My Eurotrip 2009: Day 4

Road Trip with Simon
Monday, May 4

Despina's father, Simon, had some flexibility in his schedule and took Siena and I for a drive around the Attica region of Greece. One important detail of this trip is that Simon does not speak English. He knows a few key words, and a lot of Polish words, but that didn't help the Romance linguists that Siena and I are.


We left around 9:30am and our first stop was Sounio, where the Temple of Poseidon sits on top of a hill near the sea. It was mostly cloudy, and very windy, but at least it wasn't raining. We had some coffee with Simon at a cafe at the bottom of the hill and then Siena and I made our way up to the top. Somehow we managed to get through without paying the entrance fee. (Oops!)
We drove through the hills and stopped to see some ruins from the road (it was Monday and they were closed!) We passed through Markopoulo and eventually made our way up to Marathon. At Marathon, we stopped at a restaurant on the beach for a snack. Keep in mind that our communication with Simon was very limited. He ordered some food for us, and you can imagine our surprise when 2 plates of octopus and 1 plate of calamari were delivered to our table. We tried to be polite by trying it, but let's just say it wasn't my favorite Greek dish.
Somewhere along the way, he had been trying to tell us about Ouzo, which is a drink like Raki that we tried on our first night in Greece. It is a very strong liquor that smells a bit like black licorice. Simon kept telling us that it was to 'clear our senses', you know, so we could taste the octopus. ;-) The grilled octopus was better than the boiled octopus, according to Siena. I could only get myself to try the grilled one.
We drove around some more and saw the starting point for the Olympic marathon that took place in 2004, a shrine to Saint Barbara, and made a stop for the bathroom and also ordered some spanakopita at a small tavern where Simon's friends worked.
A few times during the day, we had to call Despina to have her translate between us and her dad. We knew Simon wanted to tell us the history of many of the places we visited, but we just couldn't communicate. At some point, late in the day, he tried to tell us something about President Obama, which we found out later from Despina that it was a joke.
All in all, it was a good day and Simon was very generous with his time to take us all over Attica by car. :)