before going full mamma mia

Sometimes the group trips make it out of the group-chat, and Greek Summer 2024 did exactly that. As a celebration for finishing our bachelor's degree, the four of us flew to Athens in the middle of the night. That was the beginning of this great adventure.

Before heading to the blue and white of the greek islands we spent 2 days in Athens, exploring the ancient greek monuments and meeting up with our bestie Dimitra.

I met Dimitra in my last trip, to Graz in Austria. She was participating in the same BEST Course as me, and we've been friends since then! She was a huge help planning this trip, specially when it came to the island-hopping part.

We arrived in Athens at 6 in the morning, left our luggage in a locker with a very nice greek man.He helped us figure out the map of the city and gave us some recommendations on the best time to visit each place (we ended up doing all the opposite but thank you sir anyways). Even at that time in the morning the temperature was already like 34ºC, but we had no time to waste.

Going out on the streets in Athens meant buying frozen bottles of water to cool us down and jumping from shadow to shadow. Iced coffee was weirdly common too, you could see old men just sitting outside sipping on their straw, drinking their greek freddo cappuccino.

Our first stop was the Acropolis Museum, because the Acropolis itself had a huge line and we didn't pre-book tickets for that time slot (oops). The museum was fun and air-conditioned! I think the highlight was the 5 Caryatids (the 5 sister statues that held up a temple). Originally they were 6 but the other one is... guess what, in the British Museum.

For lunch we had out first (of many and daily) gyros in this little place, and then climbed to the acropolis, in the peak of heat at 2pm, to see the views of Athens from the highest grounds. The wind was so strong and hot it felt like being inside an air-frier. But it was worth it to see the Parthenon (the big temple, in honour of the goddess Athena) up close.

After that it was time to go home, shower and later go out for dinner. We found a cute little place called "Λόντζα της Γειτονιάς" (whatever that means) and shared some traditional greek food. They only had a handful of dishes and we chose the meatballs with feta cheese and fries. I shared a greek beer with one my friends, it was good, a little bitter compared to the traditional portuguese ones.

To end the day and celebrate Tomás' birthday at midnight we chose a cool rooftop called 360 and tried some fancy (but overpriced) cocktails. After waiting in line for a little bit, we managed to get a table with a view to the acropolis, which is all lit up at night. After only sleeping for 3 hours in the plane that morning, the day was starting to feel never-ending. After singing happy birthday, we called it a night and walked home to sleep. At the time we had no idea how hard the walk would be. It was almost 40 minutes, and let's just stay, our house was pretty high up in the hills of Athens. We arrived home and fell asleep immediately.

Athens day 2

In our second day in Athens we got some breakfast near the apartment (an iced coffee and a cake for me) and decided to hit the Monastiraki Flea Market first thing in the morning. Bought some cheap bracelets (1€) as souvenirs and settled on another gyros for lunch! This time we ate at the trendiest place - we found it on tiktok - it was right next to the Monastiraki square. Clearly this place had been trending on tiktok because we had to wait for half an hour under the sun, but it was worth it. It was probably the best gyros we had in the 9 days of our trip, and we still talk about it. While we were eating, Dimitra (our friend from Athens) joined us for the rest of the day.

The rest of the day was spent exploring the rest of the city with Dimitra as our tour guide. We went to the National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (ΕΜΣΤ) where somehow we managed to enter for free and visited the Panathenaic Stadium (where we took the most awkward group photo ever). We tried what Dimitra called "the equivalent to pastel de nata in Greece, I think it was called galaktoboureko and it was actually very good! A little too sweet for me.

After going home to shower and get dressed up, we had a dinner reservation in a fancy rooftop restaurant for Tomás' birthday dinner. Although we took forever to choose (the menu was mostly in greek and we only had 1 Dimitra). the food was amazing, and we had an amazing time.

Dinner was long, we left the restaurant at 1 am. Tried an amazing dessert called Ekmek, unfortunately I didn't take a photo of it.

The night pretty much ended there. We were tired from the lack of sleep, but most importantly, had a Ferry to catch at 6 am in the port of Athens (which was quite far away from our house). So after getting the bill, we took an Uber home, packed everything in our very over-filled bags and went to sleep. For just two hours.