Our final day of our trip is here and we are exploring Athens, Greece. We begin our day at the restaurant across the street for breakfast. It’s the same one we ate at yesterday for dinner. Greek Coffee is on the menu and I’m not really sure what it is so I ask. The coffee has ground coffee in it and letting it sit when served continues to brew it. It’s much thicker than normal coffee and served in a much smaller cup. I don’t drink much coffee at home, but I would if it tasted like this! It was amazing. I also had French toast which was also very good. The food in Athens has been phenomenal.
We meander around the city walking to new parts of the city. We come across various ruins and an archaeological site. We walk until we need to use the restroom and then return to our hotel to relax.
We enjoy a food tour in the afternoon. It is a 3.5 hour tour and I’ve been warned to come hungry. We have a difficult time finding the start of the tour. The GPS had taken us to a little restaurant, but no one from the food tour was there. I text the tour operator via WhatsApp and the meeting point is just down the road. The gps listed took us to the first food stop on the tour and not the meeting point. The two points are pretty close to each other so it worked out. The tour includes two couples from North Carolina, one couple from PA, one couple from Israel, and us.
We tried so much food over the next couple of hours! We started with spanakopita at a place that makes phyllo from scratch. We then moved over to the fish market and then meat market. The fish market smelled, but had a huge variety. We saw shark and live crabs. We learned that the salmon is imported from Norway. The meat market had some unique options such as rooster, rabbit, and even a cow’s stomach lining. The lining is used to make a soup. Rabbit is for special occasions.
Our first sit down stop was at a restaurant near the food market. I don’t remember the Greek names of things, but basically we ate Greek Salad, chicken on a skewer, fried zucchini, naan like pieces of bread, and a shot of alcohol. We also had a local wine made in a barrel. We cheered Yamas as we had our shot.
Our next stop was an olive stand in the market. They sold a variety of olives and we tried several. I absolutely hate olives back home, but tried them all here. They were really good! There was one green olive that I didn’t care for, but the rest were really good. We finished this stop with a piece of fresh feta. Yum.
The nuts and spice stand was next. We started with little balls of sesame and honey, then pink pistachios, and then a little sweet. These sweets are commonly given when Greeks visit each other’s homes. They had the texture of a gummy bear with a powdered outside. We also had a bite of something that was made with tahini and cocoa powder. It was good, but different. We finished with some oregano. Â
We moved to two more shops that are across the street from each other. The first shop was a honey shop where we sampled different kinds of honey. It’s amazing how many and how different they taste. We also sampled a pistachio cream here. The shop across the road was a cured meat shop. Most of the group had one type of meat, but I couldn’t eat it and they gave me salami instead. We had the meat with a sheep milk’s cheese. I really liked the cheese.
I’ve never been on a food tour with so much food! We finished the tour at one more sit-down restaurant and it was the grand finale. So much food! Meatballs, calamari, orzo pasta, spinach, beans, more wine, fried cheese, grapes, white peaches, Greek yogurt with honey, and Greek coffee. It was an amazing tour and I’m glad we did it!
We returned back to the hotel where we needed to weight bags and evenly distribute the weight. We have a lot more with us now with all the shopping we did in the beginning of the trip. We balance our bags to 32 kg each, balance our carry-on bags to 8kg each, and hope our little hand scale is accurate. Our hotel arranges a taxi for us with a 3am pickup time and we make one stop to an ATM to get some cash for the ride. This ATM is part of a bank and the fee is less than the one in Italy, but still a lot in my opinion.
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