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03/15/2025 Saturday. Foot stool on leather strap shelf. Room 704. Moxy Hotel. Athens, Greece.
Well, my days off are in ruins! Ancient ruins, that is. Two full days off in Athens. Today we went to the Acropolis. Saw the Parthenon. The Parthenon! The birthplace of democracy! Not that anyone gives a shit about that anymore. Where did all the liberal dipshits go? To the bank, probably, to check their 401k. You know, I always have found the stock market to be problematic and immoral, but tying your retirement to the stock market? Fuck you. Free Bernie. Free Luigi. Abolish Turnstiles.
Sorry, don’t mean to start off so salty, its just this whirlwind world tour has me knocked off kilter. I feel obligated to do stuff, but that means walking around in the sun for hours and then eating too much food and drinking too much beer and then taking a two hour nap in the middle of the day and waking up at dusk. Sixteen hour plane rides? Yesterday at one point I felt so incredibly awful that I thought something was very wrong with my body, then I remembered that I hadn’t slept in twenty four hours and twenty of those hours were inside an airplane. I don’t know. When I get back to NYC, that’s it, I’m not eating for a week, drinking only water and taking only necessary airplane flights and Mediterranean cruises.
But the Parthenon! It was great! It was better than great, it was phenomenal! Exquisite! Exceptional! Profound! Sweet-swank! I mean, there were exactly 300 jackasses milling about doing jackass things, but they paid the same 10 Euros as Scott and I, so who am I to judge? We even took a picture:
[insert Parthenon picture]
Japan was magical. We got kicked off the boat in such a funny way that it felt like we were VIP criminals. We had a concierge that escorted us off the boat, through passport control and customs, she then hailed us a cab and waited until we were in it and even waved us goodbye before she started walking back to the ship. The cab was black and sleek and doiliac, it reminded me of a hearse. Then it was an hour of driving through the mountains of Yakushima, I think, something like that, like, I don’t know, it reminded me of being very young and driving through the mountains in Wyoming during an early summer rain storm. I found it very relaxing.
Fast forward twenty four hours. Three airplanes later. One, an hour and a half. The second one, fourteen hours, I think. The third one, five hours. And we are driving into Athens, our cab driver giving us advice on how to be a tourist. It was good advice. Make reservations at the Parthenon. Hang onto your ticket so you can use it other places. Share food. I was like, “Όχι σκατά, Σέρλοκ.” Which, loosely translated means, “No shit, Sherlock.” He didn’t like us much after that, but it didn’t matter, we were in the heart of downtown by then and he kicked us out of the cab in front of the Hotel Moxy, apropos indeed. I suppose I have a credo when it comes to travelling; Adjust to the time where you are. When we got to our hotel rooms it was around one in the afternoon. I poked around in my room for a bit and then went out walking. Looking for this place called Butt Brothers Market that I saw when we turned off the side street and onto the roundabout in front of the hotel. I never found it, but I did find that Athens has a very flourishing unhoused population. There are quite a few vagabonds, as it were. Unlike Miami, they seemed to be allowed to live their lives free of retribution, not that they were somehow better off, but at least nobody seemed like they were trying to look busy for the cops. They were a menacing crowd, but only because they wanted money. They were not entirely dispirited. I mean, I don’t know. It hurts my feelings seeing people suffer this way, but it seemed like, much like the 90’s in NYC, they had a squat somewhere where they slept. It wasn’t like they were living in an encampment. If that is somehow better. I am sure that I looked out of place, wearing my hotdog American flag tee-shirt and pacing up and down the streets, but my guess is that I looked like I was looking for drugs, so I was left mostly alone.
Scott doesn’t follow my credo. He immediately fell asleep. He slept into the evening hours. When he woke up we headed towards the ruins to look for food. We got lured into a tourist trap and ended up having a bill of goods for dinner. I mean, kind of. We kind of ordered wrong. The city turns from a very downtown New York kind of place to a Italian villa kind of place the further away from the downtown area you get. Our waiter was like, “We don’t serve meals, you have to order sides and share.” Which caused us to order sides and share, but the sides were full meals. The bread was great. We ordered a Greek salad which had amazing tomatoes. I thought we should get fire kissed sausages, which turned out to be grilled hotdogs. Scott ordered some fried anchovies, but those were just basically fried green beans with lemon squeeze. There was a fried cheese thing that was good. In the end there was too much food and half of it was junk.
On our way back to the hotel we stopped at a bar Michael suggested. Friends of his own it and surely it was going to be a place to be, but it was Friday in Little Greek, and the weather was quite great, so every place was competing to be the most obnoxious. We managed to find a place to sit, just barely, and Scott drank Ouzo and tonics with an earwax rim while I sucked down six dollar French beer served in a thimble. Eventually a limit was reached and we slank back to the hotel room where I tried to write but couldn’t because I was too exhausted and instead flossed and brushed my teeth and fell asleep the second my head hit the pillow. I woke up only once. Confused and dehydrated, yet ironically, had to take a leak. I got back in bed and slept well until eight. Got up and went out, bought a couple coffee drinks for breakfast and took them back to my room. When I finally heard from Scott he was waiting at the bottom of Acropolis Hill, he had been up since two and had been poking around the town for a few hours by then. He gave me his location and I hauled ass to meet him.
Then the Parthenon. A wild ride, the Parthenon. I’m telling you, amazing. I have three places that I want to see on earth; the Parthenon, the Pyramids, England. I am not against other places, I just don’t give a couple of shits about them. I will be in England next Sunday, I think, but just the airport. The Pyramids will come around at some point. But this ancient Greek shit? Its worth it. Even the amount of travel and weirdness to get here. We were only there for an hour. But it was crazy. There were so many people. Hundreds of them, thousands, just poking around, but it is also an active archeological site. There is even an elevator that goes to the top, because you know, the thing is on top of a very tall hill. Steep and tall. But you can only look so hard at things. You know? You can’t touch the marble. You can’t walk into the structures. Its an open air museum. Mona Lisa on a light pole. I gathered as much memory as I could and before long we were looking for lunch.
The bill of goods from last night made our lunch choice tricky. How can one choose a good place to eat when everything is designed to be phony? I mean, think of Greek food. What do you think? Hummus? Gyros? Olives? Olive oil? Feta cheese? Pita? I don’t really know. Oregano. Grape leaves. I mean, mostly it is just olives and wine. I guess grapes if you think of the perverts. So my expectations were very minimal. Scott, though, a very educated and worldly modern day pirate, he had ideas. He wanted juicy sardines, tender octopus, fresh caught isosceles sprinkled with shaved marble flakes served on the back of a centaur.
Oddly enough the first place we found turned out to be fantastic. Scott read the menu before we sat down and was like, “This looks really good.” And it was really good. It was 11:59 and the place opened at noon. We asked if we could sit down and the two very stoic men who were serving waved at the twenty open tables suggesting, “Be my guest, you suckers.” We sat down and I ordered a Mythos beer, Scott ordered a Ouzo and tonic with an earwax rim. [I know it will irritate him that I keep saying that, he did not order that, it does not exist, but I kind of would like to drink a ouzo and tonic, just to see what it tastes like because my guess is that it would be very intense. He ordered an ouzo on the rocks.] We looked at the menu for a while and eventually ordered a tomato and cucumber salad. Olives, naturally. A fish egg salad that was so amazing that I don’t even know what to say about it. It was potato and fish egg and spices and lemon juice. We got bread as well. Fresh bread. Amazing bread. We sat around eating stuff and drinking stuff for quite a while. Eventually the place started filling up. By the time we ordered a pork stake and octopus, the once stoic and dismissive waiters were running back and forth between tables and shrugging at us when we tried to order more things. Meaning, “What the hell do you expect us to do about it, you idiots?”
By the time we left it was mid-afternoon and we were both exhausted and half-cocked. I went to sleep, setting my alarm for two hours later, I don’t know what Scott did, but it is almost 11p and he is still not awake. [Note: He just woke up. I gave him a breakfast beer and we are about to go see some more sights “sites” when I finish this.]