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Explorations and Half-Successes
This is a super long entry, so in case you want to skim, the day consisted of INTENSE ADVENTURING, 1 awesome hat, 4 half-successes, and a penchant for lamb rolled into sausage form. And one sleepy, sleepy, sleepy Angela.
Sunday was my first full day in Athens. (ZOMG) We (my flatmates and I) got up around 9:00ish and decided to leave the apartment to try to achieve a couple of the items on the List (which is still not complete; I am trying to complete it by the end of the week). Namely, visit the Monastiraki Flea Market and at the same time, Melissinos, the Poet-Sandal Maker. I was also planning on figuring out where I was working and taking a walk there just so I had an idea of the neighborhood. I had it all planed out with the awesomeness of Google Maps: what street to cross, how far to walk, etc, etc. So we start the day off with orange juice and cereal (because we had no milk) and set off for the flea market.
The first thing we do after leaving the apartment is to start walking the wrong direction and we get lost. Not lost, because we knew where we were, but lost in that we were going the opposite direction. Blame it on the fact that we had walked this way on Saturday to get everywhere, but we had to go back to the apartment to get a map. After that, everything went much more smoothly in that we knew where we were most of the time.
The first thing we come across, after getting onto the big street, is this:
What is that, you ask? Why, that's the Panathinaiko Stadium, which hosted the revival of the Olympic Games in 1870 and the Panathenaic Games in ancient times. So basically, we live next to an Olympic Stadium. Note the rings in the background. It's absolutely huge and there's a little cafe next to it where people are just sitting and drinking coffee and enjoying the morning breeze, though even at 10 AM, it was starting to get hot...like...upper 70s hot.
We cross the street into this garden, which seems to be on my map and seems to be the right direction to get to Monastiraki (spoiler alert: it's not) and come across...a palace!! With a garden next to it. This, as I later found out were the Zappeion Gardens and Zappeion Palace, where lots of events take place (incidentally, I'm filming a children's event for work on Friday here). It's quite large and impressive and although technically not a palace, per say, it's still very pretty and though we couldn't get inside, from what we saw, it was very velvety and regal on the inside as well.
As we continued on from the palace, we stumbled upon a book fair just getting started. Some of the stalls were still covered, but this one already had all it's books set up. Some of the stalls also had children's books, which were very cute [one of them featured a mole!!]; there was a plan for about half a minute buy a children's book and translate it into English, but that thought dissipated as soon as we saw how long the books were. There were also really cute postcards and posters of advertisements from the 1960s onward in Greek and English; I almost regret not buying one that was really cute (it was a chocolate ad, go figure; *short digression dealing with chocolate ads and burly men in them...*), but I figured I couldn't just buy every cute thing I laid my eyes on, so I resisted and decided that if we stopped by the fair on our way back, I would buy that postcard. The fair was supposed to last until 11 PM, and theoretically, we would pass by it coming back, but as it turned out, we never did.
After passing the book fair, we entered what I know now to be Plaka, a sort of touristy marketplace. There were many touristy items (I <3 Greece tshirts, jewelry, things that looked like they belong in Hercules...) and a cool Art Gallery sign made of X's.
By this time, I was sweating bullets because the sun had come out from behind the clouds and the hats that I possessed all fit very closely to my head and I couldn't put my hair up while wearing these hats so my neck got incredibly sweaty. (I solved this problem later by doing pigtails, but it was the first day and I was still overwhelmed by all the Greekness of the place.) Looking around, there were lots of places selling hats. Big brimmed hats. I had wanted to get one before coming to Greece, but I couldn't find one that I liked and was cheap enough to buy, so I came with my adorable, but kinda sweat-inducing hats. These touristy hats were all priced around 10 - 20 euros and I didn't really want to spend ~$15 on a hat, so I resisted until I came across a gorgeous big-brimmed blue striped cloth hat, that I could fold up to put in my bag if I wasn't wearing it. And it was 7 euros. The vendor didn't budge when I tried to bargain, though I really care too much because it was much cheaper than any of the other hats I had seen up to that point (and beyond that point, in fact). Pictures of this awesome hat will be below.
We then passed by what looked like a random ruin in the middle of the street. Turns out it was next to a church and there looked like there was a party going on. Would I get to complete objective 16 (go to a Greek wedding)? Unfortunately not, but the party turned out to be a baptism with plenty of little kids playing with rattles and noisemakers and people dressed in brightly colored church clothes. We stayed and watched them for a while. There was lots of hugging and kissing and quintessential Greek-ness near a church. So I count this as
HALF-SUCCESS #1.
Continuing on, we walked towards a row of restaurants with many hecklers asking people to eat at their restaurant. There was one heckler with whom we felt very comfortable because he didn't so much heckle as make conversation with us. He knew about 10 languages and could great people and carry on a short conversation in those languages. He won me over when he started talking to me in pretty good Mandarin and invited to treat the three of us for an iced tea sometime. His name? Konstantine. Nickname? Kosta.
HALF-SUCESSS #2
We decided to eat at the restaurant later in the day because Konstantine had been so nice to us. We all got a Greek salad, which was cool and refreshing and to drink I had a green glass bottle of sprite. I had never seen one before (only glass coke bottles), so I was very intrigued. Main course consisted of a lamb souvlaki which was delicious and contributed to my breakfast the next morning and desert was this grainy cake with honey and...almond powder, I want to say? Perhaps. Not that delicious, but an experience. Lunch ended up being over 2 hours long, as we sat, sipped, nibbled, and had all around a great, relaxing, refreshing time as we watched the tourists and Grecians around us languidly roaming the streets of the Plaka.
One of the stops we made as we were touring the Plaka was to the Children's Museum, a museum especially for children to go and play and learn, free of charge. All you need is a name tag. One of the groups of children were baking what smelled like heavenly cookies and another group was doing art projects. We went into the room that taught children about their bodies and what foods were good for what parts of the body. There were exercise items, like hoola-hoops and muscle diagrams, which seemed disproportionately complicated for the 5 year old kids that were baking and coloring, but maybe that's just me. There was also a room that taught children how to make cornmeal, or popcorn or something like that, and one room full of art utensils like ribbon and connector things and rubber stops and corks and metal bendy things. Marj made a ribbon flower and tacked it to a cork, which was adorable and currently sits in our kitchen waiting to cork something.
After leaving the Plaka, we meandered our way to another ruin, which turned out to be the Library of Hadrian. Because we had to pay to go in and it was now around 3:00 PM, we simply stayed around the outskirts and took pictures there.
And then we made our way to the Athenian Flea Market, next to Monastiraki Metro Station. Could this be the Monastiraki Flea Market? Actually, it wasn't and by that time in the afternoon, the flea market would have been gone anyways. The Athenian Flea Market that we went to consisted of a bunch of really brightly colorful shops selling everything from beads to sneakers to really big safety pins. One of them even had a dinosaur coming out of the ceiling!! Because this wasn't really a flea market, but because it was called the Athenian Flea Market, I count this as
HALF-SUCCESS #3.
We were at Monastiraki Metro Station so we figured we might as well take the Metro home. After figuring out exactly how much to pay and how to get a monthly pass, which no one did because we didn't have the little photo that you needed, we bought some fruit in a stand outside the Metro station and took the Metro home. The train was very clean and nice and the ride was incredibly smooth. What's great was that there were not that many people on the train at that time (which I now know to be unusual for Monastiraki) and it was not too crowded. We enjoyed a leisurely 3 minute train ride back to the station near our apartment and met two girls from the program walking down our hill: Liz and Emma. As we were all having dinner together later that night, we decided to meet up before hand so we could all walk over together. We all thought dinner was going to be this relaxed shindig where we would get advice on what to do in Athens and we'd be back in a couple hours at the most. Little did we know, after dinner (kabobs, apparently, with french fries and white wine), we stayed out further for drinks with a great view of the Acropolis.*
At this point, it's around 10:30 and it was a good forty-five minute walk to where we had gotten. We had found out that many of the group did not have to work on Monday, but I did and my plans to go check out where I worked had totally fallen through due to all the adventuring that happened. "No, we'll only be out for another 15 minutes" was what I heard, but by the time everyone was ready to leave, it was around 11:30, and I was getting a bit antsy, especially because I had work at 9:00 AM and had neither an idea of how to get to work nor a phone if I got lost. As most of the group ran off to enjoy the city some more, four of us headed back, where we ran into some palace guards walking towards the palace to change shifts. Though I didn't get to see the changing of the guard at the palace, I figure seeing guys with leggings and poof-balls on their feet kick-stepping their way towards the palace could count as
HALF-SUCCESS #4
Finally, finally I got back to my room with my slightly humidified bed and awesome shower and after talking to my mom for a bit, fell asleep as soon as my head hit my pillow, getting ready for a day of work that apparently, everyone forgot I had. Tucked into my pillow that night, I fell into a deep sleep, so it's fitting that this entry end in...
Zzzzz,
Angela
*Note: There is no minimum drinking age in Greece, and children may buy alcohol from kiosks for their elders without discrimination.
