We went to bed a bit early last night. For some reason staying up through the night on a flight will do that to you. So we went to sleep around eight and woke up around five. That’s a bit earlier than we were hoping, but the traffic noise was starting to build and it didn’t seem like we would be able to fall back to sleep.
Today is Sunday. A lot of things seem to be closed on Sunday, even in Athens. We walked around the hotel in search of an ATM, an electronics store (hoping to buy a plug adapter), and to find some breakfast. We found an ATM at a bank across the street from the hotel. Across another street from there is a bakery called Bread Factory. We had no choice but to buy some pastries. The pastries were good, especially the mini Pain au Chocolat.
We pulled out 300 Euros from the ATM so we would have some walking around town money. We had our hotel break a 50 so we could tip the parking attendant when we were ready to leave.
Breakfast
Brett and Jess came down to the lobby just after eight and we headed off to find breakfast. We walked back to the restaurant area near the Acropolis and ate at a little café on a side street. I had some Greek yogurt with muesli and the omelet special. It was more food than I needed. The yogurt was really good, but the muesli wasn’t super impressive. Jess got honey with hers and that looked like the win. Charmaine and Brett each got fruit, which looked better than the muesli but not as good as the honey. The omelet specials we each got were nothing special, but they were fine.
After breakfast we worked our way to the Agora which was really cool. I think I enjoyed it more than the Parthenon and the Acropolis Museum the day before. The Temple of Hephaestus at the Agora is really well preserved and didn’t feel reconstructed or fake the way the Parthenon did.
What is a Gyro Anyway?
We worked our way through the shopping streets towards the Acropolis museum for lunch. We had pork gyros. That’s right, pork. The only options for gyros in Athens (and maybe all of Greece) are pork and chicken. That’s extremely confusing to me. Greek restaurants in the US never have pork or chicken. They only have lamb and beef. That seems like a big deal. How did the two diverge? We may never know. I will say this, though, I far prefer the lamb and spices of the American gyros. It also seems to be extremely common to put French fries on gyros in Greece. You never see that in the US. We have a lot of onions and tomatoes on gyros in the US, but you don’t see that as often in Greece. Really the only thing Greek gyros have in common with American gyros is that their both served on a pita with a tzatziki sauce. Everything else is different.
After lunch we walked over to check out Hadrian’s Gate before heading back to the hotel. When we got back, we were locked out of our rooms. We had asked for a late checkout earlier this morning before leaving, but something must have gone wrong. It wasn’t a big deal. They swiped our cards and we went upstairs, grabbed our stuff, and headed out to Meteora in our lowrider Mercedes that I really dislike.
Beautiful and Green
The drive to Meteora was beautiful. Greece is so much greener and prettier than I expected it would be. I think I expected dry rocky coastlines and desert-like conditions, but that’s almost the opposite of what we saw. Driving the toll road was nice and fast. All the toll booths took visa and it was so easy to just tap the card and never worry about fumbling with change.
Brett and Jess brought an international plug adapter with them, but only one. We’re planning to borrow it from time to time to charge my laptop and then charge our phones from the laptop. Our rental car does have a few good things going for it. One of them is a series of USB-C plugs throughout the car, so we’re able to charge our phones anytime we’re driving (and we remember to plug them in).
We arrived in Meteora to see our hotel bustling with activity. They were filming a Romanian cooking contest TV show out front of the hotel. It was easy to see why they chose this location. It’s incredibly beautiful. If this was in the US, it would almost certainly be a national park. We got settled in our rooms and then drove up to some of the monasteries and overlooks to enjoy the sunset.
