It's all Greek to me...

We spent two and a half days in Athens in April and had a wonderful time.  We really loved Greece and hope to make it back sometime soon.

The food was delicious (and cheap!), the ancient sites were beautiful, and the people were extremely friendly.  Below are some highlights from the trip.

First, the food...

Our favorite thing to eat was the 2 euro souvlaki that we found on "souvlaki row."  (We would call it a "gyro," but these places referred to them as "souvlaki").  They were huge sandwiches of lamb and beef wrapped in a pita with tzaziki sauce.  We had these for our meal several times.  Caitlyn REALLY enjoyed them. 

We don't know the exact name of our favorite dessert item.  We think it was "kokopena," but we just called them "honey melty poppers."  We stumbled upon them at a bakery and then kept going back for more because they were so addictive!  They were soft doughy sticky balls that literally melted in your mouth, and honey would ooze out once you took a bite.  Mmmmm...

Another memorable meal was at a little family-owned restaurant on a side street.  There was no menu--the server just brought us up to the kitchen to show us what they had made that day.  The woman kept giving us (and Caitlyn) hugs--she reminded us of the woman from My Big Fat Greek Wedding!

Speaking of food, we visited a local meat market.  This is the kind of thing we saw -- they surely use the whole animal!  It actually was not that surprising to us given what we had seen in Morocco a few weeks earlier.

The ancient sites in Athens were amazing.  We visited the Acropolis, which contained the Parthenon and other Greek relics.  

Caitlyn and Josh "played" baseball on the Acropolis!

We also visited the Acropolis Museum and the Ancient Agora, both of which were fascinating.  Here are some highlights:

One of the first known voting machines

One of the first known ballots.  Citizens would vote to ex-communicate someone
from society by writing the person's name on a ballot like this one.

Caitlyn saw the tourist train riding around town and kept asking to take a ride, so for our last night we took the train all through town.  She was really happy.

We also really enjoyed strolling around the Plaka district and just taking in the sites.  Josh bought some "worry beads," a traditional Greek toy for men, to fiddle with as we walked.

Greece is definitely on our list of places to visit again.  In the meantime, if anyone finds those honey melty poppers please let us know!