this is as close as we got to the Acropolis
Joanna and I in front of a Zues monument
the girls in front of a Zues monument...with the Acropolis in the background
all of us at our fantastic lunch
Me with two cooks from lunch - they were rolling the grape leavesOh Athens. According to my good friend Jason Miller, Athens should fit me perfectly: a café culture that spends their days sipping coffee and meanly (hopefully angrily) making fun of the passersby, begin dinner at 10 pm and all throughout they are eating and drinking. That is unless they are on strike…But, first lets back up.
We had to fly from Dubrovnik to Athens via a 4 hour layover in Rome. The Rome airport was fantastic…or at least the food in the Rome airport was. We had a great mid-afternoon meal at Ciao! of wine (how often to do you get ridiculously good wine at an airport café), caprice salad, and pasta, topped off with some sort of chocolate concoction with an espresso and cappuccino. At this point I start thinking to myself that I should just forget it all and move to a Mediterranean country for the food, wine, coffee, hours of operation and lifestyle.
Then we get to Greece and everything changes. They lost one of our bags. Its had most of joanna’s clothes, our toiletries, some of my clothes, etc. It was never very clear where anyone was supposed to go to find their luggage. We finally found a luggage counter. Because we are in Greece, there was no sense of a line that existed. So, Joanna goes in the line to wait…and wait…and wait. When she finally gets there, they don’t quite confirm that the luggage is missing, but tell her to fill out a form with the address of where we are located in Athens in case it is actually missing and if they happen to find it. We are feeling extremely confident that things will end well. Fortunately our philosophy while traveling is, “whatever you are missing you can always buy.”And speaking of that attitude…while Joanna was waiting two college girls come up to ask if there is any vacancy at the hotel in which we’re staying. Why? Because they don’t have a hotel, nor do they have a guidebook, nor anything that will help them book a hotel. We show surprise that they don’t have any of the above mentioned trip resources, they claim they haven’t needed it yet and that they have spent a number of nights in airports. We soon learn that they are in their 2nd or 3rd year of school at some private school that starts with an “H” in Pa…and that they are roughing. They said all this with a straight face as she held her real deal Fendi bag. Yep, that’s right, rich kids, rebelling against their life of privilege, by sleeping in airports. Nice.
After an eventful cab ride, which included a ride through Athens red light district and talk of mafia from the cab driver (he seemed to think it was because of the mafia that he had to take a convoluted route to the hotel), we check in and get excited for an exciting day seeing historic Greece….
Well, we were wrong. The Acropolis was closed…because of a strike. We did see some Zeus ruins and got some good pictures of the Acropolis and Pantheon from the Zeus stuff, but it really wasn’t the same. We were able to walk around some theater area, which did have some old stuff and up to the gate to the Acropolis. Once at the gate, we ran into a heated discussion between the strikers who were guarding the area and some disgruntled customers. I figured that this was my opportunity to finally cause some sort of international incident. I just wanted to ask some questions: why are you striking? Why do you do it inconsistently (just today and tomorrow, not for 2 or 3 weeks straight)? What do you hope to gain out of this? Don’t you think it’s stupid? Don’t you realize that you are not winning anyone over to your cause by doing this? Will you take a $100 to let me and my friends through? It was about my turn to argue, when the girls made me leave. They got concerned because a few people tried to break through and the strikers sent their muscle over to the gate. So, unfortunately for our readership, there was no international incident. Maybe another time.
Instead of seeing old stuff, we went to lunch. We had a great lunch at Kouklis Ouzeri. It was in the plaka, but away from the mass of unimpressive, undistinguishable tourist restaurants. We did a bit of extra walking, but found a charming restaurant which had a sign in garbled English said something like, “the only authentic Greek restaurant in the Plaka.” Authentic or not the experience almost immediately changed our mood. The owner/waiter said that he could feed 4 of us including water and wine for a cheap price – maybe 12 euro/person. We chose 10 small dishes off of his tray that included some fantastic meatballs and lamb as well as some apparently good eggplant (I don’t know, I don’t dig on eggplant). The homemade wine was fantastic as well. It was a perfect lunch. We were feeling good about Greece…
Then we spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out how to leave Athens….Bodrum, Rhodes, Santorini, Crete, Mikynos, Paros…There were a number of problems with this:
1. It is high season in Greece. I have to imagine the highest of high season in Greece is the week we are here. Awesome
2. No one knows anything about anything. Worse yet, they think they do. So, you have to try to figure out what is real and what isn’t
3. You have to go to the ferry terminals to actually figure things out. The ferry terminal is about a half hour away and a ridiculous mess. Its filled with five types of people:
1. People that don’t know anything, but think they do
2. People seeking any sort of reliable information
3. Travel agents. They have accurate information for about 10% of what is actually going on but insist they have 100% of the information
4. People that are traveling that have no idea where they are supposed to go
5. People that know stuff
After about 3 hours of walking back and forth and around and around and back and forth, we determine that we will likely not take a ferry and will fly. Its not much more and it seems like ferries aren’t super reliable…oh and they actually have availability. We finally book some flights to crete (with no idea of how we’ll actually leave crete) and head out for a late dinner. Lonely planet suggested a restaurant that didn’t exist in a touristy area (but, with a great view of a lit up Parthenon). So, we walked around for a while and found a super charming place (for those who care, we think it was called: Kalipartia? On 8 Astiggos - not in guide book, found it off the main strip). The food was again fantastic. We ended the evening at a bar around the corner which didn’t have much in the way of English menus – so that was good (Inoteka on Avissynias Road - in a back alley somewhere)
Our next day in Greece was spent trying to leave Athens. We did spend some time at the archeological museum…they had a bunch of artifacts – but that’s all it was. No story, no structure, it wasn’t awesome.
Getting our tickets was sort of a debacle. We waited in the line for our tickets/boarding passes…just like we normally do…as it turns out, the tickets we bought on-line, were not e-tickets. So, we had to go wait in line to get the tickets. The woman at the boarding pass counter said that we could wait off to the side so we wouldn’t have wait in line again. We later learned that this actually didn’t matter because they routinely call folks up for flights that are about to depart if you haven’t yet checked-in. So, it doesn’t matter if you get there on time. If you come on time, everyone still gets to go ahead of you; if you come late, you get to go ahead of everyone else as it gets closer to flight time.
While Joanna and Heather stay in boarding pass line, while Mer and I head over to the ticket line. It takes FOREVER. There were two reasons for this: 1. The Greeks seem to either not care for or have no sense of a line or what it is for. They just walk up to the person – even if they are helping someone else and begin asking their questions. The key is that that person behind the desk will then help the line-cutter immediately. 2. The process to get your tickets appears to require a lot of typing, printing on a dot-matrix printer and going behind a window to do something else. The entire process takes about 5 hours per person. We finally get our tickets and rush to our gate because it is in final boarding…or not. They hadn’t even started boarding yet. I then realize that there is very little similarity between what is on the boards/screens in the airport and what is actually going on. After about 20 minutes we board our plane. Off to Crete and happy to leave Athens.
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