May 17: Athens
We had a bit of the morning to kill in Itea before Demitri picked us up at 10:00, so we strolled through town. There wasn’t much going on.
Demitri drove us back to Athens by way of the east side of the Delphi valley. We stopped at a Greek auto zone for him to buy a part for his car, and then we got coffees at a Gregorys; Greek taxi service is very familiar. He dropped us off at the Sofitel at the Athens airport.
We had the afternoon and evening free to entertain ourselves in Athens. The week before, we’d tried and failed to get some videos from the Acropolis-it was WAAAYYYY too crowded in the morning-and we wanted to try our luck in the evening, closer to closing time.
We hopped on the train into town. It went fine at first. As we approached the center of Athens, though, the train car got increasingly crowded, and I got closer and closer to panic. Maybe it was PTSD from the last time I’d been on a crowded Athens transport and gotten robbed by gypsies. Evidently we’d been by ourselves for far too long. Greece does seem to be full of extremes-either days on end of seeing no one and towns with a handful of residents, or sardine-packed mobs of tourists plus parasites cramming into just a few places.
Y’all planning a trip to Greece: Get out of Athens and eschew Santorini and Mykonos! There is the whole Balkan Penninsula out there, and Crete and Rhodes! Go to Patras or Thessaloniki. Go to Embonas in Rhodes, or Hagia Nikolaos in Crete! You will have a better time, be treated better, and be more appreciated in the places not overrun by tourists!
We did end up getting to the Acropolis. After 5 pm is the time to go-no crowds, a nice breeze, and beautiful light. Though we did have to push past a couple of guys posing in the gateway of the Propylaeia. We bought the same tickets they did, and those didn’t come with exclusive rights to portions of the site, peoples’ social media feeds be damned.
We dined at Nolan, a Michelin-starred Greek-Japanese fusion establishment currently on the hot list of fab places to dine. We didn’t have reservations, but we’ve had a certain amount of success just turning up at places and asking for a table then and there. (We got into DOM in Sāo Paolo that way, for example.) It never hurts to ask. You get extra points for being dressed appropriately, but in our case, shorts and t-shirts weren’t an impediment.
Athens never ceases to be irritating, though. We’d wanted to take a taxi back to the airport, in the interest of getting there in under 90 minutes, but there was a communist rally going on at Syntagma, and the drivers weren’t taking fares. They just flat-out refused to drive us anywhere. Whatever. At least the train was working, which isn’t always the case. We were back in our room by 11:00, not the early night we’d wanted but at least we were where we needed to be for our flight the next morning.
And that was the end of Ancient Paths!