What to Do in Athens Greece 🇬🇷 How to Spend the Perfect Day in the City

This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Today, we're going to be taking you around beautiful Athens to some ancient ruins, eating some delicious food and showing you some trendy and, well, not so trendy neighborhoods. We are starting things off in the neighborhood of Plaka, which happens to be one of the most popular places in all of Athens, also one of the oldest. So chances are, if you're only spending one day here in Athens, or if you're staying for longer, you're going to end up here in Plaka. As I just said, it is one of the older areas of the city. It's also one of the prettiest. This is a city that can be a little bit gritty at times. Sometimes, you know, some of the streets aren't as pretty, but this area is very much been looked after. It's where all the tourists come. There are a lot of people here, just be warned. Yeah, you can see a lot of people this way now, standing around, but also we're standing in like kind of some old ruins, looking at this beautiful structure, like this is what Athens is all about. It's one thing I absolutely love about Athens. Even when you get out of Plaka, as I said, some places aren't as pretty, you can still often look up and see like the Acropolis above you, or you're just walking along and you just go across some random ruins. There are so many people in Plaka, as you can probably tell, and rightfully so, because this is one of the oldest areas. It attracts the tourists, but you might be wondering about like how many people are in Athens. Yeah, so there's a population of about three million, so it's a good size city. When we're always walking around neighborhoods like this, like the ones that are just packed full of tourists, I always wonder like, what is it actually like to live here? Like, does that get really annoying? The fun thing is we're going to show you some different neighborhoods. We wanted to start off in the touristy area, because I know you're going to end up here, but there's some other really cool neighborhoods that are our favorites, and you'll see those a little later in the video. Speaking of other neighborhoods, we actually just did another video on Athens that is out already, where we did explore some other neighborhoods, but we also talked a little bit about safety, because I know a lot of people, when you start doing research, you get a little bit concerned about pickpockets, and like, am I actually going to be safe in Athens? So go back after you watch this video and watch that one, if you haven't seen it already. So if you're coming to Athens, chances are you're coming to see this. It's the Acropolis, and yes, it is majestic, as you've seen in the pictures, but right now we're standing next to it, because we're trying to avoid the lines. Remember, we're trying to give you guys a perfect day here in Athens. There's long lines to get into this thing, and I think if you haven't been here before to the city, what you might not know is you can see this from wherever you're at. And there's also more ancient ruins around the city, which we're going to take you to shortly, so you don't just have to go into the Acropolis. So chances are, if you are coming to Athens, you're really coming for the history. There is obviously loads and loads of history here, but the city happens to be one of the oldest cities in the entire world, and it's the second oldest here in Europe. Trevor, can you guess what the oldest city is? No, no. You're doing this to me? Yeah. Really? Is this happening right now? I can't believe she's doing this to me here. So the key is, you said Europe, and I was immediately going to say, like, maybe it's something like Jerusalem or something like that, but that's not Europe. Yeah. Turkey is sort of Europe. I'd go for Istanbul, but I don't know if that's it either. If it's not Istanbul. I actually had never heard of the city before. Can I make one more guess? Yeah. It can't be Rome. That seems too obvious. I actually thought, that's the first thing that came to my head. It's definitely not Rome. It's not even in Italy. It's not even in that part of Europe. It's actually closer to where we are now. Okay. So maybe I'll get you to guess the country. The country. Somewhere in Bulgaria, Romania? Bulgaria. Wow. Plovdiv or something like that is the oldest city in Europe. I'm probably butchering the name because I've never heard of it before. Did you guys know that? Well, I'll tell you one thing. If you enjoy walking, you're really going to like this city. This is why we love it. One of the big reasons. Yeah, it is a big reason we love this city. You can get around easily. Most of the stuff is pretty central. We end up getting a ton of steps when we're here, especially when we have days like today where we're doing a whole bunch of things and, you know, we're walking around various neighborhoods and then later we'll go back to our own neighborhood. We'll probably get like 15,000 steps in one day, so I feel like I get lots of exercise, but it's easy to get around. Yeah. I think this might be one of the lines for the Acropolis. Oh, it must be. So this will show you like, yeah, just how many people are trying to go up that thing. We're now just kind of on the edges of Plaka and it gets really calm, really quiet and ridiculously beautiful here. This is where it's at. It's super charming. This is probably one of the cutest streets in all of Athens. We were here actually on a few days ago on a holiday and it was packed with people, but today it's just perfect. It's a Friday as we're filming this. There's just the right amount of people around. You don't feel like you're surrounded by hordes of people, but it's just so nice. You can walk slowly around and like, look at all these beautiful buildings. That's the best part. This is kind of like, right now where we're standing, it's kind of like how some of the Greek islands are, except we're in a massive city. So we've been on islands lately for a while and you guys know we had it to ourselves, but in the city, well, we got to share it with a lot more people. But it's funny, I think a lot of when people think of Athens, they don't think about the charm. They think of the islands as being the super charming places, but you can definitely find it here in the city. Yeah, and it's not dangerous. I think you guys think that. Sure you can get into some danger in any city, but if you were looking to find a little bit more on safety in the city, I think we mentioned it earlier, but our last video we talked all about that stuff. We found some very cute steps here. I've seen photos of this place before. Yeah, I feel like when you start looking up things, you know, like on Facebook of Athens and of Greece, you start getting fed all the like, the cute photos, you're going to come across this one, I guarantee you. Yeah. There's so many people though, guys. Check this out. So as we just kind of walk up, there's all these like, different tables. It's pretty cool. And you got an absolutely killer view as well. This is, this is pretty cool. Wow. It really is like a whole other world up here with the, with the steps did not expect to see all this. I didn't realize it was multiple stairs. Did you? Oh, it's like, yeah, it keeps going. It keeps going and going. I didn't realize that. I'll show you guys if we go this way, more stairs, restaurants galore in the city. Before we keep exploring this beautiful city, we just wanted to say a huge thanks to Squarespace for being a sponsor once again. 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Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, head to squarespace.com slash you guessed it, Delightful Travelers for 10% off your first purchase of a domain or website. And of course, a huge thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and supporting creators like us. All right, back to exploring. Well, we've just come over to the ancient Agora of Athens and yeah, this place is spectacular. Not that we needed to see more old things, we've seen them so far as we're just walking around Plaka, but yeah, this place is awesome. Yeah, it is. And we've been walking by here like pretty much every day, always kind of looking in and it always seemed really tranquil and quiet and I can say when now that we're in here, it totally is. It's very chill in here. There's so many interesting buildings. There's columns everywhere, just pillars like on the ground. And there's so much to see. And one really nice thing is we did not have to wait in any lines in order to get in here. We actually booked our ticket online through Get Your Guide. It was seven euros per person to get in. That actually includes a walking, an audio walking tour of Athens if that's something you're interested in. And I think it was actually an option that was a little bit more expensive to also get an audio walking tour of the Agora too. If you wanted to have like something, you know, telling you all about it as you walked around, you could do that. But we literally didn't have to wait in line. We just showed our phones, we came in, they scanned them and we walked right in. I don't know if they can see in the camera, but the Acropolis is right there again. So everywhere you go, it's just right there, right above you, it's just looming above you. If you're wondering like, yeah, you can just walk wherever you want in this place, at least that's what it seems like. They have this old kind of, well, I think was a church there. Not a whole lot of people around. It's just kind of us at the moment around this area anyway. Yeah, it's really nice. There is a temple at one side, which we'll make our way out to. I bet you that's where all the people are. Would be my guess. Yeah, take a look. You got some of those like pillars here. Oh, we even have one of these guys. He's a Greek guy. How'd you get in? Did you pay admission? He's having a bath. I think he's having a bath. Yeah. Not too talkative today. Nope. Anna spotted a bell over here. So we're curious if we can... Well, I didn't actually spot it. I heard someone else ring the bell, so I'm assuming it's okay to do. Why does it seem... Oh, there you go. That's pretty loud. That's going to be loud in the mic. It still blows our mind that you can just walk around these ruins like anywhere you want. We've been in Greece now for like over two months and that will never get old to us. We've been to Greece many times, many different islands, and it just blows our mind. Now we're kind of used to walking around the ruins. I know. It's so weird to think like thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks were walking through these, like the same area that we were walking on. It's kind of mind boggling. We started this trip over two months ago and we started in Turkey, in Izmir, the city of Izmir, and we went to Anagora there. We did. We learned a little bit about what Anagora actually was, which is basically like the center of the city, like the gathering place, the marketplace, the religious center, like all the political stuff and everything kind of takes place there. You know, obviously it's hard to envision that here. We're walking around a city that's like beneath the city now, you know, amongst all these ruins. I think it was even way bigger than this because when I was reading about Plaka, it said it was also built on the old Agora as well, so it must have been a huge part of the city. So the Agora actually dates back to the 6th century BC. That stuff just boggles my mind to think of how old everything is. And behind me there are statues of Socrates and Confucius. I think it's Confucius. They're pretty important figures here. Yeah, so the thing that you probably already know about Greece, about Athens, is that so many important philosophers, mathematicians, basically the history or the beginning of Western civilization started off here and it's just so crazy to think about. Well, we just made our way up to this enormous temple here and, well, it looks absolutely incredible, but we got some crazy views this way. Take a look at that. So you got a view of the whole Agora and the Acropolis up there as well, just kind of looming over the whole entire area. Well, there are definitely way more people up here. Down below you get to spread out a little bit. We figured this is where all the people are. We were definitely correct about that, but it's well worth coming up here. This temple is absolutely insane. It dates back to, I think, 415 BC, something like that. It's called the Temple of Hephaestus. Hephaestus? I'm probably saying that totally wrong. It's hard to say, I think. This is actually considered one of the best, if not best preserved temples in all of Greece. You guys might be wondering if you can go inside here. Well, you can't. You can see kind of it's roped off, wired off. You can see inside. We've been to lots of temples in Greece that you can kind of walk into, but it's no surprise that you can't to this one since it's so well preserved, but you can walk right around the grounds here. I'm super happy we came in here today, something we've never done. We've been in Athens and we've been into Athens a lot of times. We are here in November, in case you were wondering. So of course, if you're here in like July or August, it's going to look a lot crazier in here. It's super packed, but November is a perfect time to come. You probably didn't guess that it was this time of year based on our clothing, but it's like 22, 23 degrees today. It's really nice. 22, 23 degrees every day. I have shorts on, a t-shirt. A lot of the Greeks, locals wear kind of puffy coats. They dress for the season, but all the tourists are in like shorts and t-shirts. It's like summer. But now we're going to take you guys back to where we're staying, our neighborhood. It's one of our favorite neighborhoods in the entire city of Athens and well, we can't wait to show you. Well, first things first, we're going to get some food at this Greek bakery. It's called Bougatsa Tico and we got some of their very famous Bougatsa. We have been here before in a previous video. This stuff's incredible. We'll get into what it is. I also got a Fredo cappuccino. This is a Greek coffee. For those of you that don't know, you have to try this if you're coming here. I'm absolutely hooked. It's like my favorite coffee in the entire world. And if you've been following along this Greek series and all the islands so far, you'll know that I drink like four or five of these a day. I know. Don't judge. Well, you might as well judge. I was going to say don't judge. Just judge away, but I don't regret it. No regrets. So Bougatsa is like a traditional Greek, I think breakfast, they were having it more as a dessert, but I'm pretty sure traditionally it's a breakfast food. It is made with phyllo pastry, layers of phyllo pastry, and in the middle is custard cream. So as Trevor mentioned, we had this a couple of years ago from the same place. We actually filmed a whole food video back then. So if you are interested in some things to eat here in Athens, we have a full video on it. This is from two years ago, but I'm pretty sure it's very, it's still very relevant. Everything we had was so good, including this, but this time we changed it up a little bit. We noticed on the menu that they had an option to get the regular Bougatsa, but they put hazelnut praline over the top, and I wasn't sure what that meant. I thought maybe there'd be like some nuts over it, but no, no, there is like a whole sauce on the top. It kind of looks and smells like Nutella, and as you guys know, like Nutella is like a hazelnut chocolate flavoring. So I think we're going to have something like that. Oh my goodness. It's warm. The plate itself is even warm, and it smells amazing. There are some big old bites here, and I'm going to try to get one on my fork and have it not fall off. This is going to be a challenge. This is one big mouthful. I don't have a knife, so I feel like I can't really cut it up any smaller than it is right now. So it's going to be a big old mouthful. Oh my goodness, this is so amazing. It's ooey, it's gooey, it's sweet, it's delectable, and it is, this is going to be so filling. It's so good. I can't get over how yummy it is. I feel like I have it all over my mouth, all over my teeth, and that's not a bad thing. It really coats your mouth because you have the custard, and you have all the hazelnut praline on the top, which does taste a lot like Nutella. So if you like Nutella, you're going to love this, but it just like sits on your mouth. It takes a lot of chewing to get through it, but it's not a bad thing. This is so delicious. I don't know. I don't know if I want to share this. Maybe not. Oh, she's sharing. Don't you worry. She's not going to be that mean, and I'm just dying to try this as well. I think she's described it absolutely perfectly, but I can't just sit here and look at this dessert. Guys, the smell of this is absolutely crazy, and I got a giant bite, and yeah, I'm just going to go for it. I'm just going to say it. This thing is stupid good. You guys, if you're coming here, just come and get this. You have to get this. The custard, the hazelnut praline, just how warm and gooey it is. I just love that the bites are giant size as well. I know I can cut it up, but what's the fun in that? I'd rather just stuff my mouth full of this thing. It's absolutely delicious, but I should probably talk about the coffee a bit more. You guys may find coffee boring. I certainly don't, especially this. You might think it's Greek coffee, and some Greek coffee is really strong. This is actually made with espresso. Usually it's like a double espresso shot, but what's the magic behind this, and we never find this anywhere else in the world, Greek coffee, like the Fredo Cappuccino, the milk on the top is actually skim milk. That's how they get it nice and frothy. I don't know if it would work with cream or anything like that, but it's a great combo because you can leave it sit like this where you can see the wine, or you can mix it all up if you want to have it blend in. I was feeling a little guilty drinking so many of these. I thought they might be like a latte, like a couple hundred calories per latte. No, these things are like 40 calories or less. That made me feel a lot better. Maybe I can have more than five. I totally feel like I just have chocolate and sugar all over my mouth, but that was so good. Definitely go there if you are here in Athens, but I don't think we actually said which neighborhood we are in. We have made our way over to Pesiri. I don't know if I'm saying that right. I feel like I always say it incorrectly, but it's our absolutely favorite neighborhood here in Athens. It's actually tricky to sum up why we really like this neighborhood, but it definitely has something to do with all the delicious food, that's for sure, and all the different varieties of restaurants. Yeah, there's just a really great vibe happening here that's a little hard to describe. It's very different from Plaka. More like bohemian, trendy kind of thing here. Is it like their Brooklyn? Yeah, a little bit. Would you call it like the Brooklyn of Athens? If that makes any sense to all the U.S. viewers or anybody that's been to New York City before. But there's just something about this. It actually feels like there's locals around that kind of live close to the area, and of course, it's a little bit touristy, but not as touristy as Plaka. Yeah, and like Trevor just said, a big variety of restaurants here, and I don't really feel like they were always trying to fish you in, whereas in Plaka, it seems to be more traditional Greek places, but a little bit more on the touristy side. Yeah, definitely. One thing that I really like about this neighborhood is that it's not remotely grid-like. All the streets go in all sorts of different directions, and we end up being here most days. We've been in the city for almost two weeks, and we literally come here every day, and there's still streets that I don't even know exist. Like that one down there, we've probably walked down it once or twice, but I literally know nothing down there, so it's like there's little gems all over the place that I don't even know about. I want to show you guys something else here that we really like. Let's see all these different antiques. Look at all this stuff. It's like records, just kind of old ornaments. It's definitely a pretty cool feature of Syria, and I wonder why there's so much of this as we kind of walk around this area, right? This isn't the only place. Yeah, so going back to the Plaka thing, like totally different vibe there. It's mainly like souvenirs, like very traditional, ordinary souvenirs. Here they have like vintage stores, antique stores, some local things, like some local design here, so it's really cool to go shopping here. This is fascinating, a fascinating neighborhood. I can't get over when I just like kind of walk here, like look, you'll see all this stuff. This wasn't even here yesterday. Like look at the old, this old typewriter here. That is, that is so cool. Yes, we know what a typewriter is. Oh, there's bars here. This would open at night. So the town, it kind of, this area does like a switch, like in the day there's lots of this kind of souvenirs, there's some bars and cafes open, but at night it's a bit more of like a party spot. A lot of the bars are wide open. It's a very young crowd as well, and honestly it's just a lot of fun to be here. There are a few bars right in this vicinity that are like Caribbean, kind of, I was going to say like Cuban, they're kind of Cuban-Caribbean, but they have like Caribbean music playing. What can I tell you, other than it makes me very excited for some upcoming travels. Can you guess where we're going next? I know, this is one here, like the inside of this place is cool. We'll talk about that a little more soon. Yeah, it's not Cuba. We're not going to Cuba. Definitely not going to Cuba. But the music is getting me in the mood for some hot weather. All you long-time viewers would definitely know, definitely know where we're going soon. As we said, it's not Cuba, but it is the Caribbean, and it's back here chasing cats. They're trying to get its attention, but it really does not care about me at all. The cat does not care, but yeah, maybe I'll just give it away. For all of you guys that watch week to week, very soon, I don't know about the next video, but very soon, you want to tell them where we're going? I'm sure they've guessed it by now. We literally already have people, I say every day, leaving a comment on the channel somewhere being like, when are you going back to the Dominican Republic? It must be soon. Don't worry. It's happening very soon, and if you're wondering, if we're excited, yeah, we're very excited. We're down one of the quieter streets here now. You get more of kind of all the, yeah, just different, different things. There's so much here. I mean, there's even, look at this. There's even like toys. There's like old Barbies, like there's old Barbies there. Like everything. Anything you want, you can find here. And I mean, as we keep walking, I'm just going to let this roll for a second. Like, look, we got a whole bunch of necklaces there, and just old, like, I don't even know, brats? Yeah, like brats, or there's like a bunch of trays over there, like antique trays. It's kind of fascinating. Like, there's bits of this that remind me of like Istanbul in a weird way. Totally get that. Kind of a gritty city, but you can see like graffiti behind you, kind of an okay, nice building there, and then a rundown building like right there. Next up, we have come over to a place called Fairy Tale, and this place is as magical as it sounds. Look at all the delicious treats, and look at the decor of this place. That's one of the reasons we have come over here. We're going to talk about more of the decor of restaurants, because yeah, the restaurants in this area are pretty spectacular, believe it or not. Got one of these again, Fredo Cappuccino. I told you, I'm on number two. I got three more to go today. I aim for five every day. Yeah, go ahead and keep judging. For the record, this is my first and will be my only Fredo Cappuccino for the day, but I'm certainly going to enjoy it, that's for sure. I love these things, just like Trevor does, but I don't have five a day. I find this good enough for me. I'm definitely going to miss them when we head on to the Dominican Republic, since we already gave that away. Can't get them there, very sadly. I wish this was one of those things that would like, you could get everywhere around the world. I don't know why it hasn't caught on, because it's just so good. But we are here at Fairy Tale. This place is so over the top. It's a little bit gimmicky, but it's really, really fun. Trevor was just mentioning the different restaurants here in the neighborhood. It almost seems like they had some crazy design competition or something, because every restaurant it seems is just over the top in terms of design. It's like they all brought in inferior designers and had a crazy competition. This place probably won if that was in fact a thing, or if I just made that up. Well, I really hope you guys enjoyed our perfect little day, or couple days here in Athens. We had so much fun exploring the city, and we really hope we gave you at least a few ideas on what you can do. Yeah, and if you do only have one day here, you could absolutely do everything that we just did in one day. If you're starting early enough, you could go to Plaka, go to the Agora, and then walk through Kisiri. The beauty of this city is you get to do all of those things. It's not just about the kind of ancient ruins. It's not just about food. It's not just about trendy neighborhoods. The city has it all. Yeah, it's kind of the combo of it all. It is, and the big thing is we hope that you guys don't skip it. We don't work for the Greek government, we're Canadians, we don't work for the Athens city or anything like that. We just really enjoy this city, and every time we come to the Greek islands and we pair it with this amazing Athens, we have so much fun, don't we? We do, and I feel like so many people tell us, like, oh, I just spent one day there, I just had a few hours, or I just went to the airport and went directly to catch a ferry because they wanted to skip the city, but don't skip it. Yeah, and get the dessert, and get a Fredo cappuccino. But next up for us, we don't know exactly what the next video is going to be, but we did give away that we are making our way back to the DR, the good old Dominican Republic, for all of you guys that have been asking. Yeah, so we'll either be in transit or we'll already be there in the next video. It's going to be so much fun. We're going to be back there for a long time, living there once again for an unknown amount of months. We're just going with a one-way ticket with no plans to leave. Can't wait. We'll see you soon. If you got this far in the video, it's Trevor and Anna, Delightful Travelers. Hit subscribe because that helps. Leave us a comment. Hit the like button because that helps even more. To all your Patreons and channel members, thank you so much for watching every week. All right, guys, that's it. From Athens, wishing you delightful travels. See you soon.