Monastiraki Square, the Flea Market and Monuments

Hello there! Stay and read my Athens, Greece travel diary. This is day 6.

Day 1 can be found here
Day 2 can be found here
Day 3 can be found here
Day 4 can be found here
Day 5 can be found here

My daughter and I took a two week trip, and in the first week we travelled through Romania, then we took a flight from Bucharest to Athens for the second week. We travelled in July, and needless to say, it was quite a hot experience! But so worth it.

I hope you enjoy reading about the trip as much as I enjoyed visiting!

Today is the last day of our trip. Later today we will fly back home. We pack up all our items. Luckily, we had a bit of spare room because we’ve bought a few souvenirs! Greece just has so many cool things to buy! After we are all packed, we take our bags to the luggage storage place. I feel like I would love to open one of these places as a business idea.

As it’s our last day, we treat ourselves to a delicious brunch. We go for the bacon and egg roll with a side of fruit, and to wash it down, a cold chocolate (not to be confused with a milkshake). We hang around here for a bit after we’ve finished our meal because I know that once we’re up, we’ll be walking for a few hours.

Our flight is at 7.25 pm, so we still have most of the day to sightsee. We decide that we’re too brain dead after 2 weeks to visit anything meaningful, such a museum or archaeological site. So we point our feet in the direction of Monastiraki Square to visit the flea market and Avissiniss Street where the antiques stores are.

The flea market is less of a flea market nowadays. There are more souvenir stores and just general shops. We go into one that has beads. Beads as far as the eye can see. Except right at the back at the store it has the weirdest dinosaur scene. And I’m not talking like a little dinosaur scene. This thing is huge! It’s so random and out of context.

We find a few secondhand book stores. I buy a poster and Amy gets a couple of books for her journals. We get to the end of the flea market street and we come across a section of land that has ruins on it. It also has a group of archaeologists working on it. It is very cool to see them work.

It’s been about 45 minutes of us strolling, and we don’t really have anywhere to go, so we go to a nearby restaurant to have some cool drinks and to waste a bit of time. And to rest our legs. Reminder to take magnesium and panadol next time.

We decide to keep wandering around and we head back to Monastiraki Square. We’re a bit aimless.

There’s a church in Monastiraki Square, so we go in and have a look. It is very decadent and has many light and lantern fixtures. It has a beautiful ceiling that’s been painted blue with gold stars. It is roped off, though, so you can only go in a little bit. After about 5 minutes of marvelling at all the gold fixtures and ceilings, we go outside again.

We start walking again, looking into stores along the way, until we happen to stumble across Holy Metropolitan Church of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. We sit down and look at the exterior for a few minutes before formulating our plan. We will look at this church, then go to the Monument to the Unknown Soldier and then go and collect our luggage.

The church is adorned with a beautiful scene in, what I think, is mosaics. The church is just as beautiful on the inside with blue ceilings and colourful windows. It is really lovely. There’s a museum here underneath the church, but we don’t visit.

After we’ve finished at the church, we go to the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. We get there just in time to see the soldiers march. It is a ritualistic march that is done is very slow motion. There is another soldier there who, after the march, attends to the guarding soldiers because it is so hot. He wipes their faces down for them and then gives them some water.

The marble is so white and bright that it is making me scrunch my face up with squinting and hurting my head! I have no idea how these soldiers are able to withstand that every day as they aren’t wearing sunglasses (neither was I as I don’t like to travel using sunglasses. I just want to see the true colours of everything I’m looking at. I know, I’m weird!)

Once we’ve finished, it’s now time to walk back to collect our luggage. We arrive and sit for a few minutes before ordering an Uber. This is my one splurge as I just couldn’t deal with public transport being so hot and sticky and tired at the end of our adventure. And it was only double that of the train tickets, anyway.

We arrive at the airport and check in. We walk the very long walk to the terminal area we are flying from. I don’t mind, it’s good for my step count. Once we are in the terminal and we’ve found our gate, we have some dinner of a burger and chips.

The flight is on time and it goes so smoothly. I play sudoku for the entire 4 hours while listening to music. Bliss. We arrive back home at just past 1am. By the time we get home it’s 2am and I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed tonight.

Now the biggest question is: where to next?

And if you would like to see how this day looked, head over to my YouTube video

Check back soon for the video!

More journal entries from this trip

Greece Travel Journal / Day 1
Greece Travel Journal / Day 2
Greece Travel Journal / Day 3
Greece Travel Journal / Day 4
Greece Travel Journal / Day 5

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