Day 9: avoiding winter schedule

Trip

Greece 2022

Location

Rhodes 🇬🇷

Date

September 4, 2022

We stopped at 📍Fournariko, a bakery in the old city, for breakfast. While they were too busy for any egg dish, we managed feta in phyllo and half-rolled dough with a mix of olives, peppers and tomatoes in the middle. It‘s like they were trying to make a calzone, but ran out of dough. They flipped each side to keep the vegetables from running out, but left the top open. It's hard to describe, but it tastes great.

Not wanting to risk the unannounced winter schedule, we headed to the 📍Archaeological Museum right after breakfast. Rhodes was initially Bizantine, then Genoan, before being taken over by the Hospitaller Knights (an order of Christian Knights) during the Crusades. They held Rhodes for a little more than 200 years (1309-1522). Rhodes passed to the Ottoman Empire, which makes sense considering its proximity to Türkiye (Turkey), and it stayed Ottoman for more than 300 years (1553-1912), then a brief period as Italian (1912-1948) and, finally, Greek. The archeological museum focuses primarily on burial artifacts from the pre-Christian era. The museum itself is impressive, with a small garden and gorgeous all-stone architecture. The content is a little heavy on the pots, figurines and headstones, but it did have context for the items in each small room, making the visit much more informative and pleasant. It’s the most context we’ve had while visiting a museum in Greece, making it a good hour and a half well invested.

Doing the museum first wasn’t only to reduce the risk of it being closed. Also, Rhodes does observe the siesta from about 14:00 to some time around 17:30-18:00. That’s when most shops close and most tourists go to the beach. We had a tranquil old city to visit and walk about with minimal disruption.

As any walled city of its time, we found hardly any straight lines and many twisting side streets. The wider boulevards are boarded with tourist boutiques. The side streets we navigated pretty much at random went from garbage alley to beautiful, small streets with vines overhanging. All of them seem to have a couple of cats napping in them. This makes Rhodes' old town the most cat-friendly place we’ve seen yet. They mostly seem to be community cats, as we found plenty of cat water dishes and empty cat food containers. They also look healthy and well-fed.

Our walk led us, by the simple act of walking randomly, to the 📍Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes. An impressive construction that really gives you the feel of what a castle should be like. Surprisingly enough, they’ve used the space to display floor tile art. It’s the only part of the multiple rooms we visited that had any signage or context, where the floor tile. The furniture and other artifacts had no context. Still a fascinating visit, but we had to make up our own story of which room was which and why.

Walkabout and museums over, we stopped at the aptly named 📍Gelato:Punto for what turned out to be barely OK Gelato and headed home for some laundry and chill time with large water bottles.

For apéro, we went to 📍L’Éternel French Bar. Although the posted Google Maps hours indicated an opening at 18:00, the restaurant was closed when we walked by around 19:30. This confirms that the schedule of businesses can be somewhat elastic. The information found on Google Maps can be misleading. After a little bit of research and finding an alternative apéro bar, we walked back in front of L’Éternel and found it open. We dove in and were the first customers there. Lovely spot, mainly playing French music, and a roof terrace with a decent enough view on either side. The Greek wine selection was small, but all were available by the glass. Both the white and the rosé we had were excellent. A little side of hummus and olives rounded up the apéro, providing a little food to absorb the wine.

Diner was at 📍Pizanias "The Sea Star". Again, the 20:30 arrival was perfect, landing us the last unreserved table. Granted, it was one of four tables ostensibly in the parking lot, but it was also where all the cats were. We counted at least five different cats coming and going. The restaurant’s dog kept them away from the terrace but otherwise didn’t bother them. We tried to exchange some of our fish for cat attention, but to limited success, thus proving how good a deterrent a small dog can be.

To order fish at the Sea Star, you must accompany your waiter and meet your fish in person. They are in cold drawers and weighted in front of you. Karine chose us a grouper. For our fish, we chose the tomato salad (which is essentially a Greek salad with an abundance of tomatoes), sautéed Symi’s shrimps, fried baby squid, and a sea urchin salad (sea urchins in water with a wedge of lemon). Besides that part where the sea urchin salad, which was good, wasn’t a salad, we enjoyed our meal.