#180. Free Day in Athens (Friday, October 4, 2024)

What was your best day…of having a day off with no plan whatsoever?

On virtually every other day of this ten-day trip with my mother, we visited somewhere major: the Acropolis, Amman, Petra,¹ Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, Meteora, or Delphi. But on probably the most meaningful day of the trip, we went nowhere of note. We were just chilling in Athens.

To be fair, Athens ranks pretty high among cities you’d want to “chill” in. But we had already covered the Parthenon, Acropolis,² and surrounding temples on the first leg. Today, we had no real plan.

I take my time over a top-class breakfast³ at the legitimate five-star hotel we’re staying in for one night, then we wander east through the National Garden. Coming out the other side, I notice we’re close to the Panathenaic Stadium. My mom has no idea what it is, but I know its unpronounceable name hides some completely underrated history.

The 60,000-seat stadium is built entirely of marble and, unlike all those famous ancient ruins, is still basically intact. It hosted the first modern Summer Olympics in 1896 and remains in use today. We walk the old marble seating and discover a tunnel leading to a surprisingly substantial exhibit of artifacts from past Olympics. I wasn’t expecting any of it.

Afterward we take the subway down to Piraeus Beach. It’s strangely empty, and we spend a couple of hours walking the coast in beautiful weather while I drink a very good lemonade. The view is pleasant but unremarkable. More importantly, it doesn’t feel like sightseeing at all. It feels like we’re simply spending an afternoon in some ordinary part of a city.

Back downtown, after checking into a cheaper hotel, I have dinner—including my fourth moussaka of the trip—before we wander through the crowded streets of the Plaka. The district feels both hyper-touristy and oddly local: dense streams of visitors and shops, but pockets of quiet everywhere.

For some strange emotional reason I will never understand, one bakery on a street corner gets to me. Its sign is in Greek I can’t parse, the interior is clean and simple, the shelves are full of ordinary-looking bread, and the shopkeeper somehow looks slightly sad and slightly joyful at the same time.

My mom buys some bread, and I feel this completely inexplicable pang of innocence about the place—almost sorry for this little shop sitting slightly away from the others, and for this shopkeeper I don’t know and will never see again. I take a few photos of the unreadable sign just to preserve it.

Perhaps the bakery symbolized what made this ordinary Athens day so special.⁴ It felt like a return to some innocence and peace from almost thirty years earlier, before trips with my mom carried a constant possibility that our conversations would turn into judgments about my relationships, career, choices, or some character trait she would blame herself for. Before so many trips together had accumulated that underlying tension.

This trip had almost none of it. And on this day, what stood out most was just how completely absent it was.

It was a free day in every sense of the word.

Though, in fairness, Petra did make the higher list at #31.
Which we spent only thirty minutes at, because the scorching sun at the top of a mountain in this fully open, unshaded space at two in the afternoon made it physically unbearable (and probably unsafe) to stay any longer, even for me.
Second-best continental breakfast of my life, behind only St. Katharine Docks in London eight years earlier (#21).
Fair enough—but why was this random bakery assigned a lifetime of emotional meaning that none of the other twenty bakeries we passed received? No one will ever know.