Panayotis, our Nafplion-based cab driver, brought us to Athens on Wednesday. The city was in the midst of an unseasonal heat wave & to compound matters, following the beautiful digs Marti & I had enjoyed on Spetses & in Nafplion, we were again relegated to Room-From-Hell #407 at the Esperia Palace. After a lot of hassle -- Marti brought them a laundry list of things wrong with the room -- we obtained an upgrade. We crashed for a while in the early evening, then walked down to Plaka for dinner at Diogenes.
On Thursday we hired Loucis the Taxi Driver to take us to Delphi. Enroute we stopped at a lovely old monastery called Ossios Loukas. This was Loucis' namesake, Saint Luke.
Loucis was delighted that we wanted to visit the beautiful Byzantine religious enclave. Most of his fares drive right by the turnoff & go straight to Delphi. The monastery was located in a serene mountain setting surrounded by almond & pistachio groves. The art that covered the every inch of the two churches within the complex was breathtakingly beautiful: the 10th century fresco (at right) was originally part of the interior of the first church, but had been covered until its discovery in 1965. It is now seen as part of an interior wall of the later church.
What a peaceful place for a traveler to catch his or breath, light a candle & simply chill out.
Our often-postponed trip to Delphi, site of the Oracle of Apollo, had been long in the planning. We weren't disappointed!
Marti kept calling it the "Navel of the World." She really believes in all those old myths & let's face it, is in fact a modern-day goddess. I'm a bit more skeptical & irreverent. When the guard wouldn't let me pose for a photo with one of the statues in the museum, I grabbed a shot with a bunch of reproduction heads in the gift shop. I'm not proud.
After we saw the Delphi ruins Loucis drove us into town, where we enjoyed lunch with a fabulous view at the Epicuros Taverna. I had excellent rabbit & shallot stifado (stew); Marti ordered pork with celery, a favorite. Baklava "cigars" for dessert.
We love vistas like these in Greece that make you feel like the whole world & entire millennia lie before you.
In the evening my bride & I hooked up with our Athens pal Alex, who took us to hear singer-songwriter Simon Bloom at the Small Music Theater in the Koukaki district of the city. It was hot & crowded in the venue & Simon wasn’t all that compelling, so after a while we went outside to schmooze with Alex & his musician friends.
Alex took us to Telly's, a late-night dive on the border of the hip Psirri 'hood, where we dove into plates piled high with grilled pork chops. Just what we needed! After dinner Alex introduced us to the owner, Telly himself. Sweet guy. Telly wanted to give us more pork chops. Just what we didn't need!
Next morning Marti & I went to see Vassilis, a jeweler whom Alex had graciously arranged to size Marti’s new ring while we waited. What a great hookup. This fellow's shop was in a stoa (arcade) just five minutes from the hotel. In the same stoa we found a baby gift for Maximilian, our friends Maria & Charles’ new baby, who had been born the day before in NYC. Next we took in the wonderful Botero exhibition at the National Gallery, the only art show I’ve ever seen where the observers look at the canvases & smile broadly. Well, they smile until they encounter his newest work, a remarkable & shocking series of pictures on the subject of prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Botero has said he became so upset at the atrocities that he felt compelled to produce paintings that would graphically depict them. Very hard-hitting stuff. It took us a while to recover from seeing these; Marti accurately recognized the influence of Goya on this project.
We shopped a while afterward, then hit Kioupi, our favorite blue-collar lunch restaurant in the oh-so-chic Kolonaki quarter. Marti & I had fried smelts, horta with chick peas, meatballs, orzo & veggies. Killer!
After lunch we hung out for a long time at Peros, a trendy Kolonaki sidewalk cafe where we sipped frappes & watched the beautiful people hanging out & strolling by.
If there's a better spot in Athens for girl-watching, I haven't found it yet!
In the evening we went down to Plaka, strolled by lots of inviting tavernas, but opted to go to Eden, a Greek vegetarian restaurant, of all things. We used to like this place, but the cooking has become a lot less imaginative & much more heavy-handed here than it was ten years ago. Gimme my meat, already! We headed back to the hotel, stopping for nightcaps at a favorite cafe of ours across from Saint Irini church.
Saturday afternoon featured more culture & shopping. Shunning the greasefest breakfast at the hotel, Marti & I kicked off the morning with lattes from our nearby Starbucks, complete with strolling musicians. Then we took the Metro to see the whimsical Botero sculptures at the Megaron Musiko concert hall. Which was surrounded by those crazy painted cows that keep popping up everywhere.
The Botero pieces were a delight to see. They reminded us of his marvelous 1992 installation along the Champs-Elysées. (Second from left.) Later that afternoon Marti found another one in the lobby of a bank. (On right.) The bank must have been a sponsor of the exhibition.
After the Megaron, we caught the "Caravaggio & The 17th Century" show at the Museum of Cycladic Arts in Kolonaki. On exhibit were a couple of Caravaggios we hadn't seen before. Beautiful. Afterward we enjoyed another Kioupi lunch & Peros frappe hang. We hit a few shops, finding gifts for ourselves & others. It was time to wrap up the shopping. Only a couple more days remained on this special 25th Anniversary trip!
On Saturday evening Marti & I took a cab to the Pangrati district of town, had dinner at an outdoor Italian resto, then went to our favorite live music venue in Athens, the Cafe Alavastro. The club is very laid back & the world music programming is always interesting. We were treated to a long night of music by "laika" chanteuse Lizeta Kalimeri & several of her friends who did guest turns. Laika music is a sort of popular urban folk successor to the rough, gritty rebetika style of Greek blues, for lack of a better description. Lizeta has a great voice & though we certainly didn't get all the lyrics, you could tell from the emotion & structure of the compositions that these were great songs. The audience knew many of them & sang along. Wonderful. Between sets Lizeta wrote down the titles to her CDs for us so that we'd be able to hunt them down. We headed back to the hotel after the proceedings ended, around 4 a.m. This was our kinda night on the town!
Marti & I went to lunch in the park on Sunday with our friends Alice, Lena & Alex. This was a fun, relaxing way to spend our last full afternoon in Athens. Lena is a cute little thing who eats everything you give her. What a kid! We'll see all of them again next month when they come for a stay in Paris. Later we returned to the hotel to pack for the next day's flight home. In the evening we went to Plaka to Stamatopoulo, our new favorite garden taverna, where we had gone the night we arrived 17 days earlier. "Crosby, Stills & Taki" were in full swing, so we asked for a table near the music.
We ordered a bunch of starters & a beautifully-prepared grilled tsipoura (porgy) & washed it all down with a bottle of Amethystos White. I could have stayed there all night listening to those guys sing great old Greek pop songs. In fact, we were among the last to leave that evening.
On Monday morning my bride & I went last-minute shopping (a tube to carry home posters, CDs by Lizeta Kalimeri). We downed one last lunch at Kioupi in Kolonaki. We wedged in a bit more shopping (a 1950s-style polka dot top for Marti), then basked in a final chill-out over ice cream frappes at Peros. On our walk back to the hotel I spied an awesome bakery, but we had reached maximum packing load. Next time. There was a taxi drivers strike that day, but Alex was kind enough to pick us up & our considerable luggage & take us to the airport in the big blue family van.
It was the end of an all-time dream vacation!
