Culture good, but so is commerce.
We also paid our respects at temples of Mammon along the way, too.
Happily our Visa cards worked wherever we went. I stress this since we had Visa card failures in Mexico City in 2004. (By the way the Sheraton Hotel treated us, when this happened, impeccably, whereas the bank and Visa just passed us back and forth, when Kate called Sydney from Mexico to sort it out with neither being able or willing to take responsibility. We paid with Amex, confirming my long held conviction of the wisdom of traveling with two cards.)
When I turn to museums there will be more said about the shops there. Like all travellers we ate in some restaurants, had tea and coffee in cafes, bought takeaway food here and there and so on.
In addition, I paid a visit to the Attica Department Store, opened in 2004, for necktie. Where I also looked for kitchen gadgets. No luck on either one. Attica is hard to find on the web. It does not have a food hall. It is mostly clothes and cosmetics for women. It is not a par with Harrods, Ka De We, Nordsk, Galeries Lafayette, Tokyu, Bloomingdale, and their kind. Attica is around the corner from the Hotel Grand Bretagne, I don’t think it is quite lives up either to its location or aspiration for that clientele.
In our search for food, we also went to the Central Markets, twice. The first time we walked by and through more or less unplanned. It has a meat market unlike anything I had ever seen before for scale and variety. There must been hundreds of stalls. The adjoining fish market is also big and full of snapping fresh fish. In both places the bustle and crowd was heavy. Wow! Though I fear shopping here every week would be exhausting and one would quickly fall into a routine of going to the same place each time to reduce the energy needed to cope.
But no we did not solve the puzzle of the “arrogant fish” we saw on some restaurant menus.
We also found a side street redolent of spices with a rank of cheese shops, as well as the spice and nuts. Kate tried to buy some nuts but she was invisible to the shopkeeper.
However, on this first reconnaissance we did not see any fruit or vegetable. The ever reliable Tony said there was a vegetable and fruit market across another street so we made our way back another time. He was right.
Once again it was crowded, and there were also ranks of, let us say, gypsy traders selling watches and jeans. I speculated that some of them were the dreaded Albanians selling the clothes off the backs of their children. That part was pretty grim to us cosseted folk. Moreover, it hardly seemed worth the effort since the fruit and vegetables on offer did not inspire one. Very ordinary, I thought. Maybe even less than that. Maybe a two dozen stalls all with the same thing. Beans with rust spots, aubergines with nicks, mangled marrows. The exception to this dreary parade were the tomatoes which were red, I repeat red, and had become some by the sun not by gas.
All this was disappointing because one of the delights of Greek cuisine is all the things done to vegetables.
There was an olive specialist who outclassed anything comparable I had seen before, even the olive specialist in the Florence Market in 1994. That was doing something. Maybe thirty varieties.
See http://www.athensinfoguide.com/wtsmarkets.htm
On of our first day as we made our way back from Plato’s Academy we went by, quite by accident, another retail target: The poet sandal maker, recommended by Matt Barrett so in we went, and out we came with sandals each. The style I choose was, wait for it, Plato, what else? While handing over the Euros the second generation sandal maker who is more of a playwright as it turns out than a poet like his father, asked where we are from. Kate always answers this question with Sydney. (That leaves the geographically knowledgeable wondering if she means Nova Scotia, Nebraska, or New South Wales.) The Poet asked me again because I do not sound Australian. OK, I said Nebraska. (Yes, there is a Sydney there, Ripley.) He then told me his latest play was being produced at Creighton University in Omaha. I told him Creighton was a fine college, which it is.
Check out this sandal man at http://www.athensinfoguide.com/shopping_poet.htm
Along the way, mostly in the Plaka, I acquired two tee shirts, one inspired by Kate with an owl design another with a good luck blue eye, some komboloi from Melos, a sponge for the shower, a flag decal, and some other things that I cannot call to mind now.
We also walked through the Flea Market at Monastiraki Square one Sunday morning without parting with any Euros.
The perfect leather briefcase is a career long mission. I had one that almost made it that I got in Zurich in 1983. It lacked only a shoulder strap to make the grade. However, it wore out, speeded in this by Jonty the Great who chewed a hole in the corner when I mistakenly left on the floor at home one day when he was a pup. Since then I have tried many others. It has become something I shop for when traveling as a souvenir. I have looked and not bought in Seattle, Vancouver, Quebec City, Tokyo, San Antonio, and more. I bought nifty looking thin-line brief case (with shoulder strap) in Italy when I spent a semester at the European Universities Institute. It never was big enough for books, and what else but books do I want to put in a brief case, but it was handy for one book. However, the lining wore out, and flaked off and into everything. A cloud of fragments arose from it when putting things in or taking them out. Enough become enough and it went.
I bought an expensive one in the Queen Victoria building that was made by a local designer. Again it was heavy when empty (because of all the lining and compartments) and did not accommodate much. Nonetheless it served for a couple of years until one day in a car park at Heathrow in the rain it came apart, spilling contents here and there. There have been others. I bought one in New Orleans that looks like a million and weights about that; Warning! Leaden when laden!
In a reaction to these weighty versions I decided to buy something that was not leather. I got a canvas bag from Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knife Company, at Ka de We in Berlin. Light and surprising accommodating. However it is just is not quite right for getting into with ease. The canvass is not rigid enough. So we looked one evening alone Adrianou Street and found lots of leather brief cases with steep discounts at the end of the tourist season. I bought an Athens brief case and I am now using it. For leather it is light, and does not have too many in-built obstructions which now seems the fashion. When I expressed interest the shop keeper punched numbers into his calculator to determine the discount and said 77 Euros. I found 70 Euros in my pocket an offered him that. Deal.