A Week in Athens

Since at least the age of 14, I had wanted to visit the sites of ancient civilizations, Egypt, Italy, Greece, Iraq, Israel… As a 14 yr old in Agartala, a city in the north-eastern part of India, the idea seemed improbable. This was back in 2012 or so, I did not have internet access, a computer or a mobile phone that was capable of doing anything more than phone calls. All I had was outdated encyclopedias and access to the gigantic city library. On some Saturday’s my mom would drop me off with water, my mobile phone and a promise to pick me up in a few hours. The library would be empty, I’d browse shelf after shelf of random books. I genuinely don’t remember much of those days, but I do remember reading really outdated books that mentioned trivia of these distant places. At the time, my imagination extended to being able to visit these places as an older individual, on a trip. That quite dream somehow embedded itself into my sub-consious, and moulded future decisions. The decision to pursue higher education in Europe and not the US, primarily due to access to the Schengen zone and now, here I am, some 14yrs later, visiting Athens !

Athens is actually the second place out of my list of cities I’d like to visit in my lifetime, having visited a bunch of cities in Italy already. The rest of the cities in the list are much harder, either because they are unsafe to visit as a woman, or due to their being in a conflict zone. I’ll get to them some day, hopefully later in my life

So, on to Athens. April of this year felt like a perfect time to go. The prices were right and I was serving my notice period at a previous job. I had decided to try out being a CDN Engineer at a major US streaming platform, that did not work out, the reason for that would take up another blog post. I had some vacation days to spend and my husband was onboard as well, so off we went. I soon realised that it is unusual to choose visiting Athens over any of the other islands, mostly because it seems that Athens functions as the “serious” part of the country, while the island like Crete or Mykonos would be the “fun” touristy parts. Similar concept as India, where I would not consider Mumbai or Bangalore or Thiruvananthapuram for that matter, to be touristy cities as compared to Shillong or Darjeeling. Athens was functional and though there’s an abundance of historical structures, the city functions like an actual city and not just a giant playground for tourists, like Rome for example.

Logistics

We found an awesome deal at a hotel that was near the metro stop Sepolia which was a good idea since it was not too far from any of the museums or touristy spots. We stayed for over a week for just under 300€. Regarding food: fortunately/unfortunately we are both vegeterians and as expected it was annoying to find decently priced + good quality food during the trip, but we were able to manage with hummus, cheese, great bread and olives that we were able to source from supermarkets. An unexpected positive of this trip was discovering Georgian cuisine and its delights (especially the odd flavoured lemonade) and the fact that it is so vegeterian-friendly: Khachapuri, Khinkali, Badrijani Nigvzit.. wonderful ! We looked around for Georgian restautants once we got back to Prague and found that there is a expat community of Georgians here who carry their culture in their restaurants exceptionally well