"Girls, this is when we say Opa!"

Saturday night we showered and went to a nearby Irish bar because it seemed to be one of the only places open. Our Saturday night in Athens wasn’t shaping up to be too great! But after a couple of beers at the bar we started talking to a Greek guy who immediately took a couple of rounds of shots with us. He had just gotten back a couple of months ago after living in Miami for a year, working in his cousin’s restaurant. Tina made the mistake of asking why he came back … apparently he got in a fight with his cousin’s wife and she called immigration on him. And if he “ever sees her in the street in Athens, I’d kill her.” Yiiikes … so that’s when we started talking to the group of sailors next to us. They were a really fun and nice group of guys – English, Scottish, Australian, and Serbian – all here working on a Greek yacht or something. We all decided to go to another bar together and unsuccessfully tried to turn away the Greek (death threat towards his sister-in-law still fresh in our minds). We walked through the snow to a club, danced, drank, talked, etc. But the best part of the night was the walk home – had a hardcore snowball fight between us, the sailors, and some Greeks on their way home from the bars. It was awesome. Then we got to our hotel and made the mistake of being a little too rowdy, which Yia Yia Pella definitely didn’t appreciate. She essentially pulled Tina and I inside and
locked us in for the night. We continued trying to communicate with our friends from the
balcony, another dumb idea. She then called our room – “Close the door, go to bed, then in the morning you pay and leave.” Quite the change from the lady who upon check-in tried to convince us to pay for 4 nights based on the impending weather situation. Not a big loss … the room was filthy, freezing, and we slept with our beds smashed together and a tiny space heater propped on a chair at our feet. But this was just the initial realization of our theme’s trip – karma. As disappointed as we were about the weather, we made the most of it and lots of fun things came out of it all! This first hotel was in the area of town known as Monastiraki – the market area with lots of little cheap shops and hotels everywhere. It was pretty close to the Acropolis, but wasn’t the most entertaining area to stay in.