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Athens, Greece Day 2
I woke up the next morning to Sarah returning to the room. She is very much a morning person, unlike me, and had already gotten ready, gone out to get a coffee, and returned before I woke up.
We spent the first chunk of our second day walking around and going into the many shops near our hostel. One type shop that there were a ridiculous amount of were shoe stores. I'm not sure if Greeks have an obsession with shoes or what, but they certainly have no shortage of shoe options. I ended up purchasing a pair of handmade sandals because they were on sale, and I hadn't brought a pair of sandals with me to study abroad and with that warm weather, I really did not enjoy wearing sneakers.
After walking around for a while, we took the metro to the port to explore a different part of the city. To our surprise, there really wasn't much to do in this area. We went for a long walk near the sea, but you couldn't get very close to it which was unfortunate. We didn't see much on the walk, a couple nice looking buildings, but at least we got our steps in for the day.
Another thing I quickly noticed about Athens was that guys have no shame. I lost count of the amount of men who whistled at Sarah and I or made some kind of sickening comment while we were walking by. Things like this made me feel pretty uncomfortable in the city. There is also a lot of trash in the streets of Athens, and as I mentioned in my previous blog, a whole bunch of graffiti. Athens definitely has its nice areas, but in most of the city I felt very uneasy to be honest.
After our walk we took the metro back to the city center since there was really nothing else to do by the port. We stopped to get something to drink because we were parched and water just wasn't doing the trick. I ended up finding a place with what was essentially frozen lemonade and it was so good! That was a nice little taste of America that I hadn't had in a while because they don't really have much lemonade over here in Europe. For example, in the UK at least, their "lemonade" is pretty much Sprite.
Soon after we stopped at a restaurant for dinner and wine. I got a spaghetti dish and a rose wine and it was very good. The little area around where we ate was very cute and as it started to get a bit darker out they lit a bunch of candles which made it look even nicer.
We stopped at the hostel after dinner to get changed and wait for it to get darker outside, and then went back out to walk around and see all of the ruins lit up at night. As we were walking to find a rooftop restaurant to have some dessert, we ran into a large precession of people with crosses and candles. We figured it must be some kind of holiday or something.
We found a rooftop restaurant with a perfect view of the city and the Acropolis all lit up and had some very heavy but delicious Oreo cheesecake. We decided to look up and try and figure out what religious holiday it was, and to our surprise, we discovered that it was in fact the Orthodox Good Friday! We both didn't realize it, but we unintentionally booked our trip during the Greek Orthodox Easter! This ended up being a very happy accident because we got to experience Greece in a different, more culturally immersive way than most people do.
After our dessert we walked around a bit more to see the city lit up at night, and ended up finding a group of street dancers who were performing! They were all very talented and I could've watched them for hours. It was a really good way to end the day.
