Kyla and Wes did the Segway tour with us during the day, so Piper joined us for an evening cooking class. We aren’t allowed to take pictures of the middle child these days, but she enjoyed making stuffed grape leaves, Greek salad, and other yummy food. I pulled my usual trick of cooking indifference so I could cheer on others while sipping wine and chatting with new people from other countries.
Honorable mention to Hans & Gretel, ice cream place extraordinaire. The kids almost didn’t notice the long distance we walked on a hot day to get here. Deciding what to order took most of the afternoon!
And while I am wrapping up our time in Greece, I remembered our taste of rose cordial at a 19th century restored city house of a prosperous farmer. Ten days in Greece wasn’t enough!
Exploring the National Gardens on our first afternoon in Athens.
My phone calls me “goddess” so it’s not surprising Athena and I have so much in common. Sure, she has an entire ancient city named after her, a unique origin story, and the adulation of millions, but we could totally be besties.
Athens: Sure, fine, go ahead, Tourists. Take pictures with the ancient temple ruins we couldn’t bother cleaning up in our Garden.
Of the Big Cities we’ve explored, Athens might be my favorite*. It was shiny and clean and stuffed with Greek ruins and good food. I was surprised to learn that when I was in high school, Athens was Europe’s most polluted city. It has literally cleaned up its act with car-free zones and driving restrictions. At 33°C (in the 90s!), it was bearably hot, compared to the 45°C it will be in height of summer.
More casual, unidentified ruins and columns on our way to Hadrian’s Arch.
Hadrian’s Arch
My favorite part of a city is the afternoon we arrive and Dwayne and I savor our first taste of a place, usually by walking to the nearest and biggest green spot on the map. In Athens, we stumbled across Hadrian’s (yes, Hadrian, again!) Arch and the ruins of Zeus’s Ridiculously Big Am-I-Compensating Temple on our way to the National Garden, before we had a family dinner under the lights of the Acropolis.
The Acropolis from a distance. I swoon.
It was a delicious first bite of Athens. Four-course meal tomorrow!
*Eleven million people call Greece home, and almost half of them live in Athens. So, when I say we saw Athens, please read that as “We explored the square mile or so around the Acropolis” and count that as Athens.
Corfu is a great little Greek Island that has many things going for it:
–>A great water park that, on a hot Tuesday in early June, had lines about 3 people long. It had many more water slides than Wild Waves and way fewer people. And if Piper didn’t put on a swimsuit and leave her shaded chair, she at least took off her winter coat/security blanket by 4pm. Kyla, Wes, and Dwayne got as waterlogged as possible, and my knee was allowed the lazy river and wave pool, under the direct supervision of Dr. Dwayne. However, I read a book and didn’t tear off my leg, so it was still a wonderful day.
–>An Old Town with terrible parking but great shops and cafes, and a living history museum, depicting late 19th-century upper-class life with freaky automatons, which delighted me.
–>Beaches with terribly pebbly beaches (seriously, do I have to go to Whidbey Island to get some decent sand this year?). But what they lacked in sand, they make up for with turquoise water, hot sun and toplessness. (Poor Wes and Piper.)
–>Cooking classes! This was a long one, where we met a small group in Old Town for market shopping before driving out to the host’s home out in the country. We made some traditional Greek dishes in the outdoor kitchen, and then feasted on the front deck. At 6 hours, it was a bit too long of a day for the kids, sitting around and talking news and politics with new friends from Greece, Germany, and the UK, but the food was good. Dwayne coveted the olive press ruins in the back yard and the kids had 6 semi-feral cats and 3 kittens for entertainment.
–>Tavern Tripa, a place in a small old town with questionable parking options that served traditional Greek food family-style, with music and dancing. It was similar to the one Dwayne and I enjoyed in Cyprus, and the kids didn’t hate it. I felt like I sneaked a little culture into their dinner.
–>A fun little aquarium & reptile house that was passionate about local marine life, and let us hold their friendly python.
We got a whole week in Corfu, putting the finishing touches on our tans and enjoying living in a (VRBO) house again. But once the general details fade, I think Dwayne will vividly remember the worst thing about Corfu: driving. Generally, the roads were even a little wider here than in Sicily and Sorrento, but Corfu was missing Italy’s reluctance toward vehicular homicide. His opinion was cinched on a road Google Maps was convinced was a viable alternative to our cooking host’s home. I would have taken a picture of it, but I was too busy with the passenger’s window down, touching the sides of the walls two inches from the car door to help Dwayne navigate getting within a half-inch of the buildings on my side so he had enough room on his side. This road was NOT suitable for anything wider than a pregnant donkey. But again, a brag. Dwayne didn’t get a scratch on that car, and I would have sworn (oh, and I did swear) there were parts of that street that were narrower than our car.
More fun than “Can You Survive this Greek ‘Road’?” is still the “Does Denise Like Beer Yet?” game.
Corfu was for storing up energy and good-knee karma before our last week on our Big Adventure, split evenly between Athens and Istanbul. Oh, this is going to be good!
Needopedia 