A Lazy Day in Athens
With everything kicking off tomorrow in a big way, we chose to mostly just kick back and have a lazy day today. We got the logistics of tomorrow worked out and made a plan, then did a bunch of nothing for awhile. Later in the afternoon, I went for a long walk around the ‘hood and enjoyed the sunshine (although it was a hot and humid 27 degrees).
The flower bushes along the route were in bloom and gave a nice visual/audio block to the busy street just on the other side of it.
Reminder: you can click any image to make it show up fully on your screen without scrolling
I had seen a park on the map and used that as my guide of which direction to go, but truthfully I was just wandering. I passed a huge mall with a giant store called ‘Jumbo’… and that’s an apt name, since it’s about the size of a Walmart, only three storeys tall. Turns out the whole mall was dead, though. Oh well.
The park turned out to be nothing special, so I kept going, enjoying the view across Phaleron Bay
From there, I could see that I was behind the opera house, so I headed back that way to get a few shots inside the building. It’s lovely.
The other half of the building is the National Greek Library.
It’s clean and modern and the top floor houses a small museum dedicated to things such as book illustrators, theatre set design, calligraphy, and other artistic endeavours.
As I exited the building, I noticed that the canal was putting on a fountain show set to the music from Harry Potter.
By this time, I’d walked about 5km and the heat was becoming uncomfortable. A light haze had settled in on the city and I decided to head back.
For dinner, we decided to try a mom&pop restaurant that Viking recommended for authentic traditional Greek home cooking.
The food was quite good. We started with a flaming cheese saganaki, which was devoured before I thought to get a picture. It’s basically just a slab of cheese that’s flambéd in a small iron pan called a saganaki. Technically, you can cook most anything in that pan and serve it under the name ‘saganaki’, but the slab of cheese is the classic dish. It’s slightly crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside. Loved it.
For the mains, Rob had grilled shrimp (which were HUGE) and I went for a traditional pastitsio (Παστίτσιο), a pasta dish with ground beef covered in a béchamel sauce. Very nice.
I had a nice panna cotta for dessert and Rob had pistachio ice cream. We washed all of it down with a local retsina wine, which Rob loved. Being a white wine, I wasn’t as much of a fan, but the guy on the bottle label was pretty cute, so there was that.
Speaking of which, I must say that all those marble statues in those museums gave me a very unrealistic idea of what Greek men would look like. Perhaps we’ll see some of them at the Acropolis tomorrow.
Tonight was packing, as our luggage has to be outside our room by 7:30 am and we catch the Acropolis tour just before 8am. That means an early start tomorrow and that means that I’m signing off now and hitting the sack.