Monday, April 21, 2008
We land, a little worse for wear, in Heathrow. Carter reminds me how much he hates Heathrow as we ride the ten-minute tram through a gray London morning to our terminal. Heathrow has “helpful” information people stationed all over the airport. They wear loud t-shirts with lowercase letters on them to indicate their allegiance to the information age; they are practically related to Al Gore and look very much like Apple Store employees with their communication headgear and their ID lanyards.
I am giddy with lack of sleep and the excitement of a foreign land. I don’t get out much. I am in a people-watchers heaven. I stare and try to guess country of origin. In line in front of us at the British Airways ticketing window is a man wearing flowered Hawaiian shorts and a red, gingham, short-sleeved shirt. I am fascinated by his clothing choice, and when we reach the counter I can’t help but ask the woman behind it (who had helped him a moment before) if he was American. “He looks like he was dressed up as an American for Halloween,” I proffer. Through a smirk, she explains that he was, in fact, Dutch. This makes sense to Carter. I am left baffled, but amused.
We decide to go along with the local clock and eat breakfast. The Giraffe Café plays “World Music” and serves “Global Food.” This means that I listen to Bob Marley as I consume my porridge sprinkled with sunflower seeds – ethnic sunflower seeds. I also drink cappuccino, which I only really do abroad. In fact, I think the last cup I had was two and a half years ago in Rome… Ahhh. Cappuccino.
Greece begins to feel closer as we make our way to the departure gate. After I spend some time imagining British novels taking place in this austere setting, we hear our names on the loudspeaker. We are surprised to be called and more surprised that Laren, our last name, is pronounced correctly, something that rarely happens in the States. Go British English; it is my favourite English.
Lovely accent and something about our bags not yet being checked through. “Don’t worry, we’ve got it now.” Jolly good. Right-o. The flight to Greece is less than four hours, and despite my best efforts to stay awake for what looks like very good airplane food, I fall soundly asleep.
Our plane is full of a group of high school students who have been touring Europe with, what seems like, entirely too little adult supervision. As we are leaving the plane we hear our last name on the PA again. Go Greece, with the British English. Some of the students’ names are, apparently, called as well because we hear their excited cackling. When we reach the “information desk next to baggage carousel four,” we are not very surprised to learn that our luggage has not arrived in Greece with us. We are polite to the poor woman whose job it is to inform weary, foreign travelers that their bags are MIA. She explains that our bags will be delivered to our hotel sometime in the night (it is roughly 4:00pm now) and teaches us to say thank you: “Efcharisto.” The Pollyanna version: We won’t have to schlep our heavy bags on public transportation, we get to go on a hunt for foreign toothpaste, and we don’t have to worry about getting changed for dinner.
Athens Here We Come
I am excited that my advance reading of tour books enables us to take the subway from the airport rather than hiring a cab who, “May overcharge, or try to scam us,” as the tour books say. Carter and I figure out the ticketing machine and make our way to the platform. Athens has a very efficient and clean subway system; it is incongruous with the rest of the city.
Carter immediately sets to work trying to cram for the language test. He has a high aptitude and hunger for language; I think it is his hacking background. He begins to hack Greek just in time to decipher the Ikea sign. Our inaugural metro ride is otherwise uneventful.
We make it safely from the airport to central Athens, and see no less than four stray dogs and two stray cats in the short walk from the station to the Hilton. This is our first experience with one of the more pleasant qualities of Athens: everything is a good deal closer than you might imagine when looking at a map. Carter and I circle the big, ugly feat of 1960’s architecture for a good ten minutes before we realize it is our hotel; we didn’t imagine it could be so close to the metro.
After luxurious showers and attempts to somehow make our dirty clothes feel a bit cleaner (a maxi pad is almost fresh underwear, right?), we are ready for our expedition. Amazingly, we can see the Acropolis from our hotel room window, and decide that it is a reasonable destination. We stroll down rumbling streets as the perfect spring air caresses our skin. As we turn down one street, the sight of police in full riot gear with shields deters us for a moment. There must be about twenty of them all standing at the mouth of the street milling about. We test our resolve with a few steps towards them. They don’t seem to mind, but I jump when one of them barks something indecipherable to another. We learn that their presence there might have something to do with the National Gardens and the Presidential Palace. Further down the street we are treated to the sight of the pom-pom shoed palace guards standing stoically at fixed intervals. We decide not to taunt them… this time.
We are comfortable in the early evening air and we try to keep the Acropolis on the horizon as we continue to walk. Eventually, the busy, traffic-filled streets give way to cobblestones and street musicians; we are accosted by a boy of nine collecting for his father, the accordionist.
Instead of hitting the Acropolis head-on we end up on some curvy side street or another that winds through a residential neighborhood and ends at a chain link fence at the base of the Acropolis’s rock foundation. We meet more friendly cats on the way. I am amazed by their indifference to humans. The stray dogs are this way, too; one leads us part way up a narrow stairway where we find young lovers making out. They stop briefly to explain to us, and the tourists who’ve followed us up the hill, that the Acropolis is closed and we won’t be able to get into it this back way anyway.
We wander back down the hill passing what I think is part of Ancient Agora. It is after 8:00pm now, and we begin to get hungry. We pass a number of tavernas and judge each to be too touristy. Before we know it, we are somewhere in between Monastiraki and Psyrri. Cute restaurants are replaced with H and M and Benetton, and we end-up (after much searching) eating at an overpriced café with overcooked chicken. I have my first real Greek salad and learn that balsamic is something that must have been added between here and San Francisco. I enjoy it nonetheless with my glass of authentic Greek sangria, and Carter and I manage to find a subway back to the hotel. Amazingly, we sleep through the night. Thanks, Pollyanna.
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