Week 32 - Archeological sites open

Adventures in Greece as we pursue the dream of buying a boat and cruising the Mediterranean.

We’re at the point where the success of a week and our accomplishments are often dictated by the number of photos we think are worth sharing. Not that every thing we do is photo worthy (opening a bank account?) but still, it’s a good proxy for a week that was full of activity. This week was a good week!

The best thing about this week was that the government rolled back measures on hairdressers and archeological sites (outdoors), which meant we could visit a few places that I haven’t been able to see yet. COVID wise, we seem to be in a holding pattern with numbers that, while they aren’t going up, seem to be staying stubbornly high too. Intubations are the big concern with ICU beds remaining over-capacity.

Of the sites we managed to see, the Agora (ancient market) was the best. It’s a large area beneath the Acropolis that we’ve walked around the outside of since we’ve been here, but I’ve yet to be inside the fence! It was really satisfying to be able to get up close to and read about the various buildings I could only glimpse through the trees or see from afar.

There were two colder days during the week (one on which the weather forecast was threatening sleet / snow again and 0 degrees) but generally it was very pleasant hovering in the high teens.

Thursday was Greek National day. It was special because it’s the bi-centennial and celebrates 200 years of Greece as an independent nation. There was a lot of flags everywhere, military parades and jet fly overs which were fun. Especially for us as we were able to see the fly overs really clearly from the roof of the apartment. Unfortunately for the average Greek resident, their ability to see anything (other than on the TV) was severely restricted, with large parts of the centre shutdown and the parade inaccessible unless you were a dignitary. It’s not clear if this was a COVID precaution or just the Government being, well, the Government here.

On Friday we wandered through Keremeikos, which is the ancient cemetery placed just outside the old Athens city walls. It’s very peaceful and again, another place that I HAVEN’T WALKED IN YET, so therefore incredibly exciting. With the warmer weather the tortoises are becoming active and we saw about 10 or so as we roamed around, several of them doing their part to procreate.

Daylight Saving Time started here this weekend, so we had a VERY lazy Sunday start — why not, we don’t have anything else to do anyway. Erik reached out to see if we wanted to go for a walk so we spent a couple of hours wondering around Kallimarmaro which is the small suburb behind the ancient stadium as well as the stadium itself. In what we now consider typical Greek fashion, while the stadium was closed to tourists, if you walk around the back, someone has conveniently pried the bars apart so you can slip inside, and we enjoyed a lovely walk around the grounds, just us and about 100 other locals with the same idea.

I believe we’ve mentioned Lukamades before, these are a greek “doughnut” that come in a ball shape, stuffed with something (in this case, a sweet cream and covered in bueno chocolate). Everybody always talks about how the Mediterranean diet is good for you, so we believe in embracing all aspects of it whole heartedly. They are also delicious.

Boat wise, things should start to get fairly active in the next few weeks as the Sellers are on their way and we’ll be arranging surveyors etc., still a lot of back and forth — who knew that buying a boat is 1% looking at a boat and 99% paperwork!

EDIT: Last minute update to add a photo of me taking a photo kindly provided by Erik!

Until next week,

Tim & Karina