need a haircut. I googled to see if there were any barber shops around and I didn’t see anything and I haven’t seen any in my wanderings around for takeout. Another stark difference to Albania, where there are barbers in every block. If I wait until Albania to get a haircut I’ll practically be back at 2021.

(and no one wants that)

Another quiet day in, although H is getting to the tail end of being sick, so I’m hopeful she’ll be ready to get out by the weekend. I went out and got her coffee to remind her what’s waiting for her in the world. I know it’s no Dope, but I think Tailor Made is pretty decent still, only really lacking the cardamom buns to really make it high quality.

I am ready to get back out! I need to figure out my editing for videos — I took a ton in Paris and want to put it together, but I feel like I should finish up the Hudson Valley and the NYC December stuff first. I dunno. One of the things I loved about coffee dates in Tirana was that we sat and hashed it all out and I got good feedback from H on the videos, so I’d like to get back to that.

Here’s to the weekend!

Still recuperating and H is pretty down for the count now with the same crud, so we’re mostly just hibernating and getting takeout. It is what it is. Not gonna beat myself up about being sick.

Lunch today was from The Smashers, a smashburger place around the corner from Mailo’s etc. I had seen it when I had ventured down to AB for groceries in the last couple days and they have an Oklahoma Burger (!) on the menu, so I trust their burger heritage implicitly. Burgers were good, fries were good, nice to add another possibility into the “fast dinner” rotation.

We should be better by the weekend.

H is down now with the crud. She doesn’t have today off of work, so I volunteered to cover at work as well, so we’re just taking an easy day in the apartment. Some Streetwok for dinner later.

Felt good enough to try and go out and explore our immediate surroundings a bit, so after a slow morning, we finally pulled ourselves together and went out for coffee (at least). Dope is still closed with no understanding of why it’s closed or if it will reopen while we’re here, so we “settled” for Tailor Made (which I think is actually closer). Two coffees, a croissant, and a bougatsa later, and we were camped on their terrace looking to see what else was around we could check out.

(A bougatsa is like a phyllo pastry puff, stuffed with a cheese similar to what’s inside a cheese danish. A little sweet, made sweeter by the pistachio cream and powdered sugar I had them put on mine.)

The pastries didn’t fill us up, though, so we ended up back around Irini Square and grabbed tacos at Ancho. I’m not anti-Greek food, far from it, but this is one of the things that we looked forward to about spending a long weekend in Athens last year (a wider variety of international options) and I’m not gonna be sad about tacos, Asian noodles, or Italian pasta in my fast food options.

We eventually decided to wander down towards Syntagma Square, not for any specific tourist purpose, but just to walk some of the streets and see what we encountered. (H was looking for a notebook for work stuff, and I desperately need a haircut.) Found a department store with a mini Apple store inside (but not a notebook worthy of H’s needs) and, after spinning through the edge of Syntagma, a fun deli and grocery that H had seen on Instagram, which we poked around in a bit. H got a tote bag to add to her growing collection.

Still feeling willing to be outside, we kept strolling, parallel to Ermou and then behind the main part of the Monastiraki flea market, and eventually along the edge of the the Roman Agora and Hadrian’s Library before heading to one of our absolute favorites from last year, Diodos, for some wine and mezes that would likely pass for our dinner.

Greeks eat like most Europeans — a big (longer) meal at lunch later in the afternoon, and then a small meal for dinner starting somewhere around 9. We were a bit earlier than that, and we weren’t starving, so some small plates for sharing — tzatziki, potato salad, some fried meatballs — and (more importantly) a carafe of the house wine, which turned into a second as the night wore on. We’re definitely not one-carafe people any more, and sitting with a view of the Acropolis, who wants to rush home?

We shared some baklava and the waiter brought out some oenomelo again and that’s a nice treat. We had told ourselves that this was going to be our usual Sunday night haunt, that we were going to make sure we took advantage of the city whenever we could, so even a little under the weather, I’m glad we kept to our promise and I’m looking forward to every Sunday night now for a while.

First full day in Athens and we decided early on that we were going to take it easy — we’re both tired, and I must have caught some crud from the plane because I’m congested and fuzzy-headed. So we slept in and gave up on our previous plan to get up and wander down to Dope Roasting Co for coffee and breakfast.

Instead we hung out at the apartment until around noon and then wandered down to Mailo’s Pasta Project, a favorite spot from last year, a sort of quick-eats noodle shop that makes fresh pasta and has tasty sauces. I got carbonara and H got “creamy aglio-olio” (which doesn’t sound like it should be a thing? but she said was tasty).

We decided coffee could be for dessert instead of breakfast so we wandered back around to Dope and … they’re still not open? They appear to … not BE opening any time soon? It’s weird because there’s no indication that they’ve gone permanently out of business, there’s still coffee beans in the grinders that we can see, but it felt like this was more than just “we’re on vacation” maybe. I guess we’ll keep an eye on it and see.

We grabbed some orange juice from the grocery store but didn’t really find the kind of “grocery” groceries that we wanted (meaning, we likely weren’t cooking dinner) so instead we’ll just grab takeaway or something and resolve to find a real grocery store over the next couple of days. It’s not quite the Albanian “cheaper to eat out than to cook” way of life but when you can get gyros for under five euro, you can splurge a few days.

(It ended up being a Mailo’s repeat for dinner.)