I love Athens. The craziness, the congestion; even in a heat wave the place leaves me pumped. It’s life in a petri dish. It’s so terribly, organically, inescapably human. I didn’t stay in Athens long. I was in transit to Icaria. Two days only. But this is what I tried (and which I’d recommend to anyone popping by).
* Stay here: I was booked into The New Hotel, near Syntagma Square. My mate Bill at thecoolhunter suggested I check it out. The place is designed by the Campana brothers, who’ve cleverly reinterpreted the former Olympic Palace hotel originally built in 1958 – they pulled it down, then rebuilt it using broken bits of the hotel as well as the retro furniture. They workshopped the project with design and architecture students from University of Thessaly. So clever. Took me a while to work out that the walls were made of old bed legs and the chairs were