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.)