11:07 pm local time marks the end of my first day in Athens and already I love it here. Today was spent wandering the streets of Athens from the flea markets to the hill where Paul spoke to the Greeks finished off with a dinner at a local house turned into a restaurant. I picked up a few items while a group of us walked through the Athens flea market and got my first beanie. We then retraced our steps from the “Death March” that we took the night before up to the area around the Parthenon and the hill where the apostle Paul talked to the Greeks which ended up having a panoramic view of Athens itself.
Fun Fact: Athens is the biggest city I have ever seen. Granted I haven't been to too many "big" cities but this one takes the cake easily. Athens stretches for miles. It is incredibly hard to fathom how large this city actually is because the buildings do not go up. The people of Athens spread out.
After our hike up to the top of this hill we left and walked over toward the Parthenon and through some of the more expensive areas of town and what interested me the most was the graffiti. Most of it, especially the stuff in the rich areas, was anarchist symbols and slogans that had been done in response to the economic climate in Greece
However there were some more clever designs.
After the expensive area right by the Parthenon we headed back to our apartments to get ready for our first movie: Agora. Agora, featuring Rachel Weisz, is the story of a woman named Hypatia who lived in Alexandria, Egypt and was one of the brightest philosophers and astronomers of her time. The movie accurately displays the tensions between the pagen, Jewish, and Christian peoples who lived in Alexandria at the time and how Hypatia was caught up in them.
Dinner was next on the agenda after the movie so we headed up to a house that had been turn into a restaurant and is owned and managed by a brother and sister. We had many excellent dishes of pork and a dish of rabbit which was surprisingly good. Dessert was a duo of a spongeish cake and an extremely good chocolate and vanilla cake with chocolate sauce. Side note: the chocolate I’ve had in Greece is by far the best I have ever tasted. Our final dessert was a shot of alcohol called Tandoori. The version we had tastes exactly like Fireball Whiskey but without the after kick of the cinnamon. With the shot finished we said good bye to our hosts and left for our apartments. And so ended the first of many amazing days in Greece!!
As one Greek told us on our walk through the flea market "Welcome to True Greece"
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