So, we've landed in Athens! Behind us lies a ten-hour flight across the ocean, a half-day stroll around Copenhagen, a night in a hotel, and then the short three-hour flight to Athens. Now we need to pick up the car we reserved in advance.
I found a cheap car rental company with a decent rating, and a representative was supposed to be waiting for us at the airport. He wasn't there, so I called. They promised he'd be there in 10 minutes, and sure enough, about that time later, a guy in a red shirt appeared at the door with the company's name on a small poster. Another 15 minutes later, we were getting into a white Nissan with a manual transmission. I'd long ago learned that in Southern Europe, you have to get a manual transmission, because an automatic is considered a luxury and costs twice as much. Furthermore, in inexpensive European compact cars, the weak engine with an automatic transmission won't pull the car well uphill: I'd already experienced this in Israel, where manual transmissions are virtually unheard of.
Our first night was in the city of Corinth, just about an hour's drive from the airport. It immediately became clear that toll roads in Greece are excellent, but quite expensive: a short trip cost about 15 euros.
We arrived before our scheduled move-in time, so we parked the car near the beach and went to lunch. While parking, a funny incident occurred that would shame my gray hair: at an intersection, I had to back up a bit to fit through a narrow passage, and I discovered to my horror that I didn't know how to engage reverse gear in my car. The thing is, it had an unfamiliar 6-speed manual transmission, and it engaged reverse gear completely differently than the 5-speeds I was accustomed to. No matter how hard I tried, I kept engaging first gear instead of reverse. This all happened at the intersection of two small streets, and on one of them, there were already several cars parked, and I was blocking their passage. I had to turn on my hazard lights, and they carefully drove around me. No one honked their horns even once, even though I blocked them for two minutes. Luckily, one of the cars parked on the curb moved away, and I was able to park without reversing. But I still needed to figure out how to reverse, so I asked the first person walking his dog nearby. My Greek was only good enough for the obligatory polite phrases: "good morning," "thank you," "please," and so on, as well as "do you speak English?" Luckily, almost everyone in Greece speaks English, and my passerby was no exception. He showed me that when you reverse, you need to pull the little knob on the gearshift lever with your fingers, after which everything becomes easy and simple. So I parked the car properly, and we went to lunch.
I need to write a separate post about food, but for now, I can say that Greece is a paradise for meat and cheese lovers. I'm even seriously considering moving there 🙂
After lunch, we checked into our apartment and drove to ancient Nemea. Nemea is the very place where Hercules captured his Nemean Lion. Besides the lion, this place was famous Nemean gamesOnce held every four years and rivaling the Olympic Games in popularity, enthusiasts are now trying to revive them, holding them a month after the Olympics. All that remains of Nemea is an archaeological site with a well-restored stadium and the Temple of Zeus nearby. There was also a drinking tap with delicious cold water. Generally, water in Greece has a special place—probably due to the hot and relatively dry climate. In almost every place we photographed, a bottle of cold water was waiting for us in the refrigerator. Most archaeological sites will have drinking water taps, and all the mountain villages we visited will have streams carefully channeled into stone drains.
Ancient Nemea. The Temple of Zeus is in the background.
Besides ancient Nemea, we also planned to visit a few wineries: it's a very famous wine region in Greece. But then we made a mistake—probably due to jet lag. We saw a building we mistook for a winery. There were tables with a few people sitting at them. I went inside and asked the hostess for some wine. She didn't speak English, and my Greek was only good enough to say that we only wanted wine, not food. She poured us a small carafe of some kind of wine, and then I realized this wasn't a winery: there they would have poured me a few glasses for tasting. So we sipped a little (it was sour and we didn't like it), I asked how much we owed, paid three euros, and we headed back: it was too late to look for other wineries.
In the evening we took a stroll along the sea: at first there was a pleasant embankment, but then it ended abruptly, we walked a bit by inertia along the port, and then turned back.
Evening Corinth
