Hanging in Athens

Our trip to Greece was primarily to catch up with family and friends ~ and to have some souvlaki of course. Knowing that Akis would be starting school, it will be more challenging for us to go back to visit as he will be limited to the 10 days he has between terms.

We managed to catch up with a number of folks for coffee in the evenings. We were lucky that the hot weather had yet to strike Athens, and was amazed that I found 32 to be not too hot ~ it must not have been that humid.

We saw the whole family including Akis brother, his grandparents, Aunt Tula/Uncle Ioannis, cousin Jenny and of course his parents.

Our souvlaki experience was at Ilias ~ love the souvlaki there. And of course had to go to Sports to have coffee one morning, and again scratch my head again over the parking. Some things don't change.

We hung out at home in Petroupoli a lot. This time was spent having a lot of coffee with the parents, sorting through all the stuff that had been moved from the apartment and rescuing Akis' Oakley sunglasses from the scarecrow. When asked about the glasses, Akis' dad said that they were some cheap knock-offs. That didn't go over so well...

We did go out for coffee in the Syntagma square where the Greek coffee was served to us in small traditional brikis. This was all good until I managed to spill most of it on my pants ~ good thing that mom is good at cleaning white pants!

We did manage to take a bit of a road trip, heading to Patra to see Akis' brother. The drive was about 3 hours, and while some of this was on a divided highway, I was STUNNED to see that it is perfectly acceptable to drive 4 cars wide on a 2 lane highway. As we passed some of the cars, I thought I could reach out and touch the car beside us ~ and if not the car, then definitely the guard rail!

Once we arrived, we met Kyriakos and had a tour of the ferry. He is doing the run from Patra to Venice ~ a 30 hr trip one way. Every Monday the ship docks for about 18 hours, so we were lucky to be able to see him again. He was on duty so we had to stay near the port, but we did manage to get out for lunch.

As we got ready to return to Canada, the question came ~ what are we going to bring home with us. We had taken an empty suitcase with the knowledge that we would have some summer clothes to bring back to Vancouver. The parents wanted us to bring back 5L of Olive oil and when asked if we wanted Ouzo, we asked for 4 small bottles. What we got instead was 12. Needless to say not all of them accompanied us back home. We did after all have a limit of 20kgs a piece!