We started with a brief layover in Munich, which I want to flag because I was genuinely surprised by how much the city's administrative center looks... Soviet? The blocky, imposing architecture caught me off guard. I should have known better (I did not know better).
What I did know better was to eat at Augustiner, a traditional German pub that's been around forever, where I had the best vegan sausage of my entire life. I also had a vegan curry that was so good I'm still thinking about it. Munich: would recommend for the sausage alone.
CRETE
Here is why I chose Crete as our first stop: it has a 6,000-year-old toilet at Knossos Palace, home of the ancient Minoan civilization, and I wanted to see it.
I did not see it. It was closed for preservation purposes. But, I understand. If I had a 6,000-year-old toilet, I'd want to protect it too. That is a reasonable and correct decision by the archeological preservation community. It was still a big bummer.
What we did get to see at Knossos was genuinely spectacular. The Minoans were building sophisticated structures and drainage systems millennia ago, and walking through the ruins—even partially reconstructed after centuries of earthquake and fire damage—made me stop and think about just how long humans have been trying to figure out how to live well. The frescoes on the walls were beautiful in a way that made me wonder why we stopped doing that. My walls have paint and a few framed things. The Minoans had elaborate, colorful painted murals that came out at you in a kind of 3D effect. Are we regressing?
The next day at the Museum of Heraklion cemented this opinion. The Minoan pottery alone—including one piece with a gloriously chaotic squiggly octopus on it—was more impressive to Alex and me than the later Hellenistic Greek work. I know that's maybe a controversial take. I stand by it.
We also toured an olive and dragon fruit farm, which but was actually one of my favorite parts of Crete. It was just us, wandering through ancient olive orchards with a sweeping view of the island, learning about sustainable farming practices amid water limitations, and how Crete is one of the world's main olive producers! We brought home olive oil and dragon fruit jam.
Food in Crete was quiet—it being off-season meant a lot of restaurants were closed, and we had a few nights of hunting around in the near-dark for somewhere to eat. We found a good spot by the pier in Heraklion that hit the spot. The food didn't blow us away overall, but Crete won on vibes. It felt like Puerto Rico: a little chaotic, island energy, deeply beautiful.
MILOS
Milos is a small island in the Cyclades, and we were almost certainly the only tourists there. We stayed in a fisherman's house right on the water. It was picturesque and rainy and covered in cats.
The cats of Milos do not care about your allergies. They are grieving the loss of the tourist season, and they are looking for affection wherever they can find it. Multiple times, Alex had to gently but firmly remove a cat from my person before I started sneezing. One cat found us in the airport while we were waiting for our flight out and immediately started making biscuits on my lap. Greece is simply a country that has decided cats are everyone's problem now.
Despite the cat situation, Milos was wonderful. We had one full day where a water surge warning kept us inside—the water levels around our house were expected to get dangerously high, so we were essentially storm-locked—and we read, napped, and ate groceries we'd walked up a long hill to buy the day before. It was deeply restorative. I didn't realize how much I needed a full day of doing nothing until I had it.
When the rain calmed, we tried to visit the Byzantine-era catacombs on the island, only to find them closed. (A theme emerged on this trip.) However—and this is one of those travel moments you can't plan for—the person who managed the site happened to walk by while we were standing there processing our disappointment. They let us in anyway. It was just us three wandering quietly through these ancient burial chambers, taking in the carved walls in near-silence. Absolutely worth the wet walk uphill.
We also hiked up to see the ruins of an old amphitheater and the hillside where Venus de Milo was originally found. It was a bit treacherous—soggy and steep—and I was genuinely concerned about both of us sliding down at some point. We did not slide down.
ATHENS
We flew from Milos to Athens on my actual birthday. I turned 40. Athens greeted me, reminding me very much of San Francisco: hilly, dense, hard to park in, full of scrappy energy and beautiful chaos. We drove around trying to find parking for what felt like a significant portion of my birthday. We found it.
My bff Marion joined us that night, and we went out for a spectacular birthday dinner. Too much food. Plates that were too big. Every bite is perfect. That is exactly how a 40th birthday dinner should go.
The next morning, we took a mythology tour of Athens, which started with a climb to the Acropolis to see the Parthenon. Every friend who'd been to Greece warned me about the tourist crowds at the Acropolis. Reader, we did not wait in a single line. January in Greece is something else. We walked right up that hill—and as San Franciscans, we did it without complaint while watching the rest of the tour group struggle—and stood in front of columns that have been standing for thousands of years.
It was a genuinely spiritual experience. The views of Athens from the top are sprawling. You can see the port from up there. Alex, who has spent years reading about ancient Greece, got quietly emotional about finally being there, which I found very moving to watch.
Worth noting: the carvings and reliefs you see on the Parthenon are replicas. All the original artwork has been moved to museums for preservation. So anything you see in situ is an exact copy. I found this both a little deflating and also completely correct from a preservation standpoint. A recurring theme.
After the Acropolis, the tour ended at the Athenian Agora, an old Greek market-turned-public park that I could have stayed in for hours. On our walk afterward, we stumbled into a tiny, ancient Byzantine church sitting improbably in the middle of a city square—just plopped there, quietly protected, surrounded by the modern city. We walked in. The interior was covered floor-to-ceiling in colorful artwork. I loved it.
I also found a figurine in the flea market that has nothing to do with Greece, but it made me very happy.
The Acropolis Museum was one of the highlights of the whole trip. Underneath the building are the ruins of a second-century BC community—visible through glass floors throughout the museum—and I found that more compelling than almost anything upstairs. (The pipes! The infrastructure! I cannot help myself.) The museum itself is airy and impressively curated, and they had an exhibit showing the original color of the marble sculptures. Turns out, ancient Greek statues were brightly painted—vivid colors, not the white marble we associate with classical antiquity. Seeing reconstructions of how they actually looked was a genuine revelation.
We also took a marble-carving workshop with an old craftsman who barely spoke English and, for the first part of the session, seemed mostly to be messing with our heads through cryptic commentary on creativity. I was suspicious. But then he handed each of us a three-pound slab of marble and told us to carve something. Carving marble is hard. Alex took to it surprisingly well. I was overambitious. Marion, who insisted she wasn't creative, made something beautiful. Two hours of feeling connected to thousands of years of craft.
DELPHI
For our final adventure, Alex and I drove out to Delphi for the Temple of Apollo. On the way, we stopped in a small, nearly empty roadside coffee shop where the owner had an enormous painting of San Francisco's Painted Ladies on his wall. We took it as a sign.
I had absolutely no idea there was skiing in Greece. And yet: near Delphi, there is a mountain ski resort town where, apparently, all of Greece had gathered. We'd expected to be alone again. We were not alone. The town was full of alpine energy, meats and cheeses, and a notable absence of the salads and oils that had been the backbone of our diet everywhere else. The mountain views were breathtaking.
The next morning, we visited Delphi itself—empty, as expected—including the archeological museum (griffin statues, very well preserved, highly recommend) and the walk up to the Temple of Apollo. In the rain and snow. The stadium at the top is closed due to the weather. Still absolutely worth it. Jagged columns reaching into a cloudy sky, cliffs all around, no crowds. It was the right way to end the trip.
One more observation about Greece: the street dogs. They are everywhere, clearly being fed by their communities, and extremely good at demanding affection. At one point, a dog caused an actual traffic jam by sitting in the road to be petted by tourists on a passing bus. Alex and I spent the entire drive back to Athens joking about which dogs we would steal and bring home. We did not steal any dogs. We thought about it.
The Verdict
Greece in January is good. We ate incredible things (the dolmas! the salads! the lukumades! the baklava ice cream!), saw thousands of years of history with almost no one else around, got into closed catacombs through sheer luck, carved marble, got sneezed on by cats, and I turned 40 in a city that's been doing this whole civilization thing for a very, very long time.
Both Alex and I came home genuinely recharged. I was ready to go back to work. That almost never happens.
We'd go back to Milos, to more of the Cyclades, maybe to Athens when it's warm and alive. And I would absolutely go back to Knossos to try again for that toilet. They can't close it forever.
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