Day 5: Winter… schedule

Trip

Greece 2022

Location

Corfu 🇬🇷

Date

August 31, 2022

We’re still refining our breakfast routine and tweaking our morning schedule. We got up a little after 12:00 today. We went for breakfast at 📍Starenio bakery. We each had Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts (except for me, of course), and we shared bread with butter and honey, as well as a cheese, grape, and tomato omelette. All well done and delicious. Even the cappuccinos were well executed.

Breakfast confirmed something we’ve been leaning toward for a while: Greek honey is excellent. No wonder they put it on everything. For reasons we do not quite understand, it seems thicker and more flavourful than what we usually get back home. It might be due to the pollen, bees, harvesting or treatment being different. Internet research on the subject suggests that it’s both the pollen (which flowers are being pollinated by bees) and the fact that the honey wasn’t pasteurized (Greeks seem to prefer raw honey). Regardless, it’s excellent, and I would drown my fried cheese in it too if I were them.

After what I have to call breakfast, because it’s our first meal of the day, but what normal people would call a late lunch, we’ve set out to do the obligatory cultural visits. First stop is the local Venetian fortress. If you’re an empire that comes from what’s essentially a salty marsh, you would, of course, extend your empire to islands, and if you’re going to go as far as Corfu to expand your empire, you’ll, of course, build something to protect your investment (or so my thin grasp on history says). In any case, the visit in itself gives you good views of the port, the Greek mainland across the strait and the city itself. There are small exhibits by the entrance that you can easily avoid. One is an assortment of Byzantine-era church relics from the island, accompanied by helpful descriptions of the level of “wood carving,” and the other is art from refugees who came to the island during the Second World War. Pretty but lacking in context. Nevertheless, it’s worth its entry price, and since our plan includes a stop at the museum, we went for the combined ticket (15€ each).

We stopped for coffee at the excellent 📍Cafetierra. You could read it as “Cafeteria” and would be forgiven for it, but a cafeteria it isn’t. It offers a couple of different espresso drinks, the obligatory small pastry, and nothing else. I like a purist because they tend to do very few things very well, and that’s what 📍Cafetierra does very well.

Refreshed, we made our way to the Archaeological Museum of Corfu where we learned that winter has already arrived to the Island of Corfu. The weather does not betray it yet with the 32°C we had in that late afternoon, but the museum is unambiguous about it by adopting its winter schedule… in August. Arriving at 15:30 just to find ourself in front of the closing gate put a stopper in our plans of culture for the day. A quick internet search confirmed that our next and last stop saw winter coming too (or followed the museum’s lead) and decided to close at 15:30 as well. There was nothing else to do but to fall back on the entertainment of last resort: day drinking! 📍Arthaus Cafe Wine Bar was happy to oblige us with a small selection of local wine and complimentary chips.

Diner was at 📍Oinos kai geuseis. Recommended as a bastion of local cuisine, we went for typical dishes. I must admit they went overboard with authenticity. Peasant food is good, but it never looks appealing (lean and thin strips of meat in sauce are rarely visually appealing). Garlic is the flavour agent of choice in many of the dishes we were served. While an excellent execution, it left us wanting for something with a bit more refinement in its execution and flavour. We were served exactly what we asked for, which gave us the experience we wanted, although not exactly what we were looking for. In the end, we had to make a stop at a bakery (thank you for bakeries that are open late) and rounded out the evening.

Tomorrow we’re setting an alarm, having a big breakfast, picking up a car and going hiking! Adventure and panorama should abound!