A Travel Blog
Just off Monastiraki Square is the Athens Flea Market, a warren of small streets filled with vendors selling antiques, used clothing, and countless other things of dubious necessity. The heart of this area is the smaller Avissinias Square.
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Just east of our apartment in Thissio is the neighbourhood of Monastiraki. This busy shopping district skims across the top of the Agora, and is filled with many shops and a hectic flea market.
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We stopped in at the Century General Store for a light lunch on the way to Holyrood Palace. The café is tucked into a cool little triangular building with a turret. It’s a bright space with friendly staff.
Both of us like wandering old book stores, which have become hard to find in Toronto. Edinburgh still has many, though, so we made a point to seek them out.
Near our hotel in Granada there’s a famous narrow street called Calle Calderería Nueva. It’s often described as a Moroccan souk, and having visited the medinas in Fes and Meknes and I can confirm that it does have a superficially similar vibe, though it’s cleaner and targeted solely at visitors and not locals.
The street makes for a colourful and interesting walk, at least the first few times.
Our time in Seville is dwindling. Since our last post of photos from around La Macarena neighbourhood where we are staying we’ve become even more familiar with this quieter area full of low-key cafes, bars, art spaces, independent boutiques and markets
There’s an art school around the corner from the apartment called Centro de Arte Acción Directa. Through the door we can see sculptures in progress and people painting on easels.
Our flight from Dublin landed in Seville yesterday. Amidst the whirlwind of checking into our Airbnb, stocking up on basics at the local supermarket, and catching up on sleep and real life, we’ve also managed to head out to explore a few times.
Our wanders have lead to us becoming pleasantly disoriented on the city’s narrow, winding streets, but thankfully Google Maps on Josie’s phone has always brought us back home. Eventually.
As we spend our last week in Lisbon, it’s time to close the gaps on a few areas we feel we haven’t adequately explored. One of those is Bairro Alto, so we took a meandering wander from the top of the Acensor da Bica along Rua da Rosa.
The area definitely has character, with lots of little bars and restaurants, but around noon on Easter Sunday there was still a “morning after” vibe going on.
Here are some of the buildings in the more upscale Príncipe Real neighbourhood of Lisbon. It felt a bit like Nolita in NYC with its eclectic mix of interesting shops, bars and restaurants.
One of the most impressive sights at the Jardim França Borges park in the heart of Principe Real is this giant white Mexican Cypress umbrella. It is over 100 years old.
We left the historic Alfama and Baixa areas and took the ludicrously crowded Tram 15E along the riverfront out to the Alcântara neighbourhood. There, at the foot of the Ponte (Bridge) 25 de Abril, we visited two of the more recent additions to the Lisbon map.
The LX Factory reminded us a lot of Toronto’s Distillery District. In 2008 an abandoned 1840’s textile factory was converted into artist studios, cafés, shops and market stalls.
The streets of New York were hot in late July, and the subway stations were even worse — humid and stifling air that made it hard to breathe. This is the steamy view across the tracks from the platform at the Spring Street station. Once on board, however, the trains were nicely air-conditioned.
London is such a vast city that even a full week spent exploring as tourists meant we barely scraped the surface of a few neighbourhoods.
In between all the other major landmarks, museums, pubs and restaurants we visited and blogged about, we also came across other things that caught our interest. Here’s a random compilation.