IVF #1 CD18 Four Days in Athens

So the first couple days in Athens were spent shopping -  we found the famous Poet Sandal-Maker's shop (he's made classic Greek sandals for stars like Sophia Loren, John Lennon and Sarah Jessica Parker) and bought sandals of our own, and wandered a lot of the back-street shops. Apparently, in Athens there isn't such a thing as a convenience store, and if you need something you have to go to a specialty store to get it. Need rope? Go to the rope shop. Need baskets? The basket shop. Plastic housewares? A plastic housewares shop. All of which can be hidden around nooks and crannies among narrow streets with crazy traffic, spread very far apart. Now I get why they call them convenience stores. O.o

We also found a sort of indoor shopping mall, very similar to a US Department store like JCPenney or Macy's, but this one had like SEVEN levels with escalators between each department. Next to the escalators on several floors they had a "wish wall" where shoppers could write little wishes on notepaper and post them up. Here's the one Kaitlin added for us:



The second day, we found the more touristy section of shops, and bought presents for just about everybody as well as something we weren't planning on at all - a couple of nice rugs for the house. The Greek guy who sold them to us kept describing one design as the "Shield of Athena." Which is pretty much bullshit, because it's a Persian medallion design. :P But it sounded nice, anyway, and I think he gave us a reasonable deal on them.

Then, we went to a "Doctor Fish" spa, where we had a pedicure treatment that isn't legal in the US - you put your feet in these clear fish tanks, and all these little fish nibble at your skin and eat the dead skin cells. Which is both gross and awesome at the same time, and it certainly seemed to make the fish happy!

Today was our first day of touring, and we'll have many more to come for the remainder of our stay. We had a half-day tour of Athens this morning, including a trip to the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and the new Acropolis museum. It was so cold and rainy during the driving portion of the tour that we didn't get to see many of the sights very clearly, but we got great photos of the ruins (which are currently being reconstructed) and some nice photos of the relics inside the museum. It was a pretty good day, up until the part where we were 7 minutes late for the return bus, and it left without us, and we had to hire a taxi to get back to the hotel. Ugh. So very glad we didn't leave any of our possessions on the bus, as we would have lost them.

The food here is AMAZING. So, so delicious. We had a huge lunch and probably won't need dinner, though I think Kaitlin's going to want to go out for some sort of sweet dessert in a couple hours. But, we're both pretty tired of being wet and cold, so the rest of the afternoon's going to be spent cuddled in our hotel room reading or sorting through photos or whatever we can think of that doesn't involve going back out in the sloshy streets again.

Right after lunch we walked down through the Athens flea market to a shop we'd seen last night, and spent a ridiculous amount of Euro (about $13 USD) on a little bit of hope - a tiny baby onesie with "GREECE" written on it in Greek lettering. Kaitlin promised I could get one baby thing while we were here, and we knew it when we saw it.

Our transfer is tomorrow. We've already made arrangements for a taxi to pick us up. I woke up at 5 AM this morning thinking about it... no idea how I'll ever sleep tonight. Tomorrow is the day. The thing we've been waiting for, the thing we've spent all this money on. And then it's just a matter of finding out if it will take. If that little embryo will just settle in and grow.

Oh my gosh, we're almost there...