We spent 5 days in Athens over a long week-end the week before Easter. Athens is a vibrant, exciting city that buzzes with a modern, big-city energy that merges seamlessly with a laid-back, Mediterranean relaxation, and ancient history. I loved that the streets and cafes were always crowded with people on their way to and from somewhere, but not in a hurry (except the tourists on their forced-march paced schedules). Out of everywhere we’ve traveled in Europe so far, Athens is the hands-down winner in the best food category. Every meal but one was fabulous, and the one that was less so was still good. Of course when you’re in Greece you expect the Greek Salads to be good, and they were. The tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, and feta cheese in olive oil tasted like everything was just plucked from the garden when we’d ordered. And it goes without say that the olives were a mandatory and delicious part of every meal!

It’s also a very stray-dog and –cat friendly place – thumbs up to that! We saw loads of stray dogs and cats happily exploring Zeus’ Temple, playing in the parks, and hanging out around the edges (or in the middle) of cafes. We didn’t see any skinny ones, either! They all seemed to know “the rules” to their happy existence, don’t beg too aggressively and everyone will tolerate you, and even feed you. We saw street vendors and pedestrians feed and pet strays, and were even in a line of traffic that stopped when a stray dog at Syntagma Square decided ½ way through the crosswalk that it was far enough. He turned, faced the cars and watched us all sit and wait through the green light. Then he walked back to the side he’d started on and sat down to watch some more! I assume they have some sort of spay/neuter program since we noticed lots of strays with similar collars and tags.

The following chronicles our trip day-by day.

Waking up at 3:30 to get ready and get to the airport on time is just not a fun way to start a vacation. We finally decided that if the only flight available to any future destinations is at 6:00 a.m. we don’t want to go there. But, for this trip, we were on our way.

We’d heard Athens is in the best shape it’s been in years because of the Olympics but that was changing fast. We landed in the new airport where everything was sparkling clean and new, then took the new and spotless train (no eating or drinking allowed!) to the Syntagma station in downtown Athens. Here we started to see some signs that maybe long-term maintenance of the facilities after the Olympics hadn’t been budgeted for. It was cleaner than Naples, but there was relatively new-looking graffiti emerging on every free wall space. Our 3-block walk to the hotel (Hotel Amazon – good location, price, ok breakfast, and the smallest bathroom we’ve ever seen. Matt had to come into the main room to dry off because he couldn’t extend his arms in the bathroom!) gave us a taste of what was to come: jewelry stores, more jewelry stores, some carpet stores, and more jewelry stores; most with fairly aggressive owners and sales people. On day 1 of the trip, and with little sleep, less coffee, and the excitement of a new city, it seemed welcoming; after 2-3 days of it, less so.

After settling in, and discovering the “do not flush toilet paper down the commode – put it in the wastebasket” rule wasn’t just an odd rule at the airport, but at hotels (and EVERYWHERE), too, we headed out to explore and have lunch.

Our first meal was a family-sized Greek salad to share, moussaka for me and a gyro plate for Matt. We randomly chose a small place on the corner of a pedestrian street with outdoor seating based on the “I have to eat NOW” factor” and a very friendly waiter who corralled us in. Good choice! The waiter made great recommendations and also helped us work out pronunciations of some of the words we new we’d be using most – efcharisto (thank-you), parakalo (please and you’re welcome), nai (yes), ochi (no), and me synchoreite (excuse me). We do normally try to have a few more words than that but Greek is, well, Greek. It was so different from English, Spanish or German that we had nothing to tie things with to help remember them (I did remember excuse me by saying “mi senorita”).

You find unexpected bits of history popping out at you anywhere you walk in Athens -- a byzantine church (11th century AD) in the middle of the modern shopping district, the Tower of the Winds (2nd century BC) next to a row of restaurants, the remains of Hadrian’s library (AD 132) next to the flea market stalls. We avoided the Acropolis (as much as one can avoid that hill with the giant, ancient buildings and monuments on top that dominates the city), wanting to be awake and have a full day to explore it. Instead we window shopped (and got dragged in to stores to do more than window-shopping), weaved through streets and alleys with no destination, just discovering by accident, then looking up what we’d found in our guidebooks. We wandered through the National Gardens and around the Temple of Zeus that closed at 3:00 so we added that to our growing list of “for tomorrow”. On our way back to the hotel we passed the Presidential Palace and saw the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. As with the guards outside of St. James Palace in London, what’s most impressive is that they keep their tempers with the insane tourists snapping their photos and trying to distract them.

We made a point of napping every day so that we could go out to eat at a “civilized” time of 8:30 or 9 (still early by their standards). We found a square in Monastiriki that was surrounded by 4 restaurants, each with its own territory in the square. We picked one and had another wonderful meal that included olives, a Greek Salad and a Cretan salad (salsa on toast with feta cheese), souvlaki and salmon. We roamed about exploring the city at night, when all the monuments are lit up and the streets are thronged with people strolling and exploring. Despite our best efforts to be cosmopolitan and make a late night of it (and for us, it was a success), we were still back in the hotel, ready for bed by 11:00.

Day 2 was the Agora and Acropolis day. The Agora is beautiful and intriguing. The small museum with site artifacts and history kept us busy for longer than we anticipated, but it could’ve been longer. The Hephaisteion, an ancient temple built in around 440 BC was magnificent, but only a hint of what was to come when we got to the Parthenon. All throughout the Agora, foundations of old public buildings, latrines, and remains of the sewer system are interspersed with interpretive signs, pieces of columns, and statues. Every few minutes my brain would seize up with the thought “this has been here for 2400 years!” And the basic lay-out has been preserved and we know what buildings were where, their design and use, and even details about the inhabitants lives from items found in the area and in graves around the site. It boggles and amazes.

We then walked up the hill to the Acropolis and continued to be amazed and dumbfounded by it all. Truth be told, I was more impressed by the Hephaisteion than the Parthenon, but I’m sure that’s due to the scaffolding that covered the latter and all the workmen swarming it in preservation and restoration efforts! Afterwards we walked down the other side of the Acropolis, had lunch in Makrygianni and went back to the Temple of Zeuss (for 10 minutes, until it closed on us at 3 again).

That night we found a rooftop restaurant (Sissiforos) up some stairs in an alley in Plaka and had the most amazing dinner of the week. I had lamb that was slow-roasted all day, served with potatoes (and of course, a Greek salad). It was the most tender, succulent, amazing meat I’d ever tasted, well-seasoned without being too salty or seasoned. We had a view of the Acropolis and the Erectheion (temple that was a sanctuary for both Poseiden and Athena, on the site where the two Gods battled for possession of the city), under a starlit sky, on top of Athens. How cna you go wrong with a setting like that?

Day 3 we went to the National Archaeological Museum – a full day’s worth of things to see and read and just absorb it all (or as much as you can until you’re entirely overwhelmed and your brain just can’t take anymore!) Especially fascinating were the finds from a shipwreck that included a mechanical instrument that researchers suspect is something like an astrolabe. Until this, it was thought that the ancient Greek mariners hadn’t used complex instruments in navigation. Incredible display on how they x-rayed the portions they found, then recreated the instrument.

Of course we had another great meal that night. We were getting a bit full from all the eating, so we went to Hermion (located in an alley in Monastiriki) and shared an appetizer plate that let us sample a bit of everything – stuffed grape leaves, spinach pie, hummus, tatziki, Melitzanosalad (eggplant), octopus, and fried cheese.

Sunday was flea market day, and free-entry to all the museums and archaeological sites. Boy, are we glad we didn’t wait for THAT to go to the sites and museums. They were literally crawling with people! The flea market wasn’t any less crowded, but that’s the atmosphere we expected there. It was fun to wander around the alleys and check out the antique stores, gift shops, and stands. The sales-pitches could get a bit high-pressure, but most of them backed-off as soon as you said a definite “not interested.” After that we walked through Monastiriki and then up Filopappos hill to the monument of Philopappus. The area was lively with vendors and outdoor cafes, and it was a sunny, warm spring day, so there was lots of activity everywhere. The path to the monument goes through a beautiful hillside part of town along the side of the Hill of the Nymphs. From the monument we had spectacular views of Athens and the Acropolis.

Matt was starting to fade by that evening (the never-ending flu). So we grabbed a quick dinner at the small diner nearest out hotel. That would be the “ok” meal. The stuffed pepper and tomato weren’t bad, but it just didn’t stack up to all the other fantastic meals we’d eaten.

Monday was my favorite day of all! We rented a car and drove to Cape Sounio to see the Temple of Poseiden high up on a bluff overlooking the sea. It was a warm, sunny day and the drive down the coast offered some great views, and interesting towns. The temple was spectacular. Incredible white stone and marble columns perched above the sea, with purple and yellow flowers growing up in and around it, all set against an incredibly blue Mediterranean sky made it picture-perfect. That, and we had great timing, arriving as one busload of tourists left and before 3-4 more arrived! We had the hilltop almost to ourselves. This monument, without crowds, without scaffolding (although with a rope barrier to keep overly zealous tourists from climbing on it) felt ancient. Even the graffiti was old (we found names and dates back to 1800 carved into some of the fallen pillars strewn about the site ).

After dropping off the rental car we wandered through Plaka and into Anafiotika, one of the oldest neighborhoods around the Acropolis. We “found” the monument of Lysikrates (334 BC). There were more of these monuments, but this is the last remaining in Athens. They were built to commemorate victors in an annual choral and drama festival at the Theatre of Dionysus. Since we had to wake up early to get to the airport, we broke with Athenian ways and had dinner at a restaurant near the statue (Dionysus, I think) at about 6:30 p.m. We also opted to try a Caesar salad, rather than the Greek salads we’d had at almost every meal, again split an appetizer plate, and shared a stew of lamb and potatoes cooked in a terracotta pot. Another fabulous meal, followed by an early bedtime and all too early wake-up call for the return flight!