As soon as I walk out of the metro I realize I'm not in Kansas anymore. Athens is nothing like I expected. While it is decernably Greek, the Turkish influence is greater than I imagined. So is the graffiti. Apparently in the past five years or so, several areas of Athens have taken a nose dive. Drugs and crime are now prevalent in places you could once walk around without thinking twice. As I head to my hotel, which is thankfully close to the metro station, I clutch my bag and wish I had stayed in Italy.
I've been up since 4:30 am in order to catch the early flight out of Rome and and as soon as I get into my hotel room, I want to go to sleep. But it's only 1:30, so that would be counterproductive. I inquire at the front desk about a place to eat after unsuccessfully walking around on my own for awhile (the area in which I found later was a considerably sketchy and unsafe place to be) and they point me in the other direction to the square. As soon as I find the tavern the hotel suggested, I know that this is nothing like Italy. Everything is moving and moving fast. The waiters, the orders, the food. Everything is coming and going at a pace that would make any American restaurant pale in comparison The reason? Well the cuisine (and the attitude). Much of Greek food is heavy on the meat. Meaning, large racks of lamb or chicken or beef are cooked and then hung from a chain to easily cut off the meat with an electic saw. The result? Within ninety seconds of ordering, my food has arrived. And holy hell, it's a lot of food. I'm still working on the whole non-vegetarian thing (I just started eating all types of meat in February) so I know my body isn't going to take kindly to the mass amount of slaughtered animal I am about to consume. That's why, for the two days I am in Athens, I end up only eating one meal a day. One freaking huge meal and that's it. This is also a fact of timing. To get a grip on my growing panic about being in some place as I feel - irrationally or not - is really unsafe, I have booked an early tour of the city tomorrow and then leave for two of the islands on Thursday. The city tour leaves at 7:30am and having had little sleep the night before, all I want to do is hunker down in my hotel room, not go out for another meal. I rent a movie on my iPad and curl up in bed, asleep by 9pm, for tomorrow brings the Parthenon, a place I have heard about since I was in 8th grade, but have never gotten to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment