I'm not sure why, but I can't seem to load my photos from Greece to my blog. I wanted to have photographic evidence of the terrible array of events that, when strewn together, comprised my vacation in Greece. Alas, no luck. You will have to make do with my stories. And oh the stories I have...
After all the drama concerning my flight and whether it would be canceled, I flew out of Paris without any problems last Sunday morning for Athens. I had a realization when I got to the airport that was basically the same one that I had when arriving in Italy, which was "Wait a second. I don't speak Greek. I can barely even read Greek." Nevertheless, I navigated my way through the train, to a metro, to my hotel, and met up with my friends (who had arrived the day before) for lunch. Athens was pleasant enough, besides the fact that our hotel was in the ghetto, there were strippers literally lining our street, and we heard women screaming in the middle of the night out the window. Excellent.
We woke up the next morning and headed off to the metro to get to Port Pireaus for the cruise. We realized we were running a bit late, but it would be okay, as long as the metro didn't take too long....screach. The metro stopped abruptly two stations away from Pireaus. Athenians all filed out of the train, and explained to us that the metro was under construction, and we had to wait for a bus, then take the bus to the next metro station, then get back on the metro. We didn't have that kind of time. We frantically searched for cabs, hopped in the first two we saw, and sped off to the Port.
Or we would have sped off, if we actually weren't caught in basically standstill traffic for ten minutes. We got to the port at 10:40, our cruise set to ship out at 11:00. We were freaking out. To compound the problem, our taxi dropped us at a completely different place than the other group's taxi. We jumped out, only to learn we were in the wrong place, then jumped back in a taxi for another half mile or so along the port, and sprint into the port's departures terminal.
Great sigh of relief. The other group was there, with Carol of Louis Cruises and Some Other Guy of Louis Cruises, who informed us that because of a violent port strike scheduled to arrive at our very location in about five minutes, the cruise's embarkment had been changed from Athens to a town called Lavrio. They hurried us into cabs to get us to "safety." I thought they were being ridiculous, until as we drove off on our hour ride to Lavrio, I saw a huge mob wielding banners and yelling a lot rushing towards the departures terminal. Anyways, after an hour in the taxi, we arrived at Lavrio and rushed onto the boat-- the last passengers to board. We went up to the buffet hall to eat underwhelming food and collapse into chairs, relieved that we finally made it. We noticed out the window a little tug boat that was pulling out ship out to see. It was having a hard time. We said it was cute and made references to the little tug boat that could.
The little tug boat couldn't. Obscenely strong winds prevented it from pulling us out to see for the next THIRTY SIX HOURS.....so we sat in Lavrio, and enjoyed our scenic view of an empty parking lot. We went to the Moonlight Disco that night onboard, which was frequented by Burlington, Vermont's High School Band. From the guest lists of Cab and the BC to the Moonlight Disco. Oh my, how far we'd fallen.
We finally made it out to see at 3pm the next day, but due to the crazy wind, the ship was rocking back and forth at an apparently unprecedented rate. Lots of green looking fat tourists and queasiness. No Moonlight Disco for us that night. Alas.
I won't go into details of the ongoing inefficiencies of Louis Cruises, but basically, they only compensated us 70 euro in boat credit for missing half the cruise, had rather terrible, bad-university-dorm-dining-hall-food, and managed to not have enough buses or boats for us to quickly leave the boat for excursions to the islands half the time. So our times on the were often short. In any event, while Louis Cruises sucked, the places we visited were fairly cool.We managed to pack four islands into the next two days-- Kusadasi, Turkey (not an actual island), and then Patmos, Santorini, and Mykonos.
Kusadasi is the site of Ephesis, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, and is the ruins of an ancient greek civilization. Quite cool. Patmos....I'm not sure why we went there. Patmos was sort of a joke. The brochure the cruise gave us described it as "A rocky, barren hillscape" and said "There's not much to see in Patmos." Then why did we go there? Oh well, we did, and we went to the "most popular beach" in Patmos, which turned out to be completely unpopulated and next to a goat farm. Private beach on the Aegean? Check.
The next day we went to Santorini. The cruise brochure described the options we would have to get to the top of the mountain: "You can take a cable car for 4euro, a donkey for 5euro, or walk by foot for 45 minutes on a strenuous uphill path you will share with the mules." I thought oh Louis Cruises, trying to scare the fat american tourists out of walking......and then we walked uphill for thirty minutes up a mountain, on a path we shared not only with the donkeys, but also with the donkeys poop, which was absolutely everywhere. And occasionally fat american tourists on donkeys would ride by, and we'd have to dodge donkeys and fat americans. Oh the joy. I'm told by others that spent a few days on Santorini that it has some great black sand beaches. I didn't see that part. Only the donkey poop.
We rounded out our cruise with an evening trip to Mykonos, which was the best island ever. We had an amazing dinner there, saw all of its cute shops and streets, and its famous windmills. We also arrived just in time to watch the sunset. Le sigh. Why couldn't the whole week have been like this again?
My last day in athens went splendidly, and I did lots of shopping, museum-going, and acropolis-seeing. A violent transportation strike semi-ruined my train plans to get to the airport the next day, but in the end it all worked out and I got there via bus. Oh Athens, you and your strikes.
Ps, those seem to have turned really problematic over the past few days. Glad I got out of there! Who knows what would have gone awry next??
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
LOL! Oh Colleen, you amuse me. You write exactly like you speak, and when I read your blog, I hear you reading it to me in my head, complete with hand gestures and incensed facial expressions and Dayne laughing next to you on the couch. It's quite the picture. I miss you. Come home early and see me!
ReplyDelete