Doing as the Greeks Do

When we're away, we try to follow the principle "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". So now that we're in Greece, we're trying find the true Greece.

In our first 3 days, we had yet to find a grocery store. We'd walked and walked, but we discovered that the tourist region in downtown Athens is enormous. It was only yesterday that we finally broke into the real land of the Greeks; where they live, work, and shop.

We found the fish market, and noted that we could smell it before we saw it.

Next door was the meat market, and up the street a hardware store that sold roto-tillers and everything hardware. We had finally scratched beneath the tourist veneer and were seeing the true Athens.

It seems sandals are worn by  everyone everywhere, and the sandals at stores outside of the tourist region were a fraction of the price of those within the tourist region. The restaurants too were populated with Greeks eating Greek food. Everywhere we looked of course all things were authentically Greek.

Except for the strong smell of the fish market, it was refreshing to get out of the tourist region, see how the Greeks live, and do as the Greeks do, under the Grecian sky.

Click here for the next story in this series:
http://travellingwithsteveandmarlene.blogspot.ca/2015/07/democracy-comes-to-boil.html