Back On My Grand Tour Bullshit: Impressions from Athens

There was once a time, long ago, when I thought I was going to grow up to be a travel writer. I was raised in a family where everyone both traveled a lot, and read stuff along the lines of Gerald Durrell, Jan Morris, and Patrick Leigh Fermor when they weren't traveling. I imagined myself writing quippy, dashing books about wild and romantic adventures. Which was, indeed, going to have to stay imaginary, as I happened to enter the workforce and adulthood in the early 2010s, where I quickly realized, in my first journalism job, that the freelance industry my travel-writing idols had been able to make money in was dead and gone, and that the most I could realistically expect from selling a travel essay was a few hundred bucks and (maybe) some compliments.

I came to this realization during the same era in which Instagram hit, YouTube became omnipresent, and even the relatively obscure (and often brilliantly clever) travel blogs of the 2000s swiftly became all-but obsolete- discarded in favor of travel videos and photos largely produced by really hot, peppy people who were absolutely wild about being on camera. As I adhere to the ancient desert belief that every time my face appears on camera, a tiny bit of my soul is sucked out with it, that means of making a living was going to be a no-go for me. I travel wrote for fun over the last decade, here and there, but other things that might realistically lead to a paycheck caught my attention.

But I mean, I still like writing about travel. I do a lot of traveling, as I work remotely and I also strive to spend as much time away as possible away from Boston - where I live, in a highly technical sense. So here I am, trying to get back into it, yawping into the void in a place more long-form than where I do my usual yawping these days, on Bluesky. Maybe someone will find this useful. Maybe one of the many great restaurants I visited will get an additional customer. I guess I'm daring to dream.

This time, I'm going to be writing about Greece. It's weird that I hadn't been to Greece until this year, as I've managed to make it to almost all the other sites that unpleasant young Victorians with pretentious ideas and overly easy lives (you know, people a lot like me) liked to go visit/loot antiquities from back in the long 19th century. What's more, I always knew that I'd love Greece, a country that is known for all the things I like: lots of archeological ruins, excellent food that's big on gamey meats and green vegetables, dramatic dry landscapes and creature-filled oceans, warm weather, and interesting local alcohol that probably won't make you go blind.

And yet, I hadn't it together enough to actually go, until I was invited on somewhat short notice to a conference in Rome in April, and realized that it'd be perfectly realistic for me to spend a few weeks in Greece - both for my own amusement, and because I try to minimize my exposure to New England before at least mid-May. I decided I'd spend a week in Athens, and then I'd spend a little over two and a half weeks in Crete, which my parents had visited a few years before and enjoyed very much.

Apparently, mid-April and May are very good times to visit Greece, judging by how many Greek people complimented me on my timing. The tourist hordes (you know, unlike me, also a tourist) have not arrived, the weather isn't yet obscenely tree-igniting hot, and most everything is open.

Let's start with my impressions from Athens.

My plane landed into an apocalyptic-looking sandstorm, apparently brought about by winds form the Sahara, but it mercifully began to clear up almost as soon as I arrived. The place I was renting was a penthouse studio in a building with no stairs, which was only a bad thing when I had to drag my suitcase up on the first day (with an assist from the owner) - and most importantly, it had a great view of the Parthenon, which made me feel like I was getting some real bang for my buck.

Immediately after unpacking, I started walking over to the Temple of Zeus - which was never finished in Classical Greek times, and was in fact only completed by known Ancient Greece fanboy the Emperor Hadrian - and as I walked, I quickly realized that I was in another one of those countries where crossing the street is mostly anarchy. Which is something I happen to like, because I guess I like staring death directly in the face. Even a death that comes in the form of a tourist bus with a Flaming Hot Cheetohs ad on it.

Plaka is surprisingly pleasant, even if it is the Tourist Area of Tourist Areas. In many European cities, the corest-core of the core tourist areas are pretty objectively horrible places to stay, between the overpriced shitty restaurants, constant congestion, roaming packs of sloppy drunks from other European countries, and the lingering feeling that you're about to be ripped off at all times. Plaka, which is Athen's core tourist area, didn't make me feel that way - and maybe it's because I was there in off-season, but I found the place perfectly nice to be in, filled with nice little allies and cats wondering if you're going to eat all of that thing you're eating.

It was easy to find reasonably-priced, good restaurants (a persistent theme everywhere in Greece), no one hassled me on the street in an effort to get me to buy stuff, there were some interesting antique stores scattered around, and the part I was staying in was even pleasantly quiet at night. There are allegedly pickpockets lurking around the Monastiraki Square area, but I get the sense they can be easily avoided if you're following basic "don't put your wallet or your new iPhone in the backpocket of your jeans" precautions. It's also highly compact and walkable from the perspective of a tourist trying to hit the major sights, which is in part due to my next point...

Athens has fewer well-preserved archaeological sites than Rome does. Don't come to Athens expecting the city to be a slightly more Hellenistic version of Rome, where every other block features a romantic view of an ancient attraction built by yet another ill-fated emperor. There are a lot of impressive ruins to see, most all of them an easy walking distance from Plaka, but the scale isn't on the same grand level as what you might see in Rome. The simplest explanation for that is age: the ruins in Athens are a lot older than many of the ancient ruins you'll see in Italy, and there's been a lot more time for people to mess them up, like that time someone thought it'd be a good idea to store ammo in the Parthenon.

Nor did Athens remain powerful and relevant after the ancient era in the same way that Rome did - and Rome's visual library of ancient ruins exists in large part because Mussolini decided to knock down a whole lot of modern buildings to revel them, as part of the usual European fascist program of reviving ancient glories. Athens, meanwhile, was something of a backwater up until the success of the Greek War of Independence, and only became the new capital of Greece due to pressure from romantic Western powers that had aided the Greeks in the war. Western architects proceeded to knock down a lot of doubtless interesting buildings from the Byzantine and Ottoman eras, built a lot of Neoclassical piles, and even ran a railway right through the heart of the ancient Agora.

During the 20th century, as brutal wars pushed huge numbers of refugees into Athens from other parts of the Mediterranean, residents who were desperate for housing largely began to start building it themselves with minimal involvement from the state. Today, that's why Athens is the second densest city in Europe, coming in after Paris - and there's also a lot of people living on top of what is presumably a lot of un-excavated stuff, who pretty understandably would like to keep living there.

Food is cheaper and larger than you'll expect it to be. I begrudgingly live in Boston these days, a place with a food scene that can be defined as "expensive, and also not very good" - and my time here, and in other places in Europe, has conditioned me to assume that if I pay a certain price for a dish, I'll probably be getting a relatively small portion. I realized that I had to chuck that logic out the window in Greece during my first meal there, after I paid seven euros for a marinated anchovy appetizer and got not the six or so delicious stinky fish that I was expecting, but a small mountain of very-good anchovies that I then had to work through with grim resolution. While there are some restaurants in Athens and in Greece that advertise themselves as offering "small plates," the plates you actually get are still usually the size of your head. As someone who doesn't like wasting food because it makes me sort of amorphously spiritually uncomfortable, this was interesting for me to navigate as a single traveler.

And crucially, Greek food is not just affordably priced and served in enormous quantities, but is extremely good. Unlike in Rome, where I'd just been, it proved to be remarkably easy to find really good restaurants at really affordable price points pretty much everywhere I went in Athens (and in Crete). I also very much appreciated that Greek restaurants almost always feature a lot of delicious vegetable and salad dishes on the menu, considering how hard it can be to reliably get roughage in other parts of Europe. I feel like my body is dying if I can't eat a huge amount of greens whenever I feel like it, and almost every menu I came across in Greece offered boiled mixed greens - which sound suspect, but are actually a delicious mound of swiftly parboiled wild greens with olive oil and lemon, sometimes served with zucchini and potato.

Not that Greek food is inherently healthy. Everything comes with fries. Everything. Gyros, which you should eat a lot of, come with fries in them. Souvlaki plates? Yep, there's fries. Ordering some stifado, a tasty beef and onion stew? Guess what, it comes with fries!

Athens also seems to have a very interesting and vibrant international food scene, and I noticed a number of nice-looking Lebanese, Indian, Chinese, Pakistani, Japanese, and even Southern BBQ places in town (among other world cuisines) - and the BBQ thing makes sense, considering the profound Greek commitment to grilled meat. I resisted trying these places as it seemed like I should stick with Greek food for my first visit to Greece, but I'll absolutely be getting a dosa next time I'm there.

Athens is a pretty safe place, and the graffiti shouldn't put you off. I get the sense that some people are unnerved by the graffiti (much of it antifascist) that blankets a whole lot of buildings in Athens, and come away with the conclusion that this means the city is inherently dangerous. In truth, Athens has a pretty crime rate - comparable to Paris - and violent crimes against tourists seem to be very rare indeed. If you're coming from the US, Athens is almost certainly as safe or safer than where you live. You may see drug-users in some of the slightly rougher areas, but they're highly unlikely to be interested in you. And they're not going to chase you down and inject you with heroin, because heroin is expensive. Be polite and move along.

Visit ruins that aren't the Parthenon or the Agora. I enjoyed walking up the Filopappou (or Philopappou) hill, where a monument to the ancient Roman prince, who hailed from a Greek-Iranian kingdom in Armenia, was erected by his sister Julia Balbilla in 116 AD. I also enjoyed Kerameikos, an archeological site that encompasses both one of Athen's key old cemeteries and its ancient city gates. There's also the weird and esoteric Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora (which I'm going to write a separate post about), which functioned as a water clock in ancient antiquity.

The Parthenon was nice, of course, but it's also extremely crowded - a situation that has improved since time-slot based entry was introduced, but is still a bit unpleasant to navigate. I did find that once you descend from the peak of the Acropolis itself, considerably fewer seem to bother with exploring the ruins on the slopes of the hill, like the Theater of Dionysus. I enjoyed visiting the Ancient Agora more, especially because I arrived right when it opened and largely had the place to myself for a solid hour so I could take pictures of voluptuous centaurs on the frieze at the Hephaisteion for my weird Internet friends. Yet another major perk of visiting in the off-season!

Let us talk museums, which you really should be going to if you're making the trouble to go to Athens. The National Archeology Museum is still worth visiting, but a lot of it is blocked off for reasons that may or may not be due to staffing. Still, you should go. Seeing the actual Antikythera mechanism - arguably the world's first known computer, and the first stop on a twisting historical road that leads all the way up to both the space shuttle and Google AI sludge telling people to eat rocks - was a trip. Get there early, as is the case with all attractions everywhere.

The extremely sleek Parthenon Museum, opened in 2009 for the explicit purpose of housing the stolen Elgin Marbles if the English ever decide to actually give them back, also shouldn't be missed. I liked seeing the weirder, older Archaic-era statues and art that existed on the Acropolis before the Parthenon in its current incarnation was finished in 432 BC.

I highly advise visiting the smaller archeology and history museums in the city, too. The Museum of Cycladic Art houses an interesting and compact collection of ancient, pleasantly austere works from the Cyclades, Cyprus, and ancient Greece, with some fun multimedia displays thrown in there for flavor. I particularly enjoyed the Benaki Museum, a deceptively large private institution with an impressively curated collection of Greek art ranging all the way from the Bronze Age to the modern era: the stuff on displays includes golden ancient Greek snake bracelets, rare Byzantine mosaics, etchings from the Grand Tour era, artifacts from the Greece Revolution, and an entire impressive wood interior from an old Greek house.

There's also the National Historical Museum of Athens, which used to be the Hellenic Parliament (1875 until 1932), and does not exactly seem to get a lot of visitors - when I walked in, a toddler who appeared to be the grandchild of the ticket lady was manning the front desk. However, the place proved to be a worthwhile, if somewhat disjointed, look at modern Greek history, with rooms featuring impressive paintings of naval battles with the Ottomans, portraits of terrifying looking Greek rebels with legendary mustaches, and a neat weapons display where a video plays whenever you hold your hand over the object in a glass case. Particularly poignant is the current top-floor exhibit, which focuses on the personal stories of the many, many people from Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans forced to become refugees over the last 200 years. In the US today, we simply don't hear much about these refugee movements. That's despite the fact that they were some of the largest and most traumatic that the world has ever seen, including the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, in which around 1.6 million people were forced to abandon the only homelands they'd ever known.

Finally, I visited the Byzantine and Christian Museum, anther enormous collection broadly covering all the religious art (which was most of the art) created after the Classical Era up until our current times - which I sadly had to rush through as I messed up my timing and didn't realize it would be closing within the hour. I'll be back someday, but the snippets of preserved, ethereal medieval church ceiling paintings and intricate, luridly-red colored icons I did see were impressive. It's also very close to Aristotle's Lyceum, of which sadly very little is preserved, although it's sort of nice to look at the site and fill the gaps in with your own imagination.

I was not informed about the urban tortoises. I've spent all these years reading about other people's visits to Greece, and not a single person mentioned that the archeological ruins in Athens are also home to a healthy, free-roaming population of Greek tortoises. You'll see them stomping around at surprisingly fast speeds, angrily taking bites out of figs that have fallen to the ground, and lurking in the tall grass in a lot of locations in intensely urban Athens.

There's also a lot of urban cats in Greece, who you will inevitably find yourself taking pictures of, and who will inevitably roll up and start yelling at you for food whenever you're eating outside. (Some of these cats have figured out that they can claw at people's clothes - but not their bare skin, which is I merciful - to demand a donation in the form of some gyros meat). I love cats, but I've spent enough time in countries choc-a-bloc with rabies that I automatically cringe whenever I see one of my fellow tourists petting a stray. However, I've been informed that Greece has an exceedingly low rabies rate, and volunteer groups apparently do a fairly through job of getting Athen's stray cat population vaccinated. But you still should avoid getting bit by a cat if you possibly can, because cat bites almost always turn into gnarly-ass infections if untreated, and do you really want to be leaking pus all over the wonders of the ancient world?

You should visit Athens. Curious tourists still get advised to spend as little time as possible in Athens and then get out for more salubrious or "authentic" parts of Greece. I don't agree with this advice at all. Athens isn't an exquisitely well-preserved romantic time capsule like some other European capitals, but it's still a decidedly interesting place, one that I've barely scratched the surface of. There's a lot to see, and simply blasting in and out over two days means you'll miss a lot, even if you do manage to hit the Parthenon.

On my last day there, I wandered by the Kerameikos area and noticed a bunch of local Greeks engaged in what appeared to be some kind of good-natured folk dance-off - and I watched that for a while, then found myself walking into a comic book convention in Technopolis, a reclaimed warehouse arts space, where there was also a big street food festival. Everyone at these events was Greek, and it was nice to see that even in the tourist heart of Athens, a lot of stuff was going on that had very little to do with the international tourism trade. There's a lot of interesting restaurants, art galleries, and cultural centers in other neighborhoods that I haven't set foot in, and I hope to do that someday.

Here are some Athens restaurants I suggest:

The Rose of Taste/To Triantafyllo tis Nostimias. A superb seafood joint that actually does seem to be frequented by locals. Excellent fried smelts, shrimp saganaki, and Greek salad.

Seawolf Athens. Great name, great contemporary seafood. Marinated anchovies served in portions as big as your head, fava bean puree with smoked cured tuna, and an excellent green salad with avocado and herbs.

Stou Mamma. Somewhat contemporary Greek cuisine - get the deconstructed spanakopita salad, which is a delicious spinach salad with phyllo dough crisps, cheese, lemon, and herbs.

Delicious Souvlaki. A very casual lunch-counter type place that really does have delicious souvlaki, as well as nice staff and some outdoor seating. Don't miss the excellent chile paste with scallions.

Bouloukos Kebab. Another excellent, friendly gyros and souvlaki place, with a few outdoor tables. Get the grilled hot peppers.

Alexandrino/Αλεξανδρινό Κεμπάπ - Μοναστηράκι - On the same block as Bouloukos, this restaurant also features tasty kebabs and souvlaki. Get the yogurt kebab, which features ground beef and lamb kebabs topped with yogurt and tomato sauce on a bed of pita bread. I also enjoyed the very large house salad with cheese and grated tomato.

Atlantikos. Very busy seafood place with somewhat brusque staff but excellent dishes. Get there right when they open to guarantee a table. I very much enjoyed the fried mixed seafood, which included smelts, squid, and delicious, tiny fresh shrimp that you can eat whole like oceanic popcorn.

Mpirmpilo. Classic Greek food in a cute space with a rotating menu, in the general vicinity of the Byzantine and Christian Museum. I enjoyed the lemon-chicken soup and the boiled greens for a light lunch.

Valitsa. Neighborhood joint on the other side of the Acropolis, with excellent fried squid and cold eggplant salad. Free raki at the end of your meal.

Harry's Kitchen. Harry is a very nice man who will sell you a very nice spinach pie out of his tiny bakery window, as early as 7 AM. I need to try the other flavors.

Karamanlidika. Fun, long-time deli and restaurant that also offers interesting Greek small plates. There's two locations in central Athens, so make sure you've got the right one if you're making reservations, which should, as this place gets slammed.