Sunday March 29, 2009

Today we spent another day exploring Athens and spent most of our time leisurely shopping through the Sunday flea market. It was fun to look at the things for awhile but then we started getting worn out and it looked like the same junk we find at American flea markets. That took up most of the morning before we headed to lunch at another outdoor café in the Plaka. Soon after we were seated a pigeon graciously pooped on me and shortly after another poo landed on our table cloth so we made the executive decision to change tables. Anyway, I had another delicious Greek salad with some sort of yummy phyllo/cheese/meat appetizer.

After lunch we wandered deeper into the Plaka and the girls did a little more souvenir shopping. The area, and Athens in general, was so pretty and much nicer than the dirty concrete jungle I was expecting. Throughout the city there are tons of small little Byzantine churches that were left alone in the middle of the more modern architecture that add to the charm. Now that we were on our eighth day of travel we started getting tired a lot faster so we headed back to the hostel to rest and arrange our departure the next day.

In that time I did some research on Greek culture and came across the concept of an “ouzerie”. Greeks are a lot like Italians in that they don’t drink to get drunk but rather leisurely sip on a drink, usually ouzo, while enjoying time with friends. Since ouzo is so strong it’s typically accompanied by metzos? ...which are basically like appetizers.

For out last night in Greece, we headed back down to the bar area to take part in this culture. Since we knew nothing about ouzo we had our waiter bring us their most popular bottle along with the sampler tray of Grecian goodies that the table next to us was eating. The sampler tray was a heart attack on a plate but absolutely incredible! There’s a good chance we were moaning a little while we ate (kind of like my mom does:). On the platter there were three kinds of sausages, creamy potato salad, phyllo wrapped feta, fried cheese balls, phyllo and spinach spirals, a glorified pig in the blanket, and some kind of layered cheese, mushroom, and meat item. Heaven. Falling asleep that night was no problem.