I wasn’t that excited about going to Greece. I don’t know why. Everything I had heard about it was good but something about it just kept me away. But on my Athens, Nice, Monaco trip, it just seemed such an easy opportunity to hop over to Athens for a few days. Athens was the place in Greece that I most wanted to visit. The islands look beautiful but boring to me and I have no interest in spending time on a boat. Athens had a sort of appeal in that it looks kind of dirty and a little rough around the edges. That, mixed with all the antiquities, left me a bit intrigued.
I flew in from Nice via Paris, landing in the afternoon the airport in Athens. The train was a bit annoying. I was happy that there was a train into the city, but I had to wait over an hour for it to arrive. In hindsight I probably should have just taken a taxi, but train I did. I took it to Monastiraki station (it takes about 45 minutes) and walked to my hostel: the City Circus Hostel, located in the Psyrri neighbourhood, which is very close to Monastiraki. City Circus Hostel was a funky place in a heritage building. I liked the area immediately; it was mostly pedestrian streets lined with eateries and bars, with the occasional falling down building wallpapered in graffiti. Everyone was smoking. OK, this might not be too bad.
The hostel was great. I had decided to splurge on this little self-contained apartment on the roof with a private patio. It was a great bargain and gave me lots of privacy. I think I could have spent a month there looking out over the city. I even had my own view of the Parthenon.
But there was no time to rest, so I went out and walked around into the night. I had a cigar and a meal at a cute little cafe near my hostel and then just wandered around to get the lay of the land. The squares were full of people, mostly young, hanging around drinking, eating, yelling. It felt lively and not at all threatening. I visited a couple of churches, which stayed open late into the night and seemed to have an endless stream of religious attendees.
I don’t know what one is supposed to do in the evening in Athens, but I think I could have been happy just hopping from cafe to restaurant to bar all evening. Every place looked very appealing and had these and had wonderful patios that were cigar friendly and an excellent assortment of vegetarian food.
I wrapped up the evening on the patio of a bar called the Verve Music Café, which had a very appealing décor that would describe as ‘Rat Pack dive’ and played excellent jazz music.
I was excited for the next day when I would get up early and visit the Acropolis and Parthenon.
Those are my first impressions. Athens seemed pretty cool, easy going, cheap, tasty, an intriguing. It was certainly an easy place to visit. No special visas required for my passport, they use the Euro, many people spoke English, and no one seemed put out that I didn’t speak Greek. (I mean, there’s literally a saying “It’s Greek to me,” which suggests that it’s not easiest language to learn to speak.) And as I walked around that evening it really was dawning on me that I was in this very ancient city a place that invented or made significant contributions to, nearly everything? It looks like a perfectly normal city; you’re just walking around, looking for a place to get a coffee and the-BAM-you are face to face with a 2000-year-old ruins. And on the building around the corner is graffiti telling tourists to fuck off, and next to that is a church full of people praying at 9:00 PM, and people are selling bread circles and getting pickpocketed and getting drunk and aesthetically pleasing restaurant patios are brimming with diners being serenaded with live music while stray cats look for food to run off with… Athens made a good first impression.
I was only in Athens for three days, but I feel like I saw a lot – I certainly took a lot of pictures – and so I shall divide my Athens posts into thirds, one for each day. Read on for day two here.
