How to enjoy Athens

Today we went to the Acropolis, which was neat I guess. I evidently have no appreciation for ancient civilization. I liked looking out over the city better. There are mountains in Greece too, as it turns out. I also liked Baalbek better, but again, biased...although Baalbek really was better for several reasons, mainly that it was not as crowded so you were allowed to go up closer to stuff and look at it. At the Acropolis, there are so many tourists so everything is sort of blocked off and anyway you can't really see anything because the place is absolutely crawling with Americans. Also, there is some kind of restoration construction going on at the Parthenon right now which really obstructs the view and makes it difficult to get a picture in your head of what it would have looked like in the past. Sort of disappointing. Also, it cost 12 euros, which is ridiculous, and there was no still water so I had to get sparkling. Boohoo.

At Baalbek you can get up close to everything and touch it, and it's even bigger than the Acropolis, and way more impressive in my opinion. And the views around it are way better too, but I guess that's not what most people are there for. Maybe I was a little disappointed because we didn't have a tour guide telling us all the history.

So the point is, we spent about an hour and a half at the Acropolis then went to get a cab. We asked the cabbie to take us to this kind of shopping/flea market area of town that we wanted to see but instead he took us to a restaurant that he suggested, which was fine because the whole point was to find lunch, and it turns out all the shops close at 3 anyway (oops, we'll go tomorrow).

And this is where the real enjoyment of the tourism began. You don't even understand. No one actually needs to go and see the sites in these places; all you have to do is go out to the restaurants. We had this amazing Greek salad with the freshest vegetables and the best feta cheese I have ever tasted in my life, and this toasted bread with olive oil and black olive tapenade (basically just mashed up olives to spead on the bread). Wow. All I need in my life. And then I got chicken, but Katie got this calamari that was just...wow. Unfrigginbelievable. So we decided that our life's ambition from now on is to start a food tourism company where we take people on tours around Europe and the Middle East (for starters, we might expand later) and maybe take them to one touristy place a day, but also take them to all the amazing restaurants. Because clearly this is all people need to do. We are calling it Tummy Tours, and we figure there's a pretty big market for it, especially in the US, where all the people are fatties like us, and Britain, where the food is crap.

Now we're going to the pool and then (you guessed it) out to dinner. Tomorrow is the Archaeological Museum, the flea market, and then the boat to Santorini.