Grecian Good Times

In planning for Greece, we decided in order to appreciate Athens we wanted to do most of it at the end, after a good couple of weeks of island hopping/hanging out. Oh! I almost forgot our silly evening in Budapest! Because of a funny around the world ticket routing, we ended up with a 20 hour layover in Budapest. I know, how is Budapest the stop over between Turkey and Greece? It is if the One World partner there is Malev (Hungarian airlines). Anywho, we ended up going in to town, where we got an adorable hotel by the river, took a nice evening walk, watched the sunset and listened to a good Jazz/swing band (with people dancing) while we ate dinner. Not bad for a layover really  And now we know, someday we should actually go there, seems like fun.


Anyway, back to Athens. We decided to do like a day and a half there before heading to the islands. We got a marginal hostel, but in an awesome spot in the middle of Plaka, a super cute historic neighborhood near everything. Our first afternoon, we mostly wandered and hung out, got a nice meal, some beer and watched people (as Mike noted on Facebook, loads of Americans in Athens, apparently they’ve been hiding here). We decided to save the major stuff for our next round for a number of reasons, so instead we headed to the new Acropolis Museum. Super cool, also really makes you hate the British Museum. Such a shame that they have such a gorgeous, high tech space right next to the Acropolis and half the stuff they should be showing was looted and taken to the UK. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering, shopping (bought a new t-shirt at H&M, I’m sure y’all will notice it in pictures) and… Watching the Changing of the Guard!

They do the ceremony in front of the parliament building at the tomb of the unknown soldier. They always have two dudes there that you can take pictures of and once an hour they change. But oh goodness, it’s the funniest thing I’ve maybe ever seen. A) they are wearing traditional Greek outfits with pleated skirts, giant puffballs on their shoes and fezzes with enormous tassels. B) the way they are required to walk involves a huge leg-lift, shuffle step motion (it looks kinda like a children’s jazz dance lesson). 3) THERE IS AN ELABORATE TOE TOUCHING PART where the two guys march till they meet in the middle, then touch toes and raise them into the air. I almost died laughing.

We thought we’d be leaving early-ish the next day so we hadn’t planned anything, but apparently the only ferries to Andros were at 8 am (nooope) or 5 pm. So with our time, we checked out the Jewish Museum! It was a lovely little museum, in fact similar to the Sydney one, except the lack of adorable holocaust survivor to give us a tour & make us cry. However, it was a really interesting little spot, being that we knew very little about the Greek Jews or the fact that about 65,000 of them were killed in the Holocaust. These days there are between 5-10,000 mostly in Athens, some in Rhodes.

It was then that we began the epic journey. We had to get a bus to the alternate ferry port (as we chose a somewhat obscure island for our first stop). To get there we tried to take the metro, only to get half way and learn that the second line was closed. Boo. So we tried to get a taxi, but Greek taxi drivers are kinda douche-y and it took 3 to get one to agree to drive us that last km to the bus. Then we got a bus (about an hour). Then we got to the port and got a snack because we were about an hour early (better safe than sorry right?). THEN OUR FERRY (1 hr. 15 min) GOT DELAYED 4 HOURS. So instead of getting in at 6:30pm we got to our hotel at 11 pm. Good times.

Fortunately Andros was adorable. We had a cute little hotel with an attached café that overlooked the ocean for breakfast (and as it turns out sunset every day). We ate tasty food, Andros specialties include a fava bean paste (like hummus with red onion and lemon), the Andros omlette with crazy delish Andros spicy sausage and some adorable tiny almond pastry which a really cute woman in the bakery gave us for free so we could taste it. I like to describe it as like a cigar shaped cookie the consistency of a Mexican wedding cookie (without nuts) but with an almond paste in the middle that is everything I want marzipan to be, but delicious instead of gross. We drank beer (I don’t know how I will get used to beer being anything less than half a liter at home…). We beached. We walked. We read a lot. I read “The Help” and “ People of the Book” both A-mazing. I birthday-ed. It was lovely. Oh also, we ate lunch once at a place run by a guy named Louis and when he found out we were American he told us he lived there in the 70’s and proceeded to say, God Bless, every time he got near our table. The food was delicious, but we couldn’t go back after being blessed like 80 times. Also, there was an accordian man. When did we meet him? When our taxi picked him up at 11 pm on our way through town. And the next day at lunch, and all three nights at dinner, and we saw him pick up his accordian in the bakery while the nice lady gave us treats.

Our last day we ‘took a tour of Andros’. It was hilarious. A) The lady told us she does the tour as a favor to the woman who runs it. She is lovely, but not a tour guide. B) It was like a commerce tour we heard a lot about lush vegetation, pure spring water and Andros products. C) She kept telling us about lovely places…. That we drove straight past, but then stopped places like a clump of trees where she told us to ‘take pictures of the lush vegetation’. We went to two monasteries, one that was cool, and one that was weird, a ‘centuries old drinking water area’ and then we stopped at Chora, the largest city, for 4 hours… random! Chora was cute though. We got some lunch, walked to the end (the town goes all the way down a peninsula), saw a cute church on an island and got some ice cream. Altogether, Andros was a fun and laid back way to start our time in the islands.

Oh also, the accordian man showed up at the dock to tell us we were standing in the wrong place for the Mykonos ferry. I'm just waiting for him to pop out of my luggage tonight.