Put me on a plane any­where and I’ll prob­ably tell you how it totally met my expect­a­tions. Call it glob­al­isa­tion, or media over­load. Blame it on the inter­net or on movie aes­thet­ics, but when I went to New York — just to drop an example here of what I mean — it felt like I’d been here many times before. In fact, it felt like I’d been liv­ing there, even though I had zero ori­ent­a­tion and really didn’t see any of the drive by shoot­ings that I know from all these movies. But visu­ally, it was pic­ture per­fect: me, star­ring in vari­ous movies and series, the NYC sky­line is my back­drop and all those stor­ies told unite in my mind and my heart even though they’re fic­tional or hardly inter­est­ing. It doesn’t mat­ter: urban romance is some­thing that has been influ­en­cing my travels forever, and rarely are the myths what grab my atten­tion. Usu­ally, I just try to com­pare everything to what I already know.

Now enter our little vaca­tions to Athens. Mar­cus and I hopped on a plane and ended up in a place we knew exactly noth­ing about. I mean nada, except maybe for the little polit­ics of our con­tem­por­ary media in Ger­many. Yeah, Greece is in a dire state of eco­nom­ics, and we’ve heard a lot about riots and the fates of the poor Greek who’re obvi­ously not very happy with the cur­rent situ­ation. So with no inform­a­tion and no expect­a­tions we were hit pretty hard by real­ity: Athens is not just another dull place with old stuff to look at. Athens might, simply put, be just one of the most charm­ing, ver­sat­ile and pro­voc­at­ive cit­ies in Europe! With open mouths and stunned with dis­be­lief we walked around the streets of Plaka and Exar­chia, lively neigh­bor­hoods full of contrasts.

And by con­trasts I mean stark, ser­i­ous dicho­tomy. Antic ruins and temples in the back­ground of mod­ern ruins, left houses, closed shops. Graf­fiti every­where — I mean every­where, cheers to 1Up for their fant­astic color work in the city (damn you guys, you’re insane!) — and a feel­ing of youth­ful upris­ing in the air. It’s hard to explain how all of this mingles up in a melt­ing pot of visual over­loads. You’ve got the medi­ter­ranean sea right next to the moun­tains right next to the temples right next to the impress­ive haven right next to the over­crowded streets, all that under a burn­ing 30 degrees hot sun. I sup­pose we believed that Athens was going to be a bit more on the Florence side of European cit­ies; bor­ing and dusty, with old stuff to look at and plenty of museums to visit. Turns out Athens is more like Ber­lin than any other city I’ve seen (at least from a visual per­spect­ive). There’s dirt and grind and edge every­where, but some­how, it’s charm­ing. And: it’s young. Athens, like Ber­lin, has this strong vibe of a left and aban­doned city that has every oppor­tun­ity now to be squat­ted by act­iv­ists and artists, stu­dents and schol­ars from all over the world. As soon as the last rich per­son has fled from the crit­ical fin­an­cial situ­ation, Athens will be the first city in Europe to be taken over by a new sys­tem. Maybe that’s just our naive ideals; maybe it’s pure bull­shit, but my romantic heart will beat for the idea of a revolu­tion. Once upon a time, a wall came down in Ber­lin. And per­haps in the future, the invis­ible wall of a fierce and unthank­ful sys­tem will come down too.

But I’m going to stop with the socio-political philo­sophy right here. After all, we were on a vaca­tion and we had to use every spare second of the day to soak up as much as we could. We ren­ted out a car at the air­port in fear of the typ­ical South European traffic chaos (which turned out to be an over­re­ac­tion. The metro and the busses were work­ing just fine, but the road trip lov­ers we are, we were still kinda happy to have a car, blast loud and rude hip hop music through the win­dows and hold our hands out to glide into the fresh air). We hopped from beach to beach and were mes­mer­ized by the clear blue sea. We got sun­burned but we loved it. We spent hours appre­ci­at­ing the amaz­ing weather. We had tasty food in Exar­chia and Gazi. We strolled over a ran­dom flea mar­ket, we tried to take pic­tures of graffiti-bombed trains while they passed. We loved every minute and every second of our stay and we’re con­sid­er­ing going again, because three days is hardly enough to see everything.

And then there’s the Acro­polis. How can you not love a city that has so much cul­ture and his­tory to offer? I mean, yeah, sure, Ber­lin and everything. But this is where Europe was foun­ded! And while strolling through the Olive Gar­dens at the entrance of the Acro­polis (which, alas, we couldn’t enter because it was the day of the elec­tions and they had closed it to vis­it­ors), just for a moment, we felt like this is a really spe­cial place to be. A cap­tur­ing atmo­sphere, I swear to God.

Of course, no vaca­tion goes down without the essen­tial com­par­ison to the night­life of Ber­lin. What can I say? We went to Six Dogs, which is pretty much a place for everything: parties, drink­ing, hanging out, eat­ing out, exhib­i­tions, con­certs. It’s cool, and it’s nice to chill there, but we were simply too tired to hit the party bus so we couldn’t actu­ally tell whether they would go crazy like at Berg­hain (prob­ably not, though). And we went to Bios in Gazi, which sports one of the most impress­ive views from its rooftop (Acro­polis, of course). The music was great, right at the dark wave elec­tronic stuff that we cur­rently love so much. As if Jamie XX per­son­ally came around to drop a few beats. Whatever — again, we were too sleepy to con­tinue, but there was no driv­ing party momentum from other people either, so we must be excused. Next time, we’ll make sure to waste the day at the beach and actu­ally get ready to party — next time.

In the mean­time, we’re happy about our memor­ies. We’re happy we met this old guy in Plaka on our way to the Acro­polis, who told us about his shop clos­ing down after fifty years. That’s what fin­an­cial crisis does to you. His kitschy souvenir shop was a test­a­ment to trashy and abso­lutely ran­dom col­lec­tions of old grumpy men. But he was charm­ing in his own way, and we totally fell in love with it.

Athens is sure worth a visit, but be pre­pared: the prices are def­in­itely steeper than in Ber­lin. While you can grab a beer at the Späti-equivalents of Kiosks all around the city, they’re not in the same league as here. That said, it’s not as bad as in other European cap­it­als. So yeah, do it. Go to Athens. If any­thing, it’ll make you happy that the citys green and blue and red and everything will be a delight to the urban lov­ing soul. If not, you’ll at least have a beach to make up for it. But you’ll def­in­itely find what you’re look­ing for here — promise.

Thanks a mil­lion to EasyJet, Design Hotels and espe­cially i-ref and their 2nights pro­gram for let­ting us fly out to Athens on this won­der­ful trip.