The Arrival

3/4/09

1340 local time

The big arrival to Greece! I hoped (half asleep) on the plane at 0130 in Singapore and I was so ready to just crash on the plane, but the man sitting next to me Christos (Chris) was in the mood for a chat! Which, really isn’t such as bad thing, because he was a very interesting man, he grew up in Greece, and moved to Australia in the 70’s to ‘follow his dreams’? but he had a lot of interesting things to say, which I took it all in. Finally the conversation ended, and I managed to get several hours of deserved sleep, I was then woken up by the air hostess with supper! Apparently I missed a huge set of turbulence where people started screaming, so I was a bit upset about that, but I moved on.

Anyway the plane landed, and I got my passport stamped so I was set to tackle Athens, lucky for my good looks but I was fortunate to get chatty with an 18 year old girl that was meeting her father at the airport who has been in Athens for a while and knows his way around the area, fortunately I was able to hitch a ride on the bus with him, because there was a whole lot of things that I would have had no idea what to do. Thankfully he bought my ticket, helped me on the bus that was meant to take us to central Athens, but the bus driver cracked the shits, and told that he was terminating the service ages away from town, and that we had to find our own way to Central Athens. Apparantly there are lots of strikes going on over here, so people just stop working a random times! Super helpful!

So Tashi (daughter) the father an I jumped off the bus, and headed down underground to the metro service! Its awesome, because when they were digging and building the metro system, they kept on finding old relics and statues from centuries ago, and these are all located throughout the stations!

Anyway, so we ended up back outside, somewhere that I didn’t know, and was told to walk ‘that way’ and keep asking people, where my hostel is. So off I went, in Central Athens, dodging cars, motorbikes, trucks and busses, I also caught a quick glimpse of the Acropolis in all its glory, and I can’t wait to get up there to check it out.

I eventually found my way to the hostel, only to be told, that the people staying in my room weren’t checked out yet, so I had to find something to do for like 30minutes whilst they sort their shit out. So I went on the hunt for my first feed, after once again dodging the traffic, I came across a little Souvlaki shop where it was 1.70 Euro for a pork souvlaki, absolute bargain. The guy clearly recognized me as a tourist as he wanted to charge me 5 Euro, but I sorted him out and got the correct coinage.

So I had lunch and ended up back at the hostel with two dudes from Brazil on a huge cycling tour.

Had my first shower today, in freezing cold water, it built… a lot of character!

That’s it for me! I’m gonna go for a bit of a walk around Athens to check everything out!

Peace Guys!