Friday, June 05, 2015

Getting To Athens Then Taking It Easy

Today we we flew from Cairo to Athens but after that we pretty much took it easy. We didn’t want to pull a muscle overdoing the tourism.


If I ever have kids we are dressing like this once a week.


Egypt Air gives you free newspapers in coach! I think that's a first.


We booked another Airbnb for Athens but this time instead of someone meeting with the owner we were given a set of instructions out of Mission Impossible. In summary we were to go to an address and type in a key code to enter. Then a few floors up we would find a small safe attached to the wall where we entered another code. Inside the safe were a few containers. Opening the correctly marked contained would yield our room key, which we then needed to take to a different address to get our room. It was a lot of work with heavy bags but was actually kind of fun.








A nice long, slow lunch outside reminded me why Europe is awesome. There wasn’t a huckster pushing pyramid statues to be seen.

After some napping we went to find dinner in our new neighborhood. There was a restaurant in our guide book that made food according to ancient recipes that sounded awesome and after a bit of effort we found the place. Unfortunately that place had closed but a new restaurant called Abakas had taken its place. Why not?

The menu was entirely in Greek without any pictures. Our waiter was very patiently explaining every dish in detail but we just told him to bring whatever he thought we’d like. It was a risk but the other way was taking forever.

First he brought some complimentary shots of strong raki which is a close sibling to ouzo. They are both aniseed flavored but ouzo must come from Greece and I guess raki can come from anywhere though it's usually associated with Turkey. Next was some bread with honey mixed with olive oil as a dip. Appetizers kept coming and after the fourth we were starting to worry what we’d signed up for. Luckily next was the main course which was a giant chunk of lamb which we were supposed to carve ourselves and share. It felt kind of like Thanksgiving. Last was a complimentary dessert. It was a pastry that was maybe fried and covered with powdered sugar with I think sweet ricotta inside. It was pretty much a cannoli in a different shape.







Our waiter was awesome and was even so kind as to book us a taxi for the next day. He said he was from the island of Crete and offered pretend condolences when we said we were headed for the island of Santorini.


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