Disclaimer: I did write most of this when I should have been sleeping. Ignore typos and grammatical erros because that’s what I did.

We flew out of San Francisco Monday morning on a Lufthansa 747-8. We all sat right in a row on the left side of the aircraft so we could all eagerly gaze at the darkness below us during the night. I thought maybe I would sleep on the flight to Frankfurt, but I ended up not sleeping a wink and just alternated between vigorously closing my eyes and watching movies on the seat back entertainment screen. At one point during the night I observed a several-passenger commotion across the cabin from us. I don’t know what they wanted in life, but I vehemently thought judgmental things until one of the flight attendants came over and talked to them a bit. After that they sat back down. Anyway, other than eating two meals, it was an uneventful flight.

We had a two hour layover in Frankfurt, and immigration was a breeze. There was no line, and I was asked two questions by the border patrol guy before he stamped my passport and let me through. I could only bring one guest with me into the Lufthansa Business/Star Alliance lounge, so Trevor and I went to check one out in the A gates. There was a wide selection of food, pretty good for an airport lounge, but then everything is better in Europe, right? I grabbed some inferior bread, and he got some kind of German soup. I don’t know if he really liked it or not. After food, we boarded our flight to Athens. I was stuck in seat 15A beside a man that didn’t know any English. I asked him what language he knew, and he just shrugged his shoulders. He then said something that sounded like “turkey” at which I asked, “Turkey” to which he replied with something like “gretsi” We then lapsed into silence for the rest of the flight. The lady in 15C had flown from Dallas and was going to Crete for 5 days, that was the extent of my travel conversations with strangers on my flights to Greece.

After landing in Athens, we grabbed our bags and headed to the train station. We bought three three-day tourist tickets at 20€ a piece. If you fly into Athens, this is most likely the cheapest option of getting to and from Athens city center, since a one-way trip in taxi is regulated at 38€ one way. While obsessively researching pickpocketing in Athens, I discovered that they have the second highest rate of complaints about pickpocketing in Europe. Despite my fears, we put our bags on the luggage rack on our hour-long trip to downtown. In retrospect, it would have been very easy for unstable elements to disappear with our bags, but fortunately that didn’t happen.

We got off the metro in Syntagma Square and bumbled around until we found our AirBnb. Our AirBNB experience is worth its own dedicated paragraph, unlike any AirBNB experience you will find anywhere in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. We got our keys from a yellow lockbox in an alcove—which we missed on the first walk past the address. The “front door” was a wrought gate. At the time of writing this, I do not remember if it was a covered alleyway (the Greeks call this a στοα [stoa]) or open to the elements. As we walked to the back, we took the door on the left, and walked up a few stairs. Another interesting thing to note about floor numbering in Greece is that floors start from zero. So, basement level is Floor -1. Ground level is floor 0, and so it goes on up the building. To get back to the story, our apartment was on floor 3. We got to our apartment door, and I double-checked to make sure that the door was on the left side of the furniture in the hall, which it was. I tried the key in the door, and kept trying the key in the door. No luck. Suddenly, a lady opened the door! Whoops. Weston says my reaction was great to watch. I think the lady was as confused as I was. I asked her which floor we were on, and she didn’t have an immediate answer. After a few seconds of awkwardly standing in the dark and gloomy hallway, we decided to go up another floor. A second time, we tried the door to the left of the furniture. Fortunately, this time it worked. We found the place to be quite nice, although it was decorated in an interesting style.

We relaxed a bit in the apartment, and then decided to walk around town a bit. Since we were on floor 3 (fourth floor for us one-based Americans), and there was an elevator—not recognizable as such at first—we decided to try it out. This thing, as some of the younger generation say, was “sketch”. Imagine three buff—ahem—American dudes in an elevator about 4 feet wide by 2 feet. The first time we used it, we closed the inner doors and hit what we decided was the ground floor. As the elevator shimmied, shook, and descended warily, it suddenly stopped. We—or at least I—dumbly stared in shock at what lay beyond the elevator doors. All cage, no door! After having a good laugh, taking a deep breath and vigorously mashing buttons, we got our elevator to move—albeit shakily—toward the top floor. You may think I’m exaggerating about the shaking, but this thing did really shimmy a bit as it moved in its vertical track. I did, however, keep wondering if it was just Trevor being stupid and trying to kill us or something. I don’t know. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and after I leave this place I will never ride in one like it again.

After the initial escapade with the elevator was complete, we set out to explore the city. We walked back to Syntagma square by chance, saw some riot police, and wondered past the “Attica Department Store,” which we were told later is the “only mall” in downtown Athens. After carefully checking Google Maps for food—which mainly involved me typing in the word “food” and choosing the first option—we headed to our first, hopefully authentic, Greek meal. This place was called Τα Καραμανλίδικα του Φάνη (latinized as Ta Karamanlídika tou Fáni) which Google Translate helpfully tells me means “The Karamanlidika of Fanis” Wikipedia also tells me that the Karamanlides are “a traditionally Turkish speaking Greek Orthodox people native to the Karaman and Cappadocia regions of Anatolia.” Anyway, we sat down at the end of what I’m going to call a “stoa” despite not having any clue whether that is correct, and received some bread to begin our first amazing experience of Greek delectation.

We asked the waiter what he would recommend to a friend who had never eaten Greek food before, and we settled on the following menu items:

• Karamanlidika “pastirma little pies” — this was some kind of amazing deliciousness wrapped in some kind of crispy dough. Pretty tasty.
• “Kavourmas” beef meat with potatoes, dill, green & red peppers — I missed the dill when we ordered, but it went pretty well with the general taste.
• “Kefte sausage” with yoghourt sauce, with pita bread — AND MUSTARD! MUSTARD! WITH YOGHURT AND MUSTARD! And onions on one side too.
• “Pelmeni” pasta stuffed with ground meat, with tomato & yoghurt sauce — This also had dill in it, if I recall correctly.
• Künefe — This was our dessert. It was some kind of cheese (mozzarella, I think) sandwiched between two layers of thread-thin “angel-hair pasta” as one of the misfits commented at some point. It was pretty tasty. Wikipedia says this was “wiry kadayif”

After waiting around waiting for our check, we finally asked for it, which seems to be what you do in Greece. We paid our tab and left, leaving zero tip on the table. I really really hope that we did not offend any of our eating places by not tipping.

We then walked back to our apartment and slept the sleep of the sleep-deprived traveler. The city outside our apartment was very busy, but fortunately, I personally had Apple AirPods Pro (definitely NOT getting ad money for that) and went to sleep quite quickly. I woke up—at 4AM no less—to the sound of some guy plinking through the trash at the corner of the street which happened to be right outside our window. The next day, Wednesday (which I guess has passed since I started writing this) we went on a nice tour of Athens, which I will attempt to cover in another blog post. Don’t worry, nothing bad happens on Wednesday, it’s just really cold. Wouldn’t want to leave you hanging off a cliff.

If you want to see a similar elevator to the one in our building, here is a link. https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g189400-d233053-i37024995-Cecil_Hotel_Athens-Athens_Attica.html

Here is a link to wikipedia on Künefe (Knafeh) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knafeh

p.s. yeah I just had to do that in the disclaimer.