After a week of fixing various odds and ends along with some cleaning and polishing, we moved the yacht up to the marina in Piraeus right on the outskirts of Athens where we would be picking up our next lot of guests.  Not the most exciting of marinas but still a nice spot to be in and close to the city centre.  Our first port of call was the Kitchen Bar, a restaurant along the marina which offers a good selection of non-Greek food (something we were beginning to get a little tired of!) for a bit of beef and red wine!  Provisioning here is perfect with a huge Carrefour supermarket along the marina with plenty of European/French products available which certainly makes my life easier!  I even had the time for a quick trip into Athens to the central market which was apparently ‘a must’ and indeed it was.  I’d never seen anything quite like it.  The meat market was along three of the sides of the building where each vendor had a cubicle and then their meat selection hanging inside clear boxes.  The atmosphere was incredible with all the vendors shouting away at the crowds of Greeks and tourists.  In the middle of the building was the fish market where rows and rows of ice displays sat with such a variety of fish.  I decided I wasn’t quite brave enough to buy anything from the meat market (I’m sure it was very safe but something put me off the fairly dried looking bits of carcasses hanging from their boxes!) but I bought a fair amount of fish including seabass, bream, sole, prawns and salmon.  It all turned out to be very good and very fresh although my galley resembled the fish market after I’d finished scaling, gutting and filleting most of them!  Getting the yacht charter ready over the few days in Piraeus was a huge struggle because of the heat.  It was 42 degrees in the shade at one point so our days would often start at 7 for all the polishing outside before retreating inside at lunchtime to do all the bits and pieces out of the glaring sun.  Guests arrived and after one final night in Zea Marina we headed off to the Argo-Saronic islands for two weeks.

Clare