Athens

Hello Zeus

I wanted to visit Athens since I was a kid. To see all these ancient buildings that influenced the rest of European architecture, to see places from myths and the first written stories, places of philosophical debates, and for many more smaller reasons, like playing Hades, Zeus or watching the Hercules cartoon.

But I also knew that the golden era of Greece was a few millennia ago, and modern Athens has a lot of contrasts. Upon arrival, it was visible — some streets and parks were a bit dirty, traffic was chaos, there were strange people on the streets selling strange things, etc. But nothing too bad; it was even expected for a modern southern city, and in many places it was visible that Athens city was improving a lot — new roads, cafes and restaurants, cleaning was happening all the time.

We arrived quite late in the evening, so naturally in the morning the first thing is to find good coffee — the complexity was that Athens' cafe scene was rapidly evolving with lots of new investment, so many places we visited were brand new but hadn't quite found their rhythm yet. Some had poor service, others had dull food, but maybe it was due to only checking places on Google Maps instead of asking people, who knows. In the end we found a few nice places that I can definitely recommend.

The next thing is of course to go to the Acropolis, to see Parthenon. I must say it is gorgeous, it is impressive. It looks ancient and very modern at the same time. The whole area has few more temples, they all look stunning, for some hours we got lost there wandering between cypress, olive trees and ruins.

Like in many European cities, underneath the hill there is an old town — labyrinth of small streets with cozy, distinctively Greek white buildings and purple flowers. Some of them lead to pretty good restaurants. Unsurprisingly Greece has a very rich cuisine, with lots of grilled meats, pastries, yogurts, greens and Feta cheese.

On other streets we found some small Greek orthodox churches. It is possible to visit them, but be sure not to make any noise. The Greek orthodox churches are quite different from all the catholic churches I've seen. Much smaller, darker, they don't try to impress or overwhelm you — more like they try to create safe and quite space for people who seek it.

The rest of our short time in Athens we spend wandering on the new town streets, checking more temples and theaters, seeing sunset from the acropolis hill, visiting cafes and few museums (the Acropolis Museum was quite big and impressive). Final morning we got a taxi to the ferry terminal to our next destination.