TeamSD: Adventures of Lawyer Girl and Demian Man

Welcome to Athens

Since I’m not as funny as Demian, I’m going to play to my lawyerly strengths in my blog posts – that’s right, bullet points.

Athens Highlights

• Went on an Athens Walking Tour led by Aristotle: Much to Demian’s chagrin, we spent most of our first full day in Athens on walking tour of the city, which included highlights like the changing of the guard at Parliament, the National Gardens, the Temple of Zeus, Hadrian’s Arch, the Plaka, and the Acropolis (where we saw the Theater of Dionysus, the temple of Asclepius, and, of course, the tourist-swarmed and larger-than-life Parthenon).

• Tried the infamous Nescafe frappe, as well as various renditions of a Greek salad.

• Got lost among the whitewashed, blue-doored, bougainvillea-covered houses in Athens while looking for Monastiraki, one of the shopping districts.

• Bought custom-made sandals (and convinced Demian NOT to buy a murse) from Melissinos, the poet sandal-maker of Athens who apparently went to Parsons School of Design and has be-sandaled the likes of John Lennon, Barbara Streisand, and Jackie O.

• Ate at the Michelin-starred Varoulko, which had fantastic food and less-than-fantastic service.  For you curious foodies out there, we had a four-course (plus dessert) meal, including: (1) a refreshing, toothsome carpaccio of baby sea-bream fillets, lightly drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice; (2) perfectly fried whitefish (the lightest, crispiest breading), accompanied by an eggplant aioli (best tartar sauce ever!) and a slightly incongruous strawberry reduction; (3) grilled octopus tentacle (giant, smoky, al dente), with an eye-opening, confetti-shaped pasta interspersed with flakes of slightly salty Greek cheese and chewy-sweet (what I think was) dried apricot; (4) an unmemorable and slightly overcooked white-fleshed fish with generic sauteed greens and a shredded potato cake; and (5) a solid, but not particularly imaginative, pear-themed dessert–caramelized diced pear, pear sorbet, and vanilla ice cream between two thin strips of sweet, crisp phyllo.

Although the weather was bipolar at times (alternatively windy and sprinkling, then sunny and hot), we were lucky to have been able to enjoy Athens without any strikes, protests, or otherwise scary incidents.  We were also pretty satisfied with our hotel, The Athens Gate, which was a short distance from the Acropolis and Syntagma Square (where the government buildings, and incidentally, a lot of the recent protests have been held).  While small, our room was modern, clean, and comfortable, with a great shower and a beautiful view of the Temple of Zeus.  (It was a bit of challenge getting to our room at first, though, because the elevators in the hotel are designed to hold, at most, four people . . . with our suitcases, even just two people was a squeeze.)  The rooftop restaurant where we had dinner one night and breakfast the next morning was a great place to admire the Acropolis, especially when lit up at night.  We both thought it was a nice touch to have been greeted at reception with glasses of water and lakoumi (which I believe is the same thing as Turkish delight).

Before getting to the pictures, I’ll leave you all with some random observations about Athens that you may not find out from the guide books:

• When eating out, you will get a series of receipts for every item that is brought to the table. We were royally befuddled by this at first, and it was near impossible to get a cogent explanation from anyone (in fact, our server at Varoulko treated us like idiots when we asked about the series of receipts to make sure that we weren’t being undercharged).  Matt Barrett, who maintains a very helpful and comprehensive travel guide online, explains it pretty well: “At the end of the meal you will get a bill which is supposed to be a printout from a cash register though if you are in a far off village where the tax people rarely come it may just be a scrawled piece of paper.  By law there has to be a receipt for everything on the table and so it should not surprise you if at the end of the night you have a handful of these little receipts.  It won’t take much work to find the updated one.  The reason this is done is not so they can keep track of what you are eating.  They know. It is so the government can keep track of what the restaurant is selling. If a tax person comes into a restaurant and the tables don’t have receipts they can be charged thousands of euros for each infraction.”

• (Crude, but) You can’t flush toilet paper down the toilets.  Instead, you need to dispose of your paper products in the trash cans, which are emptied frequently.  Talk about testing a marriage.

• There are a TON of stray dogs in Athens. Most have collars and appear to have been abandoned by their owners, which is pretty sad.  A couple of these strays followed us from Parliament, all the way to the Acropolis.  Adorable, but again, sad.

• Graffiti is EVERYWHERE, which is unfortunate in such a historic and otherwise beautiful city.

• There are NO Starbucks(es?) anywhere! Not necessarily a bad thing, just a surprise.  There are, however, McDonald’s(es).

• The Greeks we have met so far are not particularly moved by an effort to speak their language (of which, thanks to some Greek-language software Demian got before the trip, we now know a few rudimentary phrases); so we’ve given up.  Good thing pretty much everyone speaks English!

And now, for the pictures!
(more…)

So I’ve been assigned the short/lame write up and you’ll just be getting a quick look into how we got to Greece from me.

So we used our miles to upgrade to business class for this first leg of the trip (San Francisco –> Frankfurt) and this gave us access to the wonderful Red Carpet Club. We got to the airport about 3 hours early so we had time to kill. This was Jaci’s first time in the Red Carpet Club and she was amazed and how it made the time fly by much quicker! They included free drinks, free access to internet, and some free snacks (cookies and fruit).

Red Carpet Club

They were even kind enough to announce when you would need to start walking over to your gate, so we just chilled there until we were ready. Then of course we got to skip all the lines and enter via the fancy “business class” line which was a breeze. Once onto the plane we were welcomes with this view:

In Flight TV Screens

Each seat had these fancy tv-screens, I didn’t take a picture of it, but below the tv screens are two different foot rests (one on the ground and one higher up). In order to control all these things, the arm rests have these consoles:

In Flight Arm Rest

Try to figure out what everything does! It took us a little while. I’m pretty sure the green button on top made the plane take off and land at our discretion, because this flight was by far the most comfortable one we’ve ever been on.

- The seats were fully reclining -  there was SO much leg room (I could literally swing my legs to a full extension and not worry about kicking the seat in front of me (even though there wasn’t anyone sitting on the opposite end, since they have seats facing each other).
- They had a fairly decent selection of movies, I watched Book of Eli (terrible movie btw) and Jaci watched It’s Complicated (she thought it was good, it looked pretty terrible to me), and she was going to watch shutter island but we ran out of time (You heard that right… ran out of time).
- Every seat had regular electrical outlets for charging items (My Laptop in this case… I had to write up some stuff for work *wohwohwoh*)
- Fancy dinner menu selection (Jaci had the “first class duck” and I had some sort of chicken eggplant thingy)
- Lastly, (probably forgetting a bunch of stuff but oh well) this was probably the first flight where I didn’t get off feeling dehydrated. They literally keep refilling your cup with bottled water so you always have something to drink.

One of the flight attendants seemed a little grumpy, but otherwise this leg of the flight was absolutely fantastic! Unfortunately, we had a 5 hour layover in Frankfurt, with no access to the red carpet club (apparently flying in business isn’t enough, you have to fly out business as well) so we just hung out at a cafe for a few hours (and I continued to do my work work) until we took off for Athens. The flight to Athens from Frankfurt wasn’t half as enjoyable as our San Francisco to Frankfurt flight, but ah well, only so much business class we could get =)

Here are a couple of pictures from the flight!

Frankfurt From The Air

Almost In Athens

We’re in Greece and everything is beautiful! We just got off the ferry to Mykonos from Athens and now have some limited access to internet. We’ll be uploading pictures and typing up our blog posts shortly!

Just as a little tidbit of what to expect:

- United Business Class flight = awweessommme
- Athens Walking tour
- Beautiful Mykonos

Whew, so this was a pretty exciting weekend (Well at least Saturday was)! Saturday morning (after lunch at Broadway Bistro) we headed up to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club! My Uncle Fritz collects a bunch of guns and rifles and Jaci and Michael were both interested in going shooting sometime (and I always love going) so with Uncle Fritz was in town we decided to head up and give some of his guns a workout!

We shot quite a few different of pistols including, two .22 pistols, 2 .357 revolvers (long barrel and short barrel), a .40 pistol, an mp5 variant submachine gun (although classified as a pistol I guess since it was modified to be a single shot). For the rifles we had a .22 rifle, something that was similar to a m15 assault rifle (I forget what it actually was), an AK 47 variant, and a pretty big rifle which was a called a PAL, FPL or something… like that. For the pistols we shot at 10 yard and 20 yards and all the rifles we shot at 50 yards.

Anyways, so since this would have been a very picture heavy post rather than having a story for every picture, I just threw a bunch of mini thumbnails below. Going shooting was super fun as always, but some oddities of the day include Steph, who was literally just crocheting the whole time, and the first 10 minutes we were there, Jaci was literally jumping every time a gun was shot.

Pictures below!

So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this year was the best 4th of July fireworks show I’ve seen yet. There’s something overwhelmingly awesome about timing fireworks to the Star Wars theme song.

Plus, that may not have even been the best event of the show. Along with the San Francisco Symphony (also performing music from 2001 space odyssey, the planets, etc.) there was a special guest narrator: George Takei, otherwise known as Mr. Sulu from Star Trek.  As George Takei came onto stage the first words he said weerrree:

*Queue full symphony Star Trek music* Space! The final frontier!

He then continued to go through the entire Star Trek intro (along with the original theme song playing in the background). They continued to play and narrate a whole bunch of other things with the general theme of “looking into our future” and playing other star trek songs like the next generations intro.

As a random aside. When I told my dad that George Takei did the whole “space… the final frontier” intro, it devolved into a discussion how only the captains of the enterprise are supposed to do the intro (William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, etc.) but that Spock was one exception, but also that Sulu at least eventually became a captain of the starship excelcesior. Anyways… it was a really nerdy moment…

*ahem* moving along… Well actually that’s pretty much it. We heard that cities we’re cutting budgets on the fireworks show but this one seemed like they had just as many fireworks if not more. Plus they impeccably timed the fireworks with the music from the symphony REALLY well and it was just overall extremely awesome. I think the night was pretty much summed up in two texts between me and michael that night.

Me: Wow. Awesome.
Michael: Standing O.

Anyhoo, picture time!

Me and Jaci early in the show

George Takei bustin' fat rhymes (not really... well. sort of.)

Miscellaneous Fireworks 1 (don't know the dude in the hat)

Miscellaneous Fireworks 2

Below I have a nice little video I took with my Google G1(pretty decent video if you ask me…)

On a side note, it’s really lame that at&t and the flickr deal got cancelled. (at&t isp users we’re given a free flickr pro account, but then they took it away after a year or two).  The limits on free Picasa and Flickr accounts are pretty dumb…

Upcoming posts to look forward too: Stuff about Zazzle (zingers), epic overload, and maybe some other randomness

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oh man… and I almost forgot (I actually did forget… and just came back to update the post), buuut traffic sucked when leaving the the shoreline so we watched Year One (only movie available at the time) and it sucked. The end.