Day 1: March 18th, 2023
Hello everybody and welcome back to the series in which I looked up, “Greece puns” and edited the ones I liked to be titles.
For those of you who missed yesterday’s installment, we were on an airplane. Thrilling.
Today, we were still on a plane, but a different one! After landing in Munich at 7:30 am CET, we had a 90-minute layover in which we got to see as much of Germany as one can
see from customs.
In all honesty, we did get to see a very cool aerial view of tons of villages and the Alps.
The Alps view from the plane
The flight from Munich to Athens was from 9:00 am CET to about 11:00 am CET (about 12:00 pm Eastern European Time, which is the time zone in Athens). So, at this point, the time that we’re reading on clocks is noon, while the time that we’re used to, in Hackensack, is 6:00 am!
We arrived in Greece and immediately saw fields of sheep and orange trees lining the streets, which was quite a picturesque change from New York. We also saw our first street cats, which provoked an entertaining reaction of everybody shouting, “Cat!” as if we’d never seen cats before.
Sheep
Orange trees
Our hotel is called, “B For Boutique Athens Signature Hotel,”or, if you’re cool, just, “B4B.” It is critical that the “4” is a number; that’s the way all of the hotel merchandise has it. The hotel is lovely and extremely accommodating of 27 rather loud and delirious people descending upon it all at once. Every room has a view of some extent of Athens and the particularly fancy ones can see the acropolis!
When we were finished checking into our rooms, it was about 2:00 pm EET, and dinner was only beginning around 6:30 pm EET, so we had a lovely four and a half hours to do whatever we wanted. Actions varied from napping to already exploring Athens, of which I will not divulge any more information about so that I don’t spoil tomorrow.
Dinner began on time at B4B’s restaurant, which is on the roof and has lovely views of the acropolis. In fact, we were able to take our own pictures that match that which is the advertisement for this trip! The acropolis looks particularly lovely at night, when it’s all lit up, and that’s how we got to see it for about three hours.
It's impossible to tell which one is from the website, isn't it?
Dinner was served family-style and we got to have salad with vinaigrette, Greek salad with croutons, sausage with peppers, moussaka with eggplant, and, the true hit, Greek yogurt with apples, cinnamon, and honey. There is nothing funnier than 24 teenagers absolutely losing their minds over yogurt. You’d think we’d never had yogurt before—I will say that actual Greekyogurt is about 100 times better than the brands popular in America. The yogurt excitement lasted until about 9:30pm EET, after which we returned to our hotel rooms.
The table was so large, we needed two separate photos of it
Overall, Day 1 was lovely. We got our first taste of Greece and are grateful to be on actual ground, as well as excited for tomorrow!