Marchela The best adventure happens when you don’t plan it. The impulsive decisions always have their pros and cons. This is one of the examples. It never crossed my mind to visit Athens, all the more so soon. Until the moment one friend mentioned it’s worth it. Then I took a look at the flights and booked a flight for the following month.
I barely arrived and I was full of adrenalin. It’s true. And what would be the reason? The driving of the Greeks, of course! Just by crossing the street, your adrenalin level rises and you pray not to be run over, even when you are in your right to cross or go with the green traffic light for the pedestrians.
Yes, that was my first impression. But you get used to it easily. Especially if you come from a country with crazy drivers and you know how to deal with them.
After surviving the street adrenaline, the first thing I did was search for a shop where I can buy pre-paid phone card. The most important thing for a person with no sense of direction like me is to have mobile data and Google Maps always working. 
And here is the second thing that left me amazed. The cashier in the shop was speaking English. Normal, you will say. But the shop wasn’t in a touristic area, that’s why I got surprised. Given that in all the places I have visited until now and the fact that in areas further away from the center people don’t usually speak English, it was surprising that in a small shop like the one I went to the shopkeeper would speak English. But anyway – I bought a card. I made the mistake of buying a Vodafone card. The coverage was awful during my stay. On the bright side, this taught me to have more patience. 
These impressions are only from the first 3 hours in Athens. Without a doubt, the good weather made an impression too, because the difference between the negative Bulgarian degrees and the positive degrees in Athens was definitely noticeable. With this warm weather, one can get lost around the city as much as they want. And that’s what I did too. I went to the center for a walk around known and unknown streets until I get lost in search for new historical sights in the city. And as usual, the adventure wasn’t far from me. I met 2 tourists on the way who were as lost as me and we decided to get lost together, just for a change.
We followed the known and unknown streets around the Acropolis, lost in the ruins of such an ancient civilization that influenced the entire world with its writing, culture, literature, philosophy etc. As a philologist, I couldn’t not think about it, because everywhere I would see Greek letters that looked like Cyrillic script. And I remembered that in one moment long ago in our history 2 Greek brothers were asked to create the Cyrillic alphabet for us, the Bulgarians. And after that even the Russians started using this alphabet. But my reflections don’t end here.
Another curiosity is that the Latin alphabet was also created based on the Greek alphabet. Incredible, right? You can’t not think about the butterfly effect, now that more than half of Europe uses the Latin alphabet and the Cyrillic variants are used for the script of 6 national Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian and Ucranian). Not to mention, the Cyrillic is used by various non-Slavic languages spoken in the former Soviet Union – like the Mongolian, Kazakh and Uzbek, amongst others from Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Siberia.
The end of the streets took us to Square Monastiraki in search of more adventures and trying to keep our money in our wallets. Not that it was very successful. It’s not possible not to be amazed when you see a 7-8 years old kid selling flowers and speaking cute English. Until you get out of the hypnosis, you are already with a flower in your hand and the kid asking you for more money that it really costs. 
After our wallets got lighter, me and the two girls finally met my friend and went to explore the Greek cuisine. We ended up eating in a restaurant named “Thanasis”. I can reassure you that the Greeks know what is good food and they don’t limit themselves in the size of the meal. I never ate so much as in this restaurant. The food had a similar taste as the Bulgarian food, but was still different enough. I cannot remember the exact names of the meals that I ate in the restaurant, because we chose a bit randomly as everything looked so good. Even so, the most popular meal in Athens is the souvlaki (apart from the Greek salad, of course) and consists of grilled meat kebabs with vegetables and bread. The best time to eat souvlaki, at least in my opinion, is after you spent the afternoon in the Acropolis Museum, as we did on the following day.
My friend and I spent a long time in the Museum and in the end we still didn’t have enough time to see the entire history of the Acropolis. But without visiting the Museum first, it doesn’t make much sense to visit the Acropolis itself, because the history, the development, the mythical fight between Athena and Poseidon for the patronage of the city and the victory of Goddess Athena, the Goddess of wisdom in whose name was built the temple Erechtheion, all of this is mentioned in the Museum. After knowing these details, visiting the Acropolis looks indeed like a dive in history. When imagining the Parthenon in its power after so many centuries and the changes it had to go through along the time after so many different influences.. Even so, Parthenon, together with Erechtheion and the entrance itself named Propylaea continue to tell their entire story, always so beautiful on the top of the city….
The Greeks know what they are doing. Furthermore, to be lost between mythology and history of a civilization as ancient as this, it seems like God Dionysus continues to protect the amusement in Athens even after so many centuries. I bought the book “Greece Between Legend and History – 8.500 years of civilization” while I was there and it also contains pretty interesting facts and pictures about Athens, some pictures of the Acropolis Museum and a lot of details about Greek Gods and Greek history in general. You can take a look at it if you are willing to take a deeper dive in the Greek history and mythology.
