"Home Is the Sailer..." Part One
Thus we begin a series about our trip to Hellas, otherwise known as Greece.
Let me preface this by saying that you should understand how far away Hellas is from California. There is a ten hour difference. Thus, to call home, we had to wait until about 10 PM, by which time folks in California were beginning to get up and stretch. --Look at it another way. We got on an airplane in San Francisco and it took us 17 hours to get to get to Athens. That is several meals and a very long time to sit in a cramped seat doing nothing. Of course we were flying the cheapest we could, or we would not have been able to afford it at all, even with 12 years of saving for it.
Did I mention that our first item on the agenda was for Diana and I to run in the Nemean Games? That requires the body to be stretched and limber, which is exactly what it was not by the time we got there.
No mind: Diana is an experienced traveler. (I had never been over the US borders before, much less across the Atlantic.) She budgeted time for us to collapse and recuperate for a day, as well as doing some stretches.
We landed at the airport outside Athens and began looking for a bus headed for Rafina, which was not easy to find. We lugged our luggage all over the place before she finally got good directions and a bus came. It was a local, and for the next hour or so we were treated to a ride through what appeared to be the seediest outskirts we could imagine. But as we got accustomed to the landscape, various things began to settle into our jet lagged brains.
The first was that the landscape looked pretty much like California. Everywhere was a profusion of Oleander and Trumpet Vine, and other familiar plant life. The second was that it was not really possible to tell whether a building was going up or coming down..
The Greeks build vertically. Put in some concrete piers, link then with floors and a stairway (alarmingly without rails) and you can later fill in walls. There are clusters of iron rebar sticking out of the tops of the piers like rusted tentacles. I learned later what that was about. --And all the houses were in bright pastels.
Eventually we got to Rafina, a beach town much like we used to have in the US: except, of course, that we were on the Agean, where the water is brilliant blue, except where it is shallow and becomes brilliant turquoise. And it is so clear that you can see the bottom as if through glass.
Diana cautioned me that this would likely be the best and most expensive hotel in which we would stay. We took showers in the Euromod glass shower, only it leaked all over the place. Greek bathrooms assume that water will get everywhere, so they have drains in the floor.
We went down to find dinner and we were clearly tourists on our first stop. The very aggressive waiter lured us in, told us we would make something special, and delivered a huge oval platter piled high with many kind of fried fish, all whole, except for the calamari.
Diana happily gobbled red fish and white fish and all kinds of things, and I stuck to the squid and shrimp. I am scared of bones. Diana will eat bones and anything else that isn't moving. But between us we could not finish it all.
When the bill came it was --gasp-- a hundred Euros!
It wasn't THAT good.
On the way back to the hotel Diana went wading in the Agean. She said it was warm.
Uh huh.
I just wanted to sleep, despite the desire to actually swim in the Blue Agean.
By the time we hit the bed, we were out cold.
Let me preface this by saying that you should understand how far away Hellas is from California. There is a ten hour difference. Thus, to call home, we had to wait until about 10 PM, by which time folks in California were beginning to get up and stretch. --Look at it another way. We got on an airplane in San Francisco and it took us 17 hours to get to get to Athens. That is several meals and a very long time to sit in a cramped seat doing nothing. Of course we were flying the cheapest we could, or we would not have been able to afford it at all, even with 12 years of saving for it.
Did I mention that our first item on the agenda was for Diana and I to run in the Nemean Games? That requires the body to be stretched and limber, which is exactly what it was not by the time we got there.
No mind: Diana is an experienced traveler. (I had never been over the US borders before, much less across the Atlantic.) She budgeted time for us to collapse and recuperate for a day, as well as doing some stretches.
We landed at the airport outside Athens and began looking for a bus headed for Rafina, which was not easy to find. We lugged our luggage all over the place before she finally got good directions and a bus came. It was a local, and for the next hour or so we were treated to a ride through what appeared to be the seediest outskirts we could imagine. But as we got accustomed to the landscape, various things began to settle into our jet lagged brains.
The first was that the landscape looked pretty much like California. Everywhere was a profusion of Oleander and Trumpet Vine, and other familiar plant life. The second was that it was not really possible to tell whether a building was going up or coming down..
The Greeks build vertically. Put in some concrete piers, link then with floors and a stairway (alarmingly without rails) and you can later fill in walls. There are clusters of iron rebar sticking out of the tops of the piers like rusted tentacles. I learned later what that was about. --And all the houses were in bright pastels.
Eventually we got to Rafina, a beach town much like we used to have in the US: except, of course, that we were on the Agean, where the water is brilliant blue, except where it is shallow and becomes brilliant turquoise. And it is so clear that you can see the bottom as if through glass.
Diana cautioned me that this would likely be the best and most expensive hotel in which we would stay. We took showers in the Euromod glass shower, only it leaked all over the place. Greek bathrooms assume that water will get everywhere, so they have drains in the floor.
We went down to find dinner and we were clearly tourists on our first stop. The very aggressive waiter lured us in, told us we would make something special, and delivered a huge oval platter piled high with many kind of fried fish, all whole, except for the calamari.
Diana happily gobbled red fish and white fish and all kinds of things, and I stuck to the squid and shrimp. I am scared of bones. Diana will eat bones and anything else that isn't moving. But between us we could not finish it all.
When the bill came it was --gasp-- a hundred Euros!
It wasn't THAT good.
On the way back to the hotel Diana went wading in the Agean. She said it was warm.
Uh huh.
I just wanted to sleep, despite the desire to actually swim in the Blue Agean.
By the time we hit the bed, we were out cold.