Back to Greece! After our hiking day, we returned to Makrinitsa for a night and had – this will be no surprise – another excellent meal. First though, there were a few photos of the de Chiciro bridge that I wanted to add. It’s really very cool the way the engineers built out a platform over the chasm then put a curved track on it.
The view from our hotel in Makrinitsa at night, looking down on Volos, was really lovely. Now that we’re over a month back from the trip, I have to say Makrinitsa and Pelion in general are really staying in my mind as very magical places!
We saw several giant hollowed out sycamore trees, and this one in the Makrinitsa main square was really striking. Also, pomegranate trees grow all around in Makrinitsa, leaving squashed pomegranate fruits on the pathways. The place should be crawling with poets looking to run with that! Last photo is a mural of Chiron the centaur in Portaria. Pelion is known as the home of the centaurs in Greek mythology.
We went out to dinner in Makrinitsa (walking there by way of a number of staircases and stone paths) near the main square and had a more modern take on traditional Greek food.
Then, the next morning, up early to head back to Athens! Liam landed that morning and we all met up near Miles’s apartment later that morning. The best way to find Miles’s apartment on google maps was to set the destination to the Ziggy Cocktail Bar, which he lived above, so we thought that should be documented. The church below is across the street from Ziggy / Miles.
Miles had arranged for us to have coffee with one of his professors and his wife, which was really great – nice bonus to be able to meet them! Lots of good discussion about the semester abroad during Covid, their previous travels and what a great student Miles is (which we knew!) Miles then took us on a walking tour of parts of Athens including the meat and fish market.
Miles had said there was a restaurant he wanted to take us to very near the fish market and we arrived at it quite suddenly. In fact, when he said we were there we were all surprised because there was no sign of a restaurant there – were were on a very nondescript corner with nothing that appeared to be open – just some functional cellar stairs leading into a basement. The “hole in the ground” turned out to be a pretty great restaurant – when we went down the stairs into the restaurant, the two guys running the place showed us to a table – we were sort of off to the side but there were about 10 tables like in the photo below, all full. They then started bringing us stuff – wine in a little jug, several plates of dishes involving beans (yummmmm), and they asked if we wanted fish. Yes – and we got a plate of fish. At the end of the meal, when we asked to pay, one of the guys came over and asked us how many jugs of wine we had, and when we said one he looked briefly disappointed then wrote a big “35” euro on the paper table covering. Everything was really excellent, could not have ordered better if ordering from a menu had been an option!
We then walked around some neighborhoods that had a lot of really interesting street art – and didn’t take many photos at all but enjoyed the tour very much! The photo below isn’t even really representative, but there was so much I think we got a bit paralyzed on what exactly to capture. We ended the night at a Cretan restaurant in Exarchaia – again no photos but really wonderful sights, people and dishes that we shared on very crowded tables with paper tablecloths. Thanks for the great tours, Miles! And well done, Liam on staying awake through the very long day after your flight over! 
The food looks so good! What a wonderful trip!
I feel the need to add a comment about how stunning the view must have been, looking down on Volos from the hotel in Makrinitsa!
Having read *The Song of Achilles* by Madeline Miller, I thought the mention of Chiron the Centaur was interesting. Chiron was not your ordinary centaur!
The view was really stunning, as was the village of Makrinitsa itself. We were very lucky to get to visit Pelion – kudos to John for finding it as a destination among many options! On second thought, I’m not sure that the centaur in the mural is specifically Chiron, though I just read that Chiron is often represented as having human front legs and horse back legs, which is kinda going on in the mural?
I think in the mural on the building, Chiron has man legs in front. There is much better, dramatic art on the Internet showing Chiron and Achilles. In it, Chiron has muscular horse front legs as well. I like to think of Chiron as having four horse legs, because it would be just weird if he didn’t. Ha ha.