(Athens, Greece)
Getting from the airport to downtown Athens is quite easy by subway…just don’t expect to see much of interest along the way!
Metro line #3 (a.k.a. the Blue Line) goes all the way from the airport to downtown Athens. It was about a 40 minute trip. The closest station to our hotel is Monastiraki…as often happens here, they stumbled upon a buried ancient community when they were building the station!
Our hotel is on Adrianou Street (see photo at the very top of this post), which runs through the middle of the Plaka neighbourhood. There’s no question that tourism is driving things around here but, with a little effort, you can still identify areas where locals still live and work.
For our first meal in Athens, we walked past multiple restaurants where touts were aggressively courting customers. It’s the same in many heavily-touristed cities. And I always ignore these places. We kept walking until we found a place (Taverna Saita) that was crowded, where most patrons were speaking Greek, and nobody addressed me as “friend” or promised me the moon.
Even though prices are likely higher here than in other parts of Greece, we still find food very affordable. And while Athens has a reputation for pollution, we don’t really find it to be worse than any other major city in eastern or southern Europe. Maybe the time of year is helping with that.
The Greek alphabet shares a lot of letters with our own Roman alphabet, although they often do not represent the same sounds. Nonetheless, I’m not finding my lack of Greek to be a problem. Many signs include the Roman alphabet equivalent under the Greek version. And knowing the Cyrillic alphabet helps fill some of the gaps when no Roman equivalent is provided. In any case, almost every person we’ve met so far speaks at least some English. We’ll see what happens when we move out of Athens!
For subsequent meals in the area, I did some quick online research to give us a head start. Once again, the main criteria were being off the beaten tourist path and having a lot of local customers. I’m also trying to choose places that focus on food from Greece or at least from neighbouring countries. This is a rare opportunity to make some new culinary discoveries!
I was really happy with our first lunch spot. It was called “Cocona”, and was on a tiny side street on the local side of Syntagma Square. They had a lot of great pies, often with cheese and/or spinach, but they also served a specialty called gĹ‘zleme from “Asia Minor” (Anatolia, in Turkiye). It is a type of stuffed turnover. I really enjoyed mine – I had it with yogurt sauce, and I was concerned that it would be loaded with garlic (like tzatziki usually is). However, yogurt sauce and tzatziki sauce seem to be two different things here, so I didn’t have to endure any garlic at all!
As we don’t have a lot of time before we move on from Athens, we have to choose our activities carefully. I think we will take advantage of our neighbourhood’s location and visit the famous Acropolis. It’s only about a 15 minute walk from our hotel to the entrance gate. Tickets are sold by time slots, in order to help avoid unmanageable crowds. I’m also hopeful that the time of year (definitely not high season) will keep things under control.
I’ll be back soon with our visit to the Acropolis…and more impressions of Athens!
