Athens, Greece!

I'm publishing this in Journal because we just arrived yesterday and these are raw notes rather than my usual reflective essays in Wander.

Every year since 2017, my son and I visited a warmer country or state (Texas!) for the winter break. We lived in the cold and snowy north-western Pennsylvania then and the change of weather and climate was needed and welcome. Even though my son moved back to the south after graduating from high school in 2020, the tradition remained.

This year, I'm living in a much warmer country - Georgia - but the tradition still remained as I would still like to continue it after I return to the US. I could never have enough warm countries. To think of it, I would probably be perfectly happy living somewhere on the equator.

Anyway, we've been to Brazil, Peru, France, Italy, and Germany for our warm winter breaks, and in Texas in 2020 right before the pandemic. This year, it's for Greece.

When I was growing up, I was dreaming of becoming an archeologist and digging for precious artifacts all over the world. The ultimate goal was to find Alexander the Great's grave. And Tamerlan's. And later - King Tamar's. You get the idea, all of them are impossible dreams of an idealistic lover of history.

Greece and Athens held a special place in those dreams as that's where Western civilization started. Life had other plans for me, but I am finally here in 2026, at almost 56 years of age. Some dreams are long dreams. And I am here not for work but for leisure.

Whenever we come to a new country, on the first or second day we take a hop-on-hop-off tour on a double-decker bus. It allows us to get the feel of the city and decide what places we want to visit because we never plan anything in advance. We just buy air tickets and the hotel and go, and then entirely wing it based on our moods and whatever grabs our eyes and interest.

And that's what we did yesterday.

We had the most inconvenient flight at 5:40 am out of Tbilisi, basically had no sleep that night. Because Athens is two hours behind we arrived at 7:40 am on our 2-hour flight. The plan was to get to the hotel, drop off the bags (the check-in time, like everywhere else, is 3 pm), and take a walk and/or the bus tour around the city.

After we cleared the border control and customs (still a breeze, but I wonder every time when the Europeans will start making the life of American tourists harder because of stupid Trump policies) and picked up our bags, we decided to take the metro to the city. It took us 9 euro per person plus some time to figure out how and where to take the train, but we were at our hotel, Ilissos, at around 9 am.

We must have been too groggy due to the lack of sleep because the receptionist took pity on us and gave us "priority" check in at 10 am. Oh how happy we were to get to the room and catch up on our sleep! It's a great hotel, too, as my son said, "inconspicuous from the outside and luxurious from the inside." To be honest, at the time any comfortable bed (and the Ilissos beds are very comfortable) would feel luxurious. We just slumbered.

But last night we found out how hard it is to sleep in a hot room without air conditioning. We had to trade opening the window for fresh cool air with closing it to avoid the non-stop traffic noises all night long.

Anyway, back to yesterday: we managed to get out of the room at about 2 pm, had a great late lunch at a traditional Greek restaurant fittingly titled 24/7, and caught the last hop-on-hop-off blue line bus. We just rode it the entire route and marked lots of places for us to visit. Today, we'll take another bus route from the same company (the tickets cost 20 euro per person and are valid for 3 days), to explore the coast, and then go to the Archaeological Museum.

But right now, we just returned from a full-on hot breakfast at the hotel, which was probably one of the best in all our travels. Not only they had a great variety of cut meats and cheeses, fruits and wonderfully thick Greek yogurt, they also took our live order for hot dishes such as fried eggs and omelets. Definitely would recommend this hotel's restaurant and would stay here again. But we still have a whole week to go!