11. Greece

I flew business class on Olympics from Riyadh to Athens, departing shortly after midnight on Wednesday, May 5. It was a seven-hour flight, three of which were spent on flying in the opposite direction to Dubai to pick up more passengers. Business on Olympics meant the first six rows of coach and a curtain. There was no other difference. There was no service at all during the first five hours. Not even a drink. Then a breakfast was served before the plane landed in Athens about an hour late.

I arrived at Athens airport in the morning on Wednesday. There are no gangways from the airplanes to the terminal building. All passengers take transport buses. The terminal looked old and more like a bus terminal than an airport. Right outside of the terminal building are local streets. I found the tourist police office, got a map and some information, and took a bus into town. The airport is not far away from the city center, but it’s local streets all the way and it was around morning rush hour, so it took a while.

The core of the city is fairly small. The neighborhood around Syntagma Square is called Plaka. I found a hotel LP listed, Myrto Hotel. It had the smallest elevator I had ever seen. It felt more like a dumbwaiter than an elevator. After resting for a while, I went back to the airport to fetch my parents. There I also bought three days of tours. The city itself I could easily cover myself, but the ancient sites outside of Athens were hard to reach on my own.

After having seen many cities in my travels, it had become easier to come to terms with the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar city. Athens is like any metropolis with a high density of population, small streets, narrow sidewalks, tiny cars zipping wherever, mopeds sharing sidewalks with pedestrians, polluted air suffocating my lungs, noises deafening my ears, etc. Posters condemning NATO actions in Kosovo were plastered over some walls. A few communist slogans could be seen painted along the walls of some highway underpasses.

The Athenians are quite fashionable. As I had observed in Buenos Aires two years ago, here too tight pants that clearly show panty lines were fairly popular. Huge billboards with nude models advertising … – I forgot what they were advertising – seem to suggest that they are a relatively liberal bunch, at least when it comes to outdoor advertising. Such observations are a bit hard to avoid coming from someone who had just left Riyadh.

One thing that I had never seen elsewhere was taxi sharing. Although there were hordes of taxis on the streets, the number of people wanting taxis must still exceed what was available. A person would wave to stop a taxi even though someone was already in the car. A brief exchange would follow. The taxi moved on or the person got in the car. Since I never took a taxi while in Athens, I hope that I have drawn the correct conclusion.

For the rest of the day, we went to see the Acropolis. We wandered through the tiny back streets around the hill. There weren’t too many people visiting the Parthenon. The high tourist season hadn’t started yet. There were a great number of restaurants and souvenir shops selling essentially the same things in the neighborhood surrounding the Acropolis. A waiter or a shop owner would approach us to show a menu, to ask us to come in to take a look, or to hand over a business card. The tenth time this happened, it became annoying. Tourist trap. What else. We had dinner at a restaurant at the foot of the hill. I tried retsina, the notorious resinated wine of Attica. Yep, it would have to be an acquired taste.

I confess that I did the very touristy things on this trip. I confess that I took bus tours and cruises that as a backpacker I would snicker at.

We went to see the Corinth Canal, ancient Mycenae, Epidaurus, and Nafpolio in Argolis on Thursday. The Corinth Canal connects the Ionic Sea and the Agean Sea. Digging first started in 67 AD and eventually finished in 1893. Ancient Mycenea was the fabled civilization mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. There a gold death mask was found, and was mistakenly thought to be that of Agamemnon, who fought the Trojan War. Epidaurus, a sanctuary for Asclepius, the god of medicine, has a well preserved theater with interesting acoustics. Nafpolio, the first capital of independent Greece, is a nice quaint town with old Venetian houses. You can read all about Greek history and all about the tourist attractions somewhere else yourself, so I’ll skip the details, especially since I don’t know much myself.

On Friday, we went to ancient Delphi – of Delphi Oracle fame. It was a very scenic areas. The sanctuary for the oracle is perched on the side of the hill overlooking a green valley.

An American woman made conversation with us. After she retired, she went to China and taught English there for four years. Now she lived in Israel and gave talks to people who were interested in knowing about China. She told me about how she, unlike most of the foreigners in China, lived outside of the compounds and only traveled with her Chinese friends and not with tours. The fact that the foreigners lived in walled-off compounds in China, much like how I lived in Riyadh, was new to me.

As with any tours, we were herded to some restaurant. Lunch was included in the tour price, but apparently drinks were not included. On Thursday, we had to pay for the orange juices but not the bottled water. Today, we had to pay for the bottled water too. It’s annoying.

The trip took whole day. Some people made the connection to another tour bus to Meteora to visit the monasteries built on top of the "rock forest". Our bus also picked up a few people coming down from Meteora.

Back in Athens, we went out, had dinner, and found the Sound and Light Show on top of the Hill of the Pnyx, a fixture in the tourist scene. From there, we had a clear view of the Acropolis. The show was nothing more than a narrated story, synchronized with lights going on and off on the Acropolis. What a rip-off.

On Saturday, we had a one-day cruise to Aegina, Poros, and Hydra, three islands close to Athens in the south. The islands were pretty but also very touristy. We came on shore, walked around, took pictures, maybe went into a shop or two. It was the routine of been there, done that, got photographic proof. The pistachio nuts on Poros were of excellent quality.

The couple with two girls that we had seen on the Mycenae and the Delphi tours were again spotted on the cruise. They must have been suckered into the same stuff. I guess I was not all that into island hopping. One benefit of tours was that I didn’t have to worry about the details and the logistics, which I suppose must be desirable at least sometimes.

Since all of our flights were in the afternoon, we went to the National Archeological Museum on Sunday morning. The museum was rather easily reached by trolley bus. Lots of marble statues, some bronze ones, and the finds from ancient Mycenae.

These three and half days in Athens had been fairly relaxing. The conscious avoidance of possible misadventures when traveling with parents seemed to have also taken out the element of adventure that can be so interesting. The adventurous part of this trip had yet to begin.

Terrence
Riyadh
Wednesday, May 19, 1999