It’s all Greek to me

When we landed in Athens, I thought I was so clever when I looked at the baggage claim/arrivals/departures information screens and it was in GREEK and I said, “well, it’s all Greek to me!” Normally Josh makes jokes this bad, not me, and I was especially proud of myself as Luna groaned.

In Athens we’ve moved on from gelato, sniff, sniff, to the bountiful world of greek yogurt. They make it in ways we can’t get in the US- 10% milk fat, double the 5% we can get in the states, so unless you are going to strain it in a cheesecloth bag in your fridge for a few hours, it’s a pretty special treat. We’ve eaten it for snacks, dessert, breakfast. Yay. We’ve eaten it with honey, granola, nuts, lemon zest, vanilla crackers and nutella.

Athens was a big departure from Italy, in that everything suddenly felt more relaxed. We had less planned, but Athens felt amazingly chill. We stayed in the area of town that’s kind of newly gentrified in an old Foundry that was turned into a hotel. The whole area is artsy, cool, colorful. Graffiti covers most surfaces which at first made it feel like, “where the Hell did we stay?” but turns out people just use walls instead of Twitter in Athens. Everyone is writing whatever they want on the walls and after talking with locals, we learned it’s mostly anarchists and it’s probably good we can’t read it anyway (I really wanted to write, “it’s all Greek to me” at this point, but I refrained).

As we strolled through the tiny village like areas of Athens, we all really enjoyed ourselves. We went to a little neighborhood place along a pedestrian street for lunch- hanging flowers bursting over the patios and promptly ate all the Greek food we could eat. We got souvlaki, Greek salad, bread, eggplant dip, tzatziki, and fava bean dip. Let’s focus on the last dish for a bit.  Fava bean spread is so simple and so good, and is a fine example of how fresh ingredients can make all the difference in making food so tasty. In Greece they call yellow-split peas fava beans and they cook them into the consistency of hummus, pour olive oil, salt and capers over it and serve it with warm pita bread. Yum.

The city is full of streets of rambling buildings and shops selling olive wood wares, evil-eye pendants and olive oil everything you can imagine. The Greeks seem really to showcase Greek-made items which was neat to see as we were able to see unique art and designers. During our time in Athens, we talked about how the city is over 3 million people, yet feels like a small town. Business owners leave their keys in their doors, wares out front displayed on the streets. This is the opposite of Rome where we’d just come from with daily notices of robberies on the streets and pickpocket notices everywhere for tourists. It felt nice to be safe, held, nurtured by our surroundings.

The Acropolis stands tall on a hill in the middle of the city, and we loved that clearly nothing is even close to being permitted to stand as tall as it does. It’s lit throughout the night each and every hour, so that it’s always lit like a beacon, a guiding light to navigate where you want to go. We ate at restaurants where we looked up at the Acropolis and even had a dinner where we ate high on a mountain looking down at it. I liked the cozy feel of the place nestled in the rambling streets.

The highlight of our time in Athens was a food tour we did guided by a mother-Julia and her adult son, Duke. They are Greek and Julia grew up in the neighborhoods we explored on foot. We stopped in the spice markets and smelled Greek oregano, ate luscious dried figs, went to a meat market where we tried some dried meats and even strolled through a butcher market complete with cow heads and goat heads and skinned bodies and it was a bit too much for Luna and I. We stopped at a little restaurant where Julia was the first customer 57 years ago- and when we got our little sandwiches there- she insisted that she feed Josh and the other man in our group their first bites as her grandmother had done at each meal, because, “How would men figure out how to eat otherwise?”

Sending love your way from Athens,

Carly