We took a bus to the airport. Bypassed huge line of people waiting to check-in (thank you web check-in!). We got there quite early so killed time playing cards and charging electronics… Tried to update blog but WiFi sucks everywhere in Europe so far so no luck there. Plane started boarding. Ran into some kind of hitch with boarding so stood in line for twenty minutes before boarding resumed. Finally on the plane and ready to take off. Flight goes smoothly although lunch is interesting… Find it ironic that we are searched for weapons before boarding then served buns that are so hard you could easily take out the flight crew with a couple of well-placed throws… We also noticed (okay, to be truthful, I may have pointed it out) that Aegean Air definitely beats Air Canada on the flight attendant attractiveness scale…
Land in Athens. Exit plane from front and back of plane at same time – there's a thought, eh, Air Canada – walk off plane into burning pits of Hades… It's 5pm and very, very hot… There is no air conditioning on the bus that takes us from the plane to the terminal. I begin to melt. Marie sits looking cool and calm in the heart of the furnace roar and mutters something about it being the first time she's been warm since she left Plumtree… Or perhaps the heat has made me delusional… Actually, it's very warm but not as hot as Thailand… I may survive. Go to find our luggage. 5 bags come out. Nothing else happens for 20 minutes… Just one lonely bag going round and round and round. Then nothing. No more bags. Conveyor belt stops. We joke that someone's bag broke the system… Then my bag comes out followed by the rest of the luggage… Sheepish grin… Finally retrieve our luggage and head for customs… Some guy looks at us as we walk past… Hope we didn't choose the wrong lane or something because there is no passport control – no stamp, no welcome to Greece, nothing. We just walk past some dude and then we're outside again looking for a taxi.
We show the driver the address of our hotel. He nods, smiles and says sure, sure… Then spends the entire trip checking his map book and GPS trying to find the hotel. Eventually we find our hotel. I don't blame the poor guy for having trouble finding the hotel – Athens is a maze… Our hotel is in the middle of that maze…
Our hotel is very nice (not Fairmont hotel nice but still nice) and we are given a room with a very large balcony with a great view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon… We dump our bags and go looking for something to eat. Turns out we're literally 5 minutes' walk from the Plaka so have a ton of restaurants to choose from… We settle on the one that provides free wine, free bread and free dessert… The food was very good. After dinner, we poked our heads in a couple of shops but didn't do much in the way of hardcore shopping… By this point, it was after 11 so we headed back to the hotel to update the blog (no luck with WiFi here, either…) and head for bed so we can get an early start tomorrow.
Thus ended our seventh day in Europe. Would like to post some more pictures but have connected 5 times to Internet only to have connection drop each time… When I do connect it is like being on dial up again… Not sure what the deal is with WiFi in Europe but have not had a good connection in any airport, any restaurant or any hotel since we got here… Surprising when you consider that we had excellent WiFi almost everywhere we went in Thailand and Cambodia… Will post more pictures as soon as I'm able.
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Thirty-four Nights in Europe 