HippieTravels

First impressions mean a lot, and meeting a new city is no exception.

One bike ride, train, bus, airplane and a kamikaze Greek bus later, I had arrived at the front desk of my hostel in Athens. I was really here. I dropped my backpack off and headed out to the 75º F weather.

I had arrived. A raw city I knew immediately would be worth discovering.

Maybe it was the greatness of the Acropolis, or the fact that I was traveling solo, but the main square in Monastiraki made me feel alive for the first time in years. The history around the city was trying to tell me somethings and I was ready to use all my senses to discover it.

In between dodging a handful of cars and eating some gyros, I turned the corner just opposite Monastiraki and found myself in another Athens completely.

"Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore."

Fish and sweat had replaced the salty smell of pitta bread and souvlaki. Tourists snapping selfies with old ruins, by locals with trolleys doing their weekly food haul. The cheerful laugh of children playing, by fishermen shouting out in Greek something that my foreign ears couldn't quite decipher. An exhilarating scene none the less.

"So this is where the Greek taverns get their feta cheese", was what came to mind while absorbing my surroundings at the Central Food Market.

It hit me: The true wonders of Athens may not be in the dead past but in the very alive present, and Greek markets are buzzing.

My mother once told me I had to learn how to color inside the lines when I was a child, but "what's outside is just way more fun", I used to think. This is how I live my life now. I follow the back roads everywhere I go in order to see not just what a city wants me to see, but what I feel I need to see. To learn from it. To grow.

Also, the next time I visit Athens Central Food Market I will definitely wear shoes, not flip-flops.