Greece: The Food

When I started blogging and tweeting about taking this trip to Greece I received a lot of comments telling me how much I was going to love the food.  Strangely I hadn’t expected that.  My last trip to Europe didn’t leave me feeling very warm and fuzzy about the cuisine.  Of course, that was 10 years ago before I developed taste buds…and of course, none of those countries served me Greek Salad.

You have never had a tomato until you’ve had a fresh Greek grown tomato.  Trust me.  And if anyone ever serves me a Greek Salad without a SLAB of amazing feta cheese on top of it again, I might cry. 

We seriously had at least one, if not two, Greek Salads every day of our trip.

We also ate a whole lot of tzatziki.  The cucumbers were almost as epic as the tomatoes.  And the olives.  Until we discovered Fava Dip on Santorini…I’m still dreaming about that deliciousness.

Breakfasts were almost all included with our hotels (unless we had a godforsaken early ferry that had us out the door before it was served).  They ranged from quite good (Mykonos) to good enough (Athens)…always with coffee, fake OJ, some kind of cheese, some kind of egg, bread, Corn Flakes, and usually the crazy thick yogurt.

Aside from the bazillion Euros we spent on bottled water (it actually wasn’t that expensive, we just drank a lot of it) we kept our energy up with sodas and coffee drinks.  Nothing hits the spot at 3pm like a frosty cold can of Coke….seriously…it saved my life (from headaches) at least twice.  And nothing beats lying on the beach than having a Frappe (iced cappuccino) delivered right to your lounge chair.

Of course, we never let a dinner go by without wine…some good, some awful or a frosty cold beer, or whatever other boozy bevvie struck our fancy.

We found some healthy snacks.

And lots and lots of carbs.  Do you know the Greeks bring you bread with every meal?  Oh, you can say no…but why would you want to?!

Gyro pita, pistatsio, roast chicken with lemony potatoes, souvlaki with rice.

Beach pizza.  Holy delicious. 

Oh pasta!  Risotto.  More pasta!

And someone finally fed me eggplant I loved.  Probably because it was stuffed with cheese and other amazingness and cooked in some kind of clay oven I’ll never find anywhere outside of Sifnos.

Sifnian food spoiled us.  We arrived on a Sunday and were presented with a home cooked chick pea “Sunday Stew” at the restaurant in our hotel.  Best thing we ate on the whole trip…I swear.  Now if only one of us had purchased the required clay pot for cooking this up ourselves…

Oh, and dessert.  Thank God we didn’t jump on the baklava bandwagon until our last night on Santorini.  If we’d tried it sooner we may very well have eaten it for dinner every night.

Instead, we only did that once.  :)

Everyone who told me the food would be amazing….you were right.  We enjoyed every bite of every thing we had on the whole trip.  Greek Salad has been forever ruined for me.  I guess I’ll just have to go back!

Greece: Cats and Dogs

We already knew we’d meet plenty of cats on our trip through Greece but I was still amazed at the number of them.  Every hotel had a resident kitty (or three), every restaurant had buddies lingering around the tables, and every village had piles of cat food in every corner.

Starbucks kitty likes whipped cream.

Feisty kitteh will steal yer chicken.

There were also multiple dogs…which we were quite happy to see seemed to be fairly well taken care of.  This guy was super duper friendly and wanted to play on the beach with us all day…

Captain Underbite!

and for something completely random… Zeus’s turtle!

Greece: Athens (last day!)

On our final day of touristing around Athens we knew we had to make it count!  We should have worn pedometers and tracked just how far we walked on this vacation.

The tickets we purchased for entrance into the Acropolis the day before also granted us access to several other historic sites (excellent value for just 12 Euros!).  Most things are relatively close so we started at Hadrian’s Library and worked out way out from there.

Thousands of years worth of history just open to the elements for the world to enjoy!  After tracking down the great gyro pitas we enjoyed on our first day in Athens, we then moved on to Roman Agora…built in the 2nd half of the 1st century BC…

The Tower of Winds…

Ancient Agora is a sprawling area including a large museum and the most well preserved temple we saw in our travels.  The Temple of Hephaistos…

Flying Victory (I’m enthralled with the draping and movement!)…

Inside the church we found Jesus…

After a minor trek across a few scary main arteries we found Hadrian’s Arch (standing all by itself with modern Athens all around)…

and finished up with The Temple of Olympian Zeus…

By the time we arrived here we started to feel a little goofy…  :)

We did wander through the National Gardens for quite some time as well but it was certainly off-season at this point so we missed out on what we can only assume is a quite gorgeous park in the Spring and Summer.

For our final night we took the time to dig out our good clothes and I even curled my hair.  We wandered through the windy streets of the Plaka to find our last dinner destination and bid Greece a fond farewell.

It’s hard to believe we’ve already been back for a month. 

This is the longest vacation I’ve ever been on and it was worth every minute, dollar, uncomfortable ferry ride, and bottle of sunscreen.  Next time I’ll take a bigger beach towel and smaller camera.

Other than that I wouldn’t change a thing.

Where to next? ;)

Greece: Athens (Acropolis)

Goodbye Greek islands…

Hello again Athens!

The ferry ride from Sifnos to the mainland took FOREVER!  We felt like we’d lost a whole day and by the time we arrived back at our Athens hotel all we wanted was dinner and sleep.  We attempted to find that same fabulous Gyro stand from our first day but starvation got the better of us before we tracked it down. 

First thing the next morning we stepped outside and pointed ourselves up the hill to the Acropolis.

Thanks to some poor directions we ended up taking a scenic walk through the residential area at the base of the Acropolis.  Along the way we encountered another pair of gals who had also been given the wrong route so we decided to stay together and figure it out.

Twenty minutes and a set of correct directions later we finally found the entrance!

It was worth the walk.  :)  Inside those walls lies some pretty amazing architecture and reconstruction. 

My favourite building by far was the Erechtheum. 

Of course, the Parthenon is pretty epic as well!

The view is spectacular and goes on for what seems forever!

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is 2000 years old and still used for live concerts today…

The Theatre of Dionysus is massive and undergoing about 5 years worth of excavation and reconstruction…

The preserved details are quite amazing.

After a few hours on the mountain in the scorching sun, we settled in for a lovely lunch then parted ways with our new friends.  Tiffaney and I headed off to the new Acropolis Museum…where many of the original pieces from the Acropolis are on display.  The museum itself is gorgeous, modern and spacious and even without an audio guide we learned so much about what we had just seen (not that I remember anything now!). 

See…vacations come with education!