Market and Free Transportation Day

We had our first trip to the open air market near our apartment! Let me just tell you, once shopping there we had no plans to buy our fruits, vegetables, or eggs anywhere but there from that day forward. The market was just a few blocks from the boys apartment and all the different stall owners were very excited about the Americans coming through. We had so many men tell us how beautiful we were and giving us free samples! There was some beautiful looking fresh fruit and vegetables and I realized that is wrong with the American diet. Even when we try eat healthy our fruits and veggies are either frozen, drenched in butter, stuck on top of a fat-inducing dessert, or covered with pesticides. There was nothing but good wholesome nutrients in that market and it was great. Not to mention the prices! You could get stuff so cheap! Everyone there is selling so much of the same stuff that they have to have competitive prices. But even more than what the market had to offer as far as produce was the people. Despite how much people say other countries hate Americans we were rarely ever faced with hostility. The market sellers loved us. :-)

Later that day...

Apparently to commemorate the day the Greeks got public transportation they have a free transporation day. (Bus and Metro, no taxis of course.) Aphrodite tells us this and me, Jen, Becky, and Andrew were going to walk home together that day. But when we got this new bit of information we decided to get on a bus, whatever bus we saw, it really didn't matter, and just see where we ended up.

We got on the bus a few blocks up from the school, and might I say this was our first time using the Athens bus system, and we rode it around for close to an hour. ..when we discovered we had no idea where we were. Luckily we got off it near a metro station and just got on the train to figure out where we were going. But we saw tons of stuff that we saw that day only and never saw again. We got into some district that had a bunch of strip clubs and some oriental clubs? Yeah, never went there again (although I wouldn't have hated seeing if anything around had bellydancing!). In some random shopping district we had our first encounter with the weirdest store mannequins ever. From then on we saw those all over Europe. In the metro station we got on there were some strange performer people which was pretty entertaining.

The most entertaining of all? The front window of a store (open or closed I don't know) stock full of naked mannequins. Not anatomically correct or anything, but just all shoved into this window with no merchandise on them. We took pictures, we found it entertaining. Especially after all the information we had been getting shoved down our throats on our "educational excursions" about how much the Greek revere nudity. That of course is why all their statues are in the buff and also why the guys at the original Olympics ran around commando. I decided that storefront truly enbraced the ancient Greek reverance for the human body...even if they were just switching from one season to the next! :-)